Putting her saber back in the weapons rack, she went from the room without another word.
She knew that she was being cruel, and that she was the confused one. It didn’t matter. She hated him for having refused her in a moment of—
Need? Spite? She didn’t know what it was. What she knew was that she understood a great deal less about men than she had thought a few months ago.
She was still simmering with rage half an hour later when she was crossing the Pinitor Court and caught sight of Polliex of Estotilaup, her former fencing-class partner, coming from the opposite direction. As he drew near he smiled at her in a mechanical, impersonal way, but showed no sign of wanting to stop to talk. Since her last and most emphatic refusal of his invitations to her to join him for a weekend of fun and frolic at the pleasure-city of High Morpin, he had maintained an attitude of the most rigorous properness in such sporadic contact as they had had. He was, after all, a duke’s son, and knew how to behave once he had been turned down.
But Polliex also knew how to behave when an attractive young woman, even one that had treated him earlier with disdain, indicated at some later time that his attentions would not be unwelcome. Keltryn greeted him with a warmth that she doubted he would misinterpret, and he very smoothly responded without revealing the faintest trace of surprise when she began to speak of High Morpin, its power-tunnels and mirror-slides and juggernauts, and expressed regret that she had never found time to go there even once since coming to Castle Mount.
Polliex was remarkably good-looking and his courtly, polished manners were extremely pleasing in comparison with Audhari’s awkward boyishness and Dinitak’s stern rigorous virtue. Her three days and nights with him at High Morpin were filled with delight. But why, she wondered, was she holding herself back, as she found herself again and again doing, from full enjoyment of all that Polliex offered? And why did thoughts of Dinitak keep stealing into her mind, even now, even here, even when she was with someone else? She was finished with Dinitak. And yet—Oh, damn him! she thought. Damn him!
8
In Thilambaluc, a medium-sized city four hundred miles farther along the road to Alaisor, Dekkeret, remembering something that Prestimion had told him he had done in the first months of his own reign, went out at midday into the marketplace in the gray clothes of an ordinary wayfaring man to hear what might be heard. It is useful, Prestimion had said, for the Coronal sometimes to learn at first hand what people were saying in the marketplace. The Castle atop its Mount was too far up in the sky to provide a clear enough view of the real world.
Dinitak was the only one who went with him. They slipped away in a quiet moment of the morning, Dekkeret saying nothing about what he had in mind to anyone on his staff. As for Fulkari, she had been feeling slightly ill that day, and had retired to her room at their hostelry. He did not mention his journey to her either.
Although Prestimion had told him that he had gone in disguise on these excursions, even to the extent of wigs and false mustaches, Dekkeret saw no need for any such intricate subterfuges. Prestimion, because he was such a distinctive-looking man, easily identifiable by the curious contrast between his surprisingly unprepossessing stature and his overwhelmingly kingly, commanding presence, would have run some risk of being recognized even among people who had not yet had a chance to see his portrait. The look in his eyes alone marked him for what he was.
But Dekkeret believed he was less likely to be discovered out here so far from the Castle. The new coinage showing his features had not yet been released, and in any case who would be able to identify a Coronal from his stylized face on a coin? Nor were the portraits of the new Coronal that hung in every shop-window particularly realistic; Dekkeret barely recognized his own image in them himself. Wearing rough casual garb that he had borrowed from one of the grooms traveling with the royal party, and with a shapeless cloth cap slouching across his head, he would seem like nothing more than just another brawny itinerant laborer, a big simple man who had come to town looking for work as a road-mender or a logger or something else equally fit for a man of his size and strength. He’d not get a second glance. And no one would have any reason to recognize Dinitak Barjazid at all.
The marketplace in Thilambaluc was a double-lobed oval with a cobbled roadway running up the middle between the two sectors. Everything within was crowded together higgledy-piggledy, each booth jammed up against its neighbor. In the eastern half of the market were dozens of stalls devoted to vegetables and fruits, and the butchers’ tables, fresh red meat piled everywhere and streams of blood running off. A zone given over to the sale of little sweet cakes and mild frothy beverages led to one where the tables were heaped with mounds of cheap clothing, and that was fronted by a row of rickety little cooking-stoves tended by the ubiquitous Liiman sausage-sellers.
