Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04

by Chaz Brenchley

  'Hasn't that djinni of yours taught you not to ask questions yet?' He sounded exhausted and troubled in equal measure. 'I'll tell it all, but not now. Hasan is beyond me; he would be beyond you too, or the both of us together, so don't suggest it. Call up your djinni. The only hope that I can see is to take him to your grandfather, as fast as that spirit can carry us, if it will.'

  'Oh, it will.' Her grandfather could work miracles, she'd always been confident of that. And seeking her grandfather meant Surayon, and home; for a moment her soul rejoiced, despite the circumstances. Then, "There's Marron too, he has something of the same sickness, I'd guess ...'

  'Can the djinni carry them both, and us too?'

  'Esren carried all the Dead Waters at once, don't you remember?'

  'Then we will take them both. Why not? The two greatest threats our homeland faces, and we will carry them to the heart of it to save them if we can. Never tell me that the gods have no sense of humour. Swiftly now, Elisande. Minutes matter.'

  Not as much as he thought, perhaps; but just then Julianne lifted her head like a blind creature seeking the sun. One glance at her face, tear-stained and racked with grief, and Elisande dropped to her friends side, put both arms around her and said, 'Don't mourn the living, sweet. Save your tears for where they're needed.'

  Julianne gave her a wry glance - and you've shed none for Marron?— but her voice was sour barrens as she said, 'He's as dead as need be, if Rudel cannot wake him. The 'ifrit might have killed him utterly, just as easily; it left him this way, I think, to make me suffer the more.'

  'Then it made a mistake. Two mistakes. One, to think you so weak; and again, to think Hasan as good as dead. Whatever it's done to him, my grandfer will undo it. Trust him, if you don't trust me. And hold tight, we're going to hurry'

  Julianne clenched her hands tight in Hasan's robe, but then straightened suddenly, as if she'd only just realised what was meant. 'Your grandfather - but he's in Surayon, isn't he? And Surayon is ... gone. Closed, Folded ...'

  'There's always a way in, love, for those who know it. We'll be with him by daybreak. Esren!'

  The djinni was there at her call, silent for once; she said, 'Take us along the road, to the border with Surayon. Me, Hasan, Julianne, Rudel. Marron too, we must collect him. And probably Jemel with him. Coren?'

  'Yes. I will go with my daughter.'

  'All of us, then.' And with an idea of making the ride a little easier for Julianne this time, that she not have to ride on empty air, 'Esren, take us on the carpet.'

  'As you command.'

  The rug beneath them rippled and rose, began to move towards the tent's doorway. The other men not named, all those haughty and useless sheikhs crowded hastily back to give it room; the crowd outside fell over itself to make way. There would be more quarrels shortly, Elisande thought, as an essential balm to wounded pride, unless the wonder of a flying carpet were balm enough to soothe the humiliation of crawling in the dust. Somehow, she doubted that it would be.

  Marron and Jemel: and of course they couldn't have one without the other, and she wasn't even resentful any more. She could even yield up what had been her place at Marron's head to the Sharai boy, and do it with a good grace yet, though it meant her sitting instead beside her father.

  As she had nothing to accuse him of, they both sat in their customary silence. She poked experimentally at the rug she sat on, feeling how it was not stiff in itself like a boat's boards, nor was it laid over solidity like a rug laid over boards; it gave just a little beneath her finger as it did beneath her weight, as though it floated on something more sustaining than water. As it did: it wasn't the rug that flew, Esren simply carried that as it carried them, on a soft firm cushion of nothing at all. It would help Julianne, that was all, not to see the ground rushing by below them. That girl had her head bent low above Hasan's again, she wouldn't be seeing anything just now bar his ruined face, but she'd look up sometime, look around. Better, Elisande thought, if she couldn't also look down.

  Darkness would help also, and it was entirely dark now except for the stars and the horizon's hint of a moon to rise shortly. She glanced back, and saw the fires of the Sharai dwindling behind them.

  'What will they do?'

