“In the end the Asrai warned me that it had only a few minutes remaining before the coming of daylight, which would so weaken it that it would no longer be able to carry me. So we gave up the search and it set me ashore on a wild, uninhabited, wooded point to spend the day. I had nothing to eat and no place to go, so I tried to sleep all day. The Phosphorescence came back for me after dark that evening.”
The Seaman cleared his throat several more times.
“There was no reason to search further, so I asked it to carry me back to Westongue. We made it before dawn the next morning!”
“So you don’t know where Douglas could have gone ashore, then?” asked Myrn.
“There is no way to tell for certain. My best estimate, based on the wind and the condition of Sea at the time, is that he was carried on to shore somewhere in the delta of Bloody Brook. I knew he planned to travel up Bloody Brook to a town called Pfantas.
“At the time, I mourned him as lost with my crew and Pitchfork. I was in no shape when I arrived back at Westongue to do anything but mourn. It was only yesterday, just before you and Thornwood came to me, that I at last said to myself, here! You must appreciate your luck that you survived this catastrophe!”
“Luck and the Asrai. It was not there by accident,” guessed Myrn. “The Asrai only comes when called. I suspect that Douglas called it when you were lost overboard.”
“I am sure of it, from what Sea Light said,” agreed Pargeot, softly. “I’m positive that Douglas was my savior.”
In the late afternoon they sighted the low, sandy coast of Kingdom and approached it more slowly, swinging first north, then south, searching for the river’s delta. The landmarks Pargeot knew were hard to identify from aloft. Myrn flew lower and lower until they skimmed over the waves at a much reduced speed.
“See? The color of the water has changed to green. Here ends the outer shelf of Kingdom,” decided the sailor. “Ha! There’s the headland on which I spent the day after the storm! Head a bit down the coast here. I think I see the river!”
Shortly they located the several mouths of Bloody Brook’s delta and, following the largest of them upstream, almost at once sighted a vast but ruined city upon its northern bank.
Myrn at first was inclined to continue without stopping, but Pargeot, with his sharp Seaman’s eye, noticed smoke from cooking fires in the ruins and movement on the crumbled pavement between the houses.
“We should go down and speak to them,” he advised. “It’s possible Douglas stopped here to get directions and assistance from these people.”
The Apprentice banked over and down, landing gently near a gang of workmen who were repairing a marble building near the riverfront. They stopped their digging and hoisting fallen blocks of white stone at the fliers’ arrival, showing no particular fear or surprise that two people dropped out of the sky.
Myrn waved to them cheerfully and they approached, smiling and bowing. Anyone who flew was worth bowing and scraping to, seemed their attitude.
“Welcome to Summer Palace,” called one. “I’m the Major-domo. That is, I was, when this was the summertime residence of King Grummist the Last. Now I’m the elected mayor, instead. My name is Delond.”
“This must have been a beautiful city once,” said Myrn, by way of greeting.
“Yes, it was, truly,” agreed the new mayor. He apologized for the sand and sweat on his hands and face and rough clothing. “We’re just beginning to rebuild, after centuries of neglect. We were long enchanted to await the King’s return.”
“Enchanted?” asked Myrn. “May I ask who broke the spell?”
“Surely!” cried Mayor Delond. “A great and powerful Wizard came this way two weeks ago. He told us the truth at last, and it set us free—that the King was not ever coming back, having been slain in a Last Battle. Suddenly, all was clear to us and we’ve decided to take charge of our destinies, to be a free and independent people.”
“We’re rebuilding Summer Palace as a place to live and raise our children and earn our livelihoods,” said another worker.
“Wizard?” asked Pargeot. “May we ask his name?”
“Of course,” said Delond again. “Our savior was the Fire Wizard Douglas Brightglade!”
Myrn clapped her hands delightedly and Pargeot breathed a great sigh of relief at this final proof that Douglas had survived the shipwreck.
“I am Myrn Manstar of Flowring Isle,” the young woman introduced herself. “This is Captain Pargeot of Westongue in Dukedom. Douglas Brightglade is well known to us. He is, in fact, my betrothed.”