Across the way, on the far side of the center roadway, the merchandise was of an even more varied sort: barrels and sacks of spices and dried meats; tanks of live fish; booths hung with simple glittery necklaces and bracelets; stacks of secondhand books and pamphlets, worn and frayed; mounds of wickerwork chairs and flimsy lacquered tables of the same sort, piled ten or twelve feet high; pots and pans and other kitchen implements of every kind; a corner where jugglers and other entertainers were performing; another where public scribes had their tables set out; another advertising the wares of sorcerers and wizards. Both the marketfolk and buyers were of a wide mixture of races other than human—a good many scaly Ghayrogs here, a sprinkling of ashen-hued Hjorts, the occasional towering Skandar or Su-Suheris moving through the throng.
Dekkeret could not remember the last time he had been in a public marketplace. The richly cluttered texture of this place fascinated him. It was so full, so busy. He vaguely remembered the one in Normork from his childhood as having been more spacious, the merchandise generally finer, the customers better dressed, but of course Normork was a city of Castle Mount and this was a nondescript provincial town in the middle of nowhere.
“Well, shall we go in?” he said to Dinitak.
As he expected, nobody showed any sign of knowing who he was. He moved casually through the place, pausing at this stand to examine a cunningly arranged pyramid of smooth-skinned blue melons, at this one to sniff at some unfamiliar custardy-looking yellow fruit, at this to accept a sample pinch of savory smoked meat from its vendor. Where the crowds were particularly dense, they opened for him as crowds ordinarily will when a man of Dekkeret’s height and mass is coming through, but without any sort of deference except to his superior bulk.
He listened wherever he went, hoping to pick up someone’s opinions of the new Coronal, or some reference to having had unusually unpleasant dreams lately, or complaints about high taxation, or anything else at all that might guide him to a better understanding of daily life in the world over which he now ruled. But these people had not gone to the market for the sake of holding conversations. Aside from the constant interchanges between buyer and seller having to do with the price and quality of the merchandise, they said very little.
On the far side from where he and Dinitak had entered, where the various entertainers were performing, they saw fifteen or twenty people gathered around a gaunt, gray-bearded man in red-and-green robes who seemed to be a professional storyteller, judging by his clear, firm voice and the conspicuously placed begging-plate full of coins sitting on the ground beside him. “This man’s servants,” he was saying as Dekkeret and Dinitak approached, “would set out fine golden bowls filled to the brim with good wine, and at a signal from the great wizard the bowls would fly through the air, and offer themselves to all the passersby, and anyone who chose could drink of them at will. I saw also that the wizard was able to make statues walk, and could leap into the fire without being burned, and assume two faces at once, and sit in the air many minutes at a time with his legs folded beneath him without falling, and do many another thing that defied my understanding.”
A stocky red-haired man with a tanned, seamed face stood ju
st to Dekkeret’s left, listening in slack-jawed awe. Dekkeret turned to him and asked, “Who is he speaking of, friend?”
“The master magus Gominik Halvor of the city of Triggoin, master. Has just come back from Triggoin himself, that one has, and is telling tales of the wondrous things he saw there.”
“Ah,” said Dekkeret. He knew that name, Gominik Halvor: from Triggoin indeed, he was, an adept of adepts among sorcerers, who had served as a magus at Prestimion’s court at the Castle long ago, before Dekkeret’s own time there. But to the best of Dekkeret’s knowledge Gominik Halvor had been dead ten years or more. Well, Dekkeret thought, a good storyteller does not have to worry about such petty factual details, so long as he pleases his audience. And the steady clink of copper coins into the man’s plate, even the occasional flashing glint of a silver piece, testified that he was doing just that.
“One day I stood in the marketplace of Triggoin, just as you are standing here with me,” the storyteller went on, “and a sorcerer appeared, a blue-furred Skandar half the size of a mountain, and took a wooden ball with several holes in it, and long ropes of sturdy twine passing through the holes, and threw it up so high that it went out of sight altogether, while he stood holding the end of the rope. Then he beckoned to a boy of twelve years who was his assistant, and ordered him to climb the rope; and up the boy went, higher and higher until he too was gone from view.