  'The tribes? Come after us, of course. We have Hasan; they followed him this far, they'll follow him a little further. Besides, there's no point their watching an empty castle.'

  'Morakh,' she objected, remembering him for the first time in a while, though he'd been the cause and motivator of so much. 'It's not empty, Morakh's there

  'You think so? Still? Use your mind, Elisande.'

  That stung, as it was meant to. She thought briefly, bitterly, and said, 'No. He would not linger. Either he has what he wanted' - Hasan not dead but sick unto death, and Marron the same, perhaps — 'or he has abandoned his plans. Either way, the tribes will not find him in the castle.'

  'They won't even look. Hasan hunted Morakh for Julianne's sake; they followed Hasan for his sake, and their own, and perhaps for Outremer. The sheikhs will follow immediately, with their retinues. The army will come after, as quickly as it may. All the way to the Surayon border they will come, more than have ever been massed against us before.'

  'They can't get in,' she said, trying to sound certain, to believe herself.

  'No, probably not. But they will see all the rest of Outremer spread before them, and no army there to hold them back. And no Hasan. What do you think they will do, Elisande? When we fought them tribe by tribe forty years ago, we barely defeated them; they know that. They are together now, if not exactly united. Even without Hasan, they can hold together a few days longer. Long enough to march on Ascariel, at least.'

  She told herself firmly that she ought not to care, that Ascariel was her enemy also; but that was impossible to sustain. 'Should we have left him, then, and let him die? Let Julianne be a widow, for Outremer?'

  'Julianne can still be a wife if she chooses, to the Baron Imber. And many would say that we should have done exactly that.' He sighed, and went on, 'I might say it myself, I'm afraid we will all have cause to say it in the days ahead. I couldn't have done it, though, any more than you.'

  'There must be some hope,' she said stubbornly, 'some way to stop them.'

  'Must there? Well, then, maybe there is. There's Coren.'

  'Coren? But—'

  Her eyes shifted, she couldn't help it, across the carpet to where that venerable old man sat beyond Marron, beyond Hasan but still not far away, not far enough. Of course he had heard; his eyes twinkled at her, though he didn't speak.

  'When fathers follow their daughters into some mad or foolish adventure,' Rudel went on blandly, 'it's not always or entirely for the girl's benefit.' He might have been watching her closely, to see if she blushed; she determinedly didn't look at him, for fear that catching his eye might make her do so. 'Coren could have stayed with the sheikhs, and tried to argue against their riding after us; he would have lost that argument, and been nullified thereafter. On the other hand, if they have a long and tiring ride on a difficult road, and round the final corner to find him there waiting for them, perhaps with news of Hasan, they may be more inclined to listen to him. He is the King's Shadow, and that commands respect among the Sharai, especially on the border of the King's country. That's so, is it not, Coren?'

  'I have hopes,' he agreed quietly.

  And what of Julianne, then, who has hopes of her fathers support as she takes her ailing husband into a strange land, and gives him over to strangers? There was no point even putting the question into words, she knew the answer already. No doubt Coren would be sorry not to be with his daughter at such a time; no doubt at all that he would do his duty or his King's bidding regardless. Julianne showed no signs of having heard the conversation, but if it were put to her directly she would know what to expect. She'd been trained in a far harder school than Elisande; she understood her father's priorities, and so far as Elisande knew had only rebelled against them the once. That onc
e had brought them to Jemel, to Rhabat, to Hasan and so to here. That was far from nothing, but still Julianne was wedded to Imber first, as her father had decreed ...

  Well, she might yet be glad of that, she might need Imber in the future; but he would be no use to her now. If Coren too was absent, then she would be dependent on her friends, which meant chiefly on Elisande. At least with Jemel on hand to watch over Marron, the two girls could stay close and worry with each other, each about her separate man. And Julianne should not be the only one to worry over Hasan; Elisande was struck with a brilliant notion, bright enough to touch her face with a brief smile.

  Rudel noticed it, of course. 'What was that thought, then?'