The Waiters gathered around them applauded with surprise and pleasure. Delond and the men went off to the river to wash off the grimy sand and marble dust of their labors. The ladies of Summer Palace came to greet the visitors.
In short order a delicious supper was prepared and laid out, served in the shade of a neatly patched gold-and-blue awning in the clean-swept Central Plaza.
Myrn told her part in Douglas’s adventures, and Delond and his council eagerly consulted with Pargeot about trade with Westongue.
“We haven’t given it a lot of thought, yet,” the new mayor admitted, “but perhaps we could sell dried and salted fish? We have plenty of both fish and salt. Would there be a market for that?”
“Even fresh fish, nowadays. We can carry them in the cold boxes Thornwood Duke has installed in all his ships,” replied Pargeot, enthusiastically. “Your best fish will reach port as fresh as when they were caught!”
This news amazed the Waiters until they were told that the famous cold boxes were inventions of the Fire Wizard, Flarman Flowerstalk, Douglas’s Master.
“In the days of the Last King,” Delond went on, “many of us in Summer Palace were expert gold and silver workers. The skills are still here, but unfortunately there’re no mines nearby and we’ve no money to buy any metal, so those arts cannot be revived just yet. Sand we have in plenty, and we were considering studying the arts of making glass. Our problem there is finding wood, charcoal, or coal with which to fire glass pots and annealing ovens.”
“I can arrange to have coal of the best quality delivered to you in exchange for your blown-glass wares, if they will be of good quality and carefully packed for shipping,” said Pargeot. “It would be profitable to us both. Good glassware, even common vessels, are much sought after everywhere.”
“But we need the capital first,” Delond objected.
“I think I can find an investor or two who would advance you the price of a shipment of coal,” said Pargeot, thinking of Thornwood in particular.
“Wizard Brightglade went up the river in one of our gondolas,” said one of the Waiters who had seen the Wizard and the Otter leave. “If you’ve heard from him from Pfantas, he must have made good time, despite the dangers of getting lost... or waylaid.”
In the morning Delond brought the same atlas of Kingdom that Douglas had consulted during his visit and pointed out to Pargeot the way to Pfantas.
“Just follow the river,” he advised. “It runs, as you see, fairly straight from the west. Watch for this crescent-shaped lake and the cone-shaped hill of Pfantas on its north shore.”
“We’ll be there in a matter of hours,” said Pargeot. “This Lady Wizard can really fly!”
They said good-bye and good luck to the Waiters. Myrn uttered the Power Words to the Feather Pin and off they shot, climbing once more to an altitude from which they could see the entire delta. This made it easy to spot the main course of Bloody Brook through Wide Marsh and avoid getting lost in the tangled maze of channels which had so troubled Douglas and Marbleheart.
After finding their bearings, they set out and made good time. Below them passed the savannahs—they caught glimpses of Wild Horses grazing on the riverbank—then the great, green expanse of the Forest of Remembrance. Myrn felt watchful eyes on their progress as they flew high over the forest, but the feeling passed as soon as they entered the rolling meadowland beyond.
In late afternoon they flew
over the burial ground of Last Battlefield with their long, evenly spaced mounds, not knowing what it was they saw, and climbed over rugged foothills where the brook became a rumbling, raging torrent squeezed between steep canyon walls.
The sun was beginning to set when they glided down over Pfantas Lake to circle the town on its steep-sided hill.
“Phew!” said Pargeot. “What’s that stink? Comes it from that dirty little hill town? Maybe we should land elsewhere!”
“Douglas’s letter said Pfantas was a garbage heap,” recalled Myrn. “Yes, I think we should avoid it for the moment. We’ll camp on that other hillside for the night, I think.”
“Good idea,” replied the Seaman. “It’s upwind of the town, I judge!”
She set them down—or rather the Feather Pin did—on the grassy lawn where Marbleheart and Douglas had pitched their pavilion and raised their pennants just a few days earlier.
Chapter Sixteen
Coventown
Douglas and Marbleheart smelled Coventown long before they saw it. A fitful breeze carried a stench like burning sulfur mixed with the hot, sour reeks of molten lead and wet, rotted wood.