“The Skandar then called out three times to the boy to return, but the boy did not reappear. So the Skandar took from his waistband a keen-edged knife of a size like this”—and the storyteller indicated with his hands a blade that was more like a sword—“and slashed fiercely through the air with it, once, twice, three times, four, five. On the fifth slash one of the boy’s severed arms fell to the ground in front of him, and a moment later a leg, and then the other arm, and the other leg, and then, as we all gasped in amazement and horror, the head of the boy. The Skandar put the knife aside then and clapped his hands, and the boy’s torso came plummeting down out of the sky: and as we watched, the severed limbs and head at once reattached themselves to the trunk, and the boy stood up and bowed! And we were so astounded by this that we rushed forward to press whatever coins we had upon this sorcerer, not just weights or crowns, but some of us contributed five-royal pieces, even, which was the least we could offer for such a remarkable performance.”
“I think he may be giving us a subtle hint,” said Dinitak. “But five royals would be too ostentatious, perhaps. Let’s see if I have something smaller.” He scooped a handful of coins from his purse, selected a bright one-royal coin, and tossed it into the bowl. There was a little round of applause from the other onlookers. Here in the provinces, even a single royal had substantial purchasing power.
“On another day,” the storyteller continued, with a grateful look toward Dinitak, “I saw a demonstration of a related kind performed by the great magus Wiszmon Klemt, who produced a thick bronze chain of fifty yards in length and hurled it into the air as easily as you would toss your hat aloft. It remained standingly rigidly upright, as though fastened to something invisible overhead. Then animals were brought forward: a jakkabole, a morven, a kempile, a gleft, even a haigus. One by one they scrambled up the chain until they came to the very top, and there they immediately disappeared. When the last of the beasts had vanished, the magus snapped his fingers and the chain came tumbling down to land neatly coiled at his feet; but of the animals that had disappeared, nothing was seen again.”
“This is very entertaining,” said Dekkeret, “but not, I think, particularly useful. Shall we move on?”
“I suppose we should,” Dinitak agreed.
As they started up the pathway that ran past the aisle of entertainers a plump, oily-skinned man in a soiled crimson robe detached himself from the crowd and stepped in front of them. Dekkeret saw that he had a little astrological amulet of the kind called a rohilla pinned to his breast, strands of blue gold wound around a lump of pink jade. Confalume, that superstitious man, had worn one of those constantly. Around this man’s throat was an amulet of some other sort that Dekkeret could not name. A flat triangular ivory pendant inscribed with mysterious runes dangled below it. That he was a professional magus was a reasonable guess.
Which was swiftly confirmed. “Tell you your future, my master?” the man said, looking up at Dekkeret.
“Nay, I think not,” Dekkeret replied, affecting a coarse east-country inflection. The last thing he wanted in this place was a magus, even one who, like this one, was most likely a charlatan, peering into his soul. “I have me no more than a few coppers to my name, and you’d want more than that of me, eh, master?”
“Perhaps your rich friend, then. I saw him throw that big coin in the pot.”
“Nay, he is na’ interested neither,” said Dekkeret. And, to Dinitak: “Come along now, will ye?”
But the magus was not so easily put off. “The two of you for fifty weights! A mere half a crown, a third my usual price, because the fees have been so slow today. What do you say, my masters? Fifty weights, the two of you? A trifle. A pittance. And I will sketch for you a map of the road that lies ahead.”
Again Dekkeret shook his head.
Dinitak, though, laughed and said, “Why not? Let’s see what’s in our stars, Dekkeret!” And before Dekkeret could protest further Dinitak pulled out his purse again, plucked five square copper coins, ten-weight pieces, from it, and pressed them into the sorcerer’s hand. The magus, grinning triumphantly, clamped his hand around Dinitak’s wrist, peered close into Dinitak’s eyes, and began to murmur something intended to pass for a formula of divination.