  'An idea, that's all. Something to do, after we're home. Nothing mad or foolish,' and she could almost have smiled again, if it hadn't been him she would have smiled at. 'I won't even leave Grandfer's house.'

  'You've made me that promise before. And broken it.'

  'I made him that promise,' and broke it, yes. How else had they all come here? She was no Julianne, to sit obedient beneath her father's commandments. 'Under compulsion,' if that made any difference. Between the two of them she thought not, where everything was under compulsion. "This time it isn't a promise. I'm simply saying it. I wouldn't want to go anywhere, anyway. I wouldn't leave Julianne.' Nor Marron; she'd let Jemel claim the nursing of him, but she wouldn't wander far from call.

  'No,' Rudel said, 'I don't believe you would.'

  And then she did blush, fearful that he might have added mind-reading to his many talents; and quickly said, 'Tell me what happened in the tent. I don't understand where that 'ifrit came from, nor what it did, why it didn't kill you all...'

  'No more do I. We'll trade stories, Elisande; you tell me how you escaped your own 'ifrit, and I'll tell you what I saw. You may make better sense of it than I can.'

  That she couldn't do, though she puzzled over it even while she told her own tale, and so took less pleasure than she felt she owed herself from her description of how she'd tricked the 'ifrit into flight, faking a future it could fear. Rudel was complimentary, but there was little pleasure in that either. After half a lifetime of setting herself against him at every opportunity, she wasn't about to warm to his congratulations now. Absolutely not.

  Instead she stared out and away, looking perhaps as though she were deep in thought; she hoped so. The truth was that she was simply staring, and seeing less even than the dark and their speed could show her.

  She had made this journey twice before, going and coming home, and the first of those had been the better. Much as she loved her grandfather and the land he governed, she had loved her freedom more; being away from Rudel had been her definition of freedom even then, and coming back had inevitably revoked it.

  She'd never ridden this way at night, though. Even by daylight it had been shadowed and dangerous, barely more than a goat-track at times for all that they called it a road, little used and not at all maintained. The surface had crumbled constantly, she remembered, beneath her pony's hooves; occasional overhangs of visibly loose rock had had her wishing that the beast could tiptoe, for fear that a noise might bring them down.

  She was glad to be flying now, for the safety and silence of their passage as much as for the speed. On horses or camels or on foot, she thought, this would be a terrifying path at night, worst for Julianne but bad enough for her; she didn't envy the sheikhs who would follow. Good sense should tell them to wait till the morning, though she doubted that they'd listen.

  The djinni was a little pillar of flickering light at her shoulder. She'd told it to take them along the road and it obeyed literally, deliberately hurling them around every twist and turn in the winding way. The wind grew bitterly cold as they climbed high into the mountains; she drew her hood up and almost, almost huddled against the strong solidity of her father, did hunch into the lee of his stocky body for what slight protection it offered.

  Julianne moved too, for the first time, when she felt the wind's bite; but she lifted her head into it and shook her hair free, so that she sat erect and silent and utterly still, her hands folded on Hasan’s chest and her eyes wide and wild. She had always been promised Outremer, and had seen only the fringes of it in all her life thus far. She could never have thought to come to the living heart of the land - to hidden Surayon, no less, anathematised and cast out — like this: twice married and never widowed yet, wed now to the country's greatest enemy and on a desperate mission to save his life, riding a carpet carried by a spirit-creature out of myth and stories. Given her history, it seemed unlikely that she was seeing anything of what her eyes were looking at, the great crags and crevasses of the high mountains, the way the road clung to sheer cliffs as it snaked between unclimbable peaks. Elisande wondered what her friend might be thinking, and decided it was better not to know. Marron snagged as ever at her own mind, Marron and Jemel together snagged at the corner of her sight, and all she had as shield was Rudel who had never, never been a figure of comfort; her own thoughts were bleak enough for anyone.