“Woof!” The Otter snorted and sneezed. “First Pfantas, now here! How in World do they stand it, these Witchpeople? I’d think they’d suffocate in no time!”
Douglas climbed to the top of a sharp ridge, screened from the town by thick-leafed, thorny brush. He crawled the last few yards on his stomach, carefully parting the stiff branches to peer into the deep cleft between two barren, out-flung mountain spines.
They’d climbed steadily all day, losing sight of the Witchservers’ trail hours before. Nothing short of a mountain goat could climb the sides of the main valley the Witchservers had entered until the Sea Otter found a side gully for them through which to scramble unseen.
In the narrow canyon before them, the travelers saw, at first, thin and twisting columns of sooty smoke rising from red glints of flickering fire. As they looked closer, however, they saw that what they had first thought sharp pinnacles and overbearing tors were in fact crooked, smoke-blackened, too-thin buildings climbing from the valley floor up the opposite mountain ridge.
A dark and dreary castle stood above it all, its topmost towers taller than the edge of the ridge behind it. In its embrasures and from arrow-slit windows, flares blinked malevolently, like wicked watchful eyes.
The castle outline blurred and shimmered in waves of heat, columns of dun-colored smoke, and gray steam. Before its narrow gate a company of Witchservers armed with pikes and long, curved swords stood watching, unmoved as heavily burdened lines of slaves were whipped through into the castle courtyard and back out again. The crack of whips, the rattle of chains, and the groans of the driven came clearly to the Journeyman Wizard across the dim vale.
“Coventown,” he said emphatically. “Could be nothing else.”
“And that’s the abode of this Emaldar the Beautiful,” sniffed Marbleheart. “So called.”
Douglas pointed down and out from their vantage. On the path approaching the town along a narrow stream at the bottom of the cleft moved the party of Witchservers, surrounding their rickety garbage wagon. Its wheels squealed as it swayed and jerked painfully over stones and ruts.
In its bed knelt a forlorn figure, heavily chained and carefully watched by his captors.
“Cribblon!” cried Douglas softly, although the constant din of Coventown made his care unnecessary. “I should have rescued him before this! Now we’ll have to get him out of that... that nasty place!”
“Nothing we could have done about it,” Marbleheart said to comfort his friend. “There was no other way to find the Witch.”
Douglas slid back down the ridge, out of sight of any watchers on the dark castle’s battlements. The Otter sniffed twice more in disgust, and followed.
“Let’s find a place to hole up,” he said. “I assume we’ll need to scout about a bit before we move in on this Witchperson. The landscape looks a little cleaner and a bit more hospitable up in that direction.”
Douglas nodded and motioned the Sea Otter to lead the way beside a tiny mountain rill that fell by uneven and uncertain stair steps from the treeless mountainside high above.
Marbleheart stopped to taste a mouthful of the water from the creek, spat it out, and made a wry face. “It tastes like the town smells. And it’s warm, not cold as you might expect decent mountain water would be. Nothing but slime and scum lives in such water. You see? No trout for dinner tonight!”
“I’ll treat it to remove the taste and the slime,” decided Douglas. “I don’t want to go much farther up than this. Do you see a sheltered spot where we can camp?”
“A little farther up, I think,” urged his companion. “See? There’s a fairly deep overhang a minute or two farther on.”
In fact, it was a cave, low and narrow at its mouth but opening up into a large, low-ceilinged room beyond.
“Clean, quite warm, and nice and dry,” Marbleheart decided after peering about with satisfaction. “Who’d have believed I would ever be grateful for a dry spot! It’ll do, don’t you think?”
“Suit admirably,” agreed Douglas. He chose a flat ledge near the cave mouth on which to build a small fire—worth the risk, he decided. Since the cave entrance faced the opposite canyon wall, a seeker could be ten steps away and not glimpse a blaze within. A continuous wind sighed mournfully down the mountain, whisking the thread of smoke away with it.
“Ah, supper!” sighed the Sea Otter, slumping down on the dry sand before the fire. “What will we conjure up this evening, Wizard?”
Douglas suddenly realized he was both very hungry—they hadn’t stopped for lunch at all that day—and very weary. Climbing mountains was something to which you had to grow accustomed.