Despite his misgivings Dekkeret found himself wondering what the man was going to tell them. Given his own skepticism toward all things magical and the general look of disreputability about this marketplace magus, he had no expectation at all of anything of value coming forth. But the degree of inaccuracy in the man’s predictions might be amusing. If he saw Dinitak opening a shop in Alaisor and becoming a successful merchant, say. Or undertaking a journey to some fabulous place that he had always dreamed of seeing, like Castle Mount.
The baffling thing that happened next was not amusing in the slightest, though. Halfway through the mumbled recitation of the formula the grin disappeared, and the magus abruptly halted his chant and clapped a hand over his mouth as though he were about to be sick. His bulging eyes stared out at Dinitak in an expression of absolute shock and horror and fear. It was the way one might look at someone who has just revealed himself to be the carrier of a deadly plague.
“Here,” the astrologer said. His voice was thick with dread. “Keep your fifty weights, my master! I am unable to perceive your horoscope. I have no choice but to return your money.” From a pocket of his robe he drew Dinitak’s five coins. Then, seizing Dinitak’s wrist, the magus dumped the coins back into his palm and went scuttling hastily away, glancing back a couple of times in that same horrified way before losing himself in the crowd.
Dinitak’s swarthy face was weirdly pale, and he was biting down hard on his lower lip. His eyes were wide with amazement. Dekkeret had never seen him as rattled as this. Dinitak looked stunned by the consultation’s abrupt end. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Am I so frightening? What did he see?”
9
“Thastain, with someone who’s here to meet with Count Mandralisca,” Thastain announced to the cold-eyed Ghayrog guard who stood in front of the building that once had been the procuratorial palace.
The Ghayrog gave him only the most perfunctory of flickering glances. “Enter,” he said automatically, and stepped aside.
After all this time Thastain still could not fully accept the fact that all he needed to do was speak his name and he would be admitted to the fabulous palace that once had been the home of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail. It was hard enough for him to believe that he was actually living in the city of Ni-moya at all. For a boy who had grown up in an unimportant little provincial town like Sennec, mere
ly to visit Ni-moya was the ambition of a lifetime. “See Ni-moya and die,” the proverb went, in the part of the country that he came from. To find himself right in the heart of that greatest of all cities, living just a few hundred yards from the palace and able to walk in and out of that extraordinary building unchallenged, was a stunning thing.
“Have you ever been in Ni-moya before?” he asked the stranger that he was escorting to the Count.
“This is my first time,” the man said. He had an odd thick-tongued accent that Thastain was unable to place: Zies eesz may vfeerst tiyme. His documents listed his place of residence as Uulisaan. Thastain had no idea where that might be. Perhaps it was in some remote district on the southern coast, far down below Piliplok. Thastain knew that people from Piliplok spoke with a strange accent, and maybe those who lived even farther down the coast spoke even more strangely.
But there was very little about this visitor that Thastain did not find strange. In recent months a whole procession of curious characters had come here on business with Mandralisca. It was Thastain’s responsibility to meet them at the hostelry where most such visitors were put, conduct them to the official headquarters of the Movement on Gambineran Way, check out their appointment documents there, and lead them into the palace for their meetings with the Count. He had grown accustomed to seeing all sorts of marginal types pass through, an odd assortment of individuals who all too plainly moved along the weirder, more dimly lit edges of society. Mandralisca seemed to have a great appetite for people of that sort. This one, though, was perhaps the most curious of them all.
He was very tall and thin, almost flimsy-looking, and dressed in a peculiar way, a coarse and heavy black overjacket thickly padded with down above a light tunic of faded green silk. The look in his eyes, somehow both arrogant and uneasy at the same time, was peculiar. The eyes themselves were peculiar too, almost yellowish where they ought to have been white, and an eerie purple at their centers. Peculiar also was his face, broad and pale with small features all jammed together in the middle. The way he held his shoulders, hunched up against his ears. The way he walked, as if he suspected that his head might be in imminent danger of coming loose at the neck. Even his name: Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp. What kind of name was that? Everything about this man was mystifying. But it was not Thastain’s job to pass judgment on Mandralisca’s visitors, only to show them to the Count’s office.
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