  For a short time, at the road's height, it seemed as though the mountains had been ripped fresh from the earth beneath, stark black shadows of what she remembered as stark black rock, like a wall erected between Outremer and the Sands. Too weak a wall, she thought, for all its massive strength: no wall could be stronger than the doors set within it. This was perhaps the hardest of the passes and they could cross it in an hour by the djinni’s grace; the sheikhs who followed would need the night, no longer, and their army would catch them in the morning. No one would be expecting this, there would be no responding army to meet it. If Coren could not stop them at the border, the Sharai would have an easy ride down to Ascariel, and there would be blood enough to drown the city before the war was done. There had been one great slaughter there already, when her people took it in the last terrible battle for the Sanctuary Land. She felt a touch of inner cold as she realised that two of the men on this mad flight had been there at the time: her father, and Coren himself. At least he'd know the horror of it, then, if he failed. That might spur him to try the harder, if being the King's Shadow were not spur enough.

  The King - there had been no King in Ascariel the last time. She wondered whether that might make a difference, whether he could act to stop a war. But why should he? As the simple Due de Charelles he'd started the last one, after all...

  Perhaps it was the darkness and the chill that drove her thoughts so blackly, coldly deep; if so, perhaps it was the first hint of warmth in the wind that drew them up again and her with them, back into the immediacy of the world.

  They had come over the mountains, faster she thought than any human ever had before them. Now as they descended there were other, lesser peaks to north and south, a spur of the great range that declined into gentler hills as it ran westward almost to the sea. Ahead and below them lay her own home, hidden but present none the less and compounded in her mind of bitterness and joy together, the uncountable memories that had made her what she was.

  The air smelled rich and damp, to senses long used to the deserts dryness; summers heat lingered here even at night, cupped as it was within mountain walls. Those walls might be fallible, might be breached by the storm approaching, but still they gave an illusion of protection, as they always had. Elisande felt her anxieties stilled by hope. Surayon would stay safe within its Folding, her grandfather would work his reliable magic on Marron and Hasan both, Coren would hold the Sharai army back until its commander returned. And surely then simple gratitude would demand that Hasan led it back to the Sands, and Outremer too would survive at least a while longer, whether or not it deserved to ...

  She breathed deeply, hungry for the smells of home. The road was wider here as they came to the valleys mouth, if in no better repair; soon it forked, one branch running away southward towards Ascariel. Esren needed no telling; the carpet with its riders swept on along the other branch.

  Soon it slowed, though, soon it settled to lie fla
t and inanimate on the stony road. Elisande stirred at the sudden unfamiliarity of hard ground beneath her; she got to her feet a little awkwardly, stretched and stamped like a sailor come to land, testing the solidity of earth.

  Others rose around her, Coren and Rudel. Jemel and Julianne stayed predictably where they were, with the two sick men. Julianne turned her head, though, with that same unseeing gaze.

  'Why have we stopped?'

  'We've reached the border, sweet. We have to stop, to open a way through the Folding.'

  Directly ahead of them was a strange discontinuity, like a rippling veil drawn across the road, transparent but disguising. There seemed to be more starlight than there ought to be on the other side of that invisible curtain, less shadow: soft rolling hills to north and south rather than the height of mountains, and an open aspect ahead. Elisande almost fancied that she could hear the sea, almost expected to scent it on the warmth of the breeze.

  Between where she stood and what she saw lay a whole country, wrapped in magic and concealed from view. If she tried to walk forward through the barrier, she knew that she would feel dizziness and very probably sickness for a few moments, she'd lose all sense of balance or direction before suddenly she found herself in that scene she could so impossibly see from here, some thirty miles from where she stood and a bare mile from the sea. If she tried to ride through it, whether on horse or camel, her mount would panic and she'd likely be thrown off.

  Far more than a simple illusion, the Folding was a powerful defence: a necessary defence for Surayon against the forces on either side, the Patric dukedoms that denied all brotherhood and would crush her country if they could.

  Still, it was a wall with doorways for those who knew how they could be opened. Elisande knew, and had used that knowledge when she'd felt it needful, though it had been a difficult and draining exercise for a girl working alone. No need for her to face that strain again. This time she had her father with her.