“Pancakes and maple syrup?” he asked, beginning to make the requisite passes in the air. “A few rashers of hickory-smoked bacon? Cold, fresh milk from Blue Kettle’s springhouse?”
“If you can’t produce ‘em, don’t torture me,” moaned the Otter, although in truth he had no idea what pancakes might be. “If you’re not teasing, don’t waste time talking about it!”
At the moment he would have eaten almost anything.
Once the meal was prepared—spelled, rather, out of Blue Kettle’s kitchen a thousand miles away at Wizards’ High—and eaten, the travelers could say they were fairly comfortable. The cave, at first dim and cheerless, took on the feel of home.
“A night’s sleep? Then what, Wizard?”
“You’re right. Tomorrow morning we’ll sniff about some, get the lay of the land. I’d like to catch a glimpse of this Emaldar person, just to make some assessment of her. We’ll have to face her, eventually, but I’d like more information about her and her people before I jump into the Witchfire.”
“I’m not at all sure I like your mentioning fire,” complained the Otter. “Well, take ‘em as they come, I say. I’m going to look about in the dark—make sure there are no Witchservers snooping up our gully—and then get some sleep.”
“Good idea,” said Douglas, sleepily. “Don’t wake me up unless you have a good reason.”
By the time the Otter had paused to let his eyes adjust to the darkness of the mountainside beyond the cave, the Journeyman Wizard was sound asleep and dreaming of swimming in Warm Seas with a very pretty pearl fisher’s daughter and a Giant Sea Tortoise named Oval.
Marbleheart had the right coloration, the low build, the hunter’s instincts, and the very strong desire to move quietly—silently, in fact—through the wind-tortured brush and over shadowy, scoured-bare rock. He crossed the crest between the little creek gully and the deeper, wider one in which had been built the Castle of Coven and its wretched village.
From a narrow ledge just below the rim of the larger canyon, he studied the setting. The main valley continued on up the slopes of Blueye Mountain almost as straight as an arrow can be shot, until it topped out in a jumbled, torn field of jagged black stones, which looked
as if they had been shoved into place by a gigantic hand and left for the centuries’ rains and snows to pack down hard.
About the village, the Otter could see no living plant except an occasional patch of shriveled broom or ground-hugging heather. There were few thornbushes, still without leaves at this altitude, although it was well into spring in the lower lands.
Down the sharp cleft past town and castle dashed a foaming stream. It caught the light of a few stars, reflecting it feebly to the lone watcher. At Coventown it slipped reluctantly into a long, narrow pool. Here the water, stilled, reflected the dirty red and yellow blur of the flambeaux on the battlements and a few dim sparks of lights in the town. A crude earth-and-rock dam had been dumped across its course to flood the narrow lake.
Below the dam the stream waters reappeared as overflow, now dark and muddy, with no reflections but slimy swirls and oily stains. From the canyon rim the Sea Otter’s sensitive nose caught its stench of sewage, the smells of human sweat and offal, bad teeth, worse breaths, and other foul castings.
Downstream the rivulet seemed to slink in shame among great, tumbled rocks thrown down from the mountainsides in ages past. It completely disappeared, perhaps underground, before the canyon curved away to the southeast toward the pinelands and distant Pfantas.
“Argh!” Marbleheart gagged, willing the wind to change and take the smells away. “Worse by far than Pfantas!”
It was past a normal bedtime in the town’s maze of cramped alleys and uneven stairways and there were only guttering torches here and there as people huddled for warmth indoors and spoke in low murmurs not meant to be overheard.
The castle above was black by day and blacker by night. Its glaring window eyes looked over the town, the canyon, and off toward Pfantas and beyond, to Old Kingdom.
“To judge by this Witch’s windows,” muttered the Sea Otter to himself, “she really does cast greedy eyes on Old Kingdom.”
At last he turned about on his narrow ledge and climbed up over the ridge again, dropping quickly down to the cave where Douglas slept. Even in his thick waterproof fur he was glad to be out of the stinging, acrid wind once more. And away from the odors, especially.
Aquamancer (mancer series Book 2) Page 20