King of Swords (The Starfolk)

by Dave Duncan

  “You may trust me, Your Highness. I will swear whatever oaths you ask of me.”

  Her smile was a fanfare of roses. “You will be good for Izar, and I should be able to protect you, in turn. You see, the regent-heir is my father. You will certainly have your work cut out for you with that imp of mine. It’s only in the last few months that his hair and eyes have started changing, and his magic is growing in strongly. Don’t tell him I told you that! My excuse for going to dissembling parties is that I want Izar to be just another brat among strangers sometimes. It’s also nice not to have people groveling all the time.”

  There had been other reasons, but it wouldn’t do for her servant to comment on such matters. “Izar is a great lad. Guarding him will be a pleasure, but why does he need guarding?”

  “I really fear that his—Look out, here comes the Terror now.”

  Izar skidded to a halt in front of them, gasping for breath. “Oh good, Mom, you’ve dropped your disguise. Are you two all done?”

  “From now on Halfling Rigel is going to be your bodyguard.”

  “DOGGY!” Izar’s grin showed at least two-dozen needle-sharp teeth.

  “So you will obey his orders exactly.”

  “What?” The great ears curled in horror. “Orders from a halfling?”

  “You heard. From now on when you disobey, I shall have Rigel put you across his knee and apply the hand of wisdom to the seat of learning as hard and often as I think you deserve. You have been warned.” Talitha smiled and floated up into the air. She gathered speed, heading for the roof.

  Gaping after her, Rigel realized that there were dozens of people soaring around under the great arches.

  “Will you?” Izar asked anxiously.

  “Will I what?”

  “Beat me if I misbehave?”

  “Mercilessly. It’s the human savage in me. But you can behave when you want to. I’ve seen you do it for as long as a minute and a half. Now show me the Crystal Castle.”

  Izar wrapped stringy fingers around Rigel’s wrist. “Hold your ears on! Oops, sorry. Didn’t mean that.” He pointed his other hand straight up, and up they went.

  In Dziban everyone wore a finger-ring amulet that would take its wearer wherever that finger pointed. Izar was quite incapable of supporting Rigel’s weight, but his ring could transport both of them as long they stayed in contact. Rigel soon discovered that he felt more secure if he kept his own hand on the imp’s shoulder. He could trust himself not to let go in a fit of absentmindedness.

  Izar’s idea of a great tour was to soar all the way up to the uppermost gallery, Stars Gate, then descend to the palace’s foundations via a seemingly endless succession of slides: straight slides, curved slides, roller-coaster slides, and scare-the-bowels-out-of-you slides, which were obviously the best. Then do it again and again by different routes.

  The imp also had odd ideas on points of interest. The zoological gardens, known as the Bestiary, he dismissed as kids’ stuff, not worth a visit. Libraries and art galleries were boring, and he could not yet see the benefits of lingering to admire feminine beauty, of which Dziban had no shortage. He also refused to stop at an amphitheater where an orchestra was pouring out spellbinding music to an audience of several thousand. On the other hand, he felt that a trip on a gondola along a canal and over a couple of waterfalls would be highly educational for Rigel.

  Twice Izar ran into friends and went into great detail describing the Minotaur battle so that he could brag about his new bodyguard and let them see the legendary Saiph. His friends were much too respectful toward him for boys of their apparent age, which was, of course, why his mother took him to parties where his identity was disguised.

  Once he detoured to a stall and pushed past a line of waiting earthlings to demand a bag of candied lizards. Rigel was ravenous, but he played it safe and chose strawberry ice cream instead.

  “Don’t you have to pay?” he asked. The humans were paying.

  Izar smirked. “Not with my hair.”

  His bodyguard made a mental note to run that excuse by Talitha.

  The slides soon grew monotonous, but the ascents were slower and usually through magnificent buildings, some of which were surely bigger than any hall or cathedral on Earth. Sunlight beamed down through elaborate stained-glass windows larger than building lots, each displaying a picture of some famous scene, either historical or mythical, if there was any difference between those terms in the Starlands. Crystal statues towered three or four stories high, supporting higher cities on their shoulders.

  Not all of the walls were transparent; some were prismatic, mirrored, or colored. Rigel saw into several living rooms, but never a bedroom. He noticed many earthlings relaxing on balconies or rollicking in swimming pools. If they were slaves, they had little to complain about, particularly in comparison to the pour souls in Muphrid’s domain.

  So far as he could tell, most of the inhabitants were human, dressed in a wild variety of costumes. Perhaps a fifth were starfolk, always fresh-faced and youthfully lithe, wearing nothing but skimpy moon-cloth wraps and often dashing about in groups, shouting and laughing like earthly teenagers. All elves, it seemed, were overgrown children, so those he had met at Alrisha had not been the exceptional rich butterflies he had supposed them to be. They had human cattle to provide muscle, they had magic galore, and they never grew up. Life was play, and eventually they died of boredom.

  Halflings were rare, but he caught sight of a few beings that seemed even rarer—stereotypical dwarves with gray beards, once a hulking young cyclops, and flocks of birds with human heads, which Izar confirmed were harpies.

  Izar was dismissive of all these minorities. When Rigel suddenly said, “Isn’t that a centaur down there beside that fountain?” he just said, “Yes. If we were any closer you’d be able to smell it.”

  “I thought centaurs were supposed to be smart.”

  Snigger. “Their front ends are, but they can’t house-train their own rears.”

  Then Izar announced that they must go and see the jail. Rigel assumed that he had just wanted to try the slide, which was an absolute terror, a transparent tube dropping out of the bottom of the city and swooping down around the supporting mountain in heart-stopping vertiginosity until it at last deposited its passengers on a narrow platform halfway to the marshes below. On one side rose a sheer cliff, the first ten meters or so as smooth as glass. On the other was nothing—no wall, no railing, only loose air.

  “Doggy!” Izar headed for the edge.

  His bodyguard whipped him back and pinned him against the rock face. “You can see perfectly well from here.”

  “I want to know what’s underneath!” His ears drooped.

  “You stay there and I’ll tell you.” Rigel had no abnormal fear of heights, but there was a gusty wind blowing. He took two careful steps to the edge and looked down. He went, he saw, he returned smartly. “About four hundred meters of nothing and then a scree slope.”

  “What’s a meter? What’s a scree slope?”

  “Two hundred times my height, then. And scree is jagged gravel. If you fell over there, you’d probably die when you hit it, and you would certainly die rolling the rest of the way down on that stuff.”

  “That’s why they call it ‘the escape’ then,” Izar said gloomily.

  The platform itself seemed pointless. At the far end it became a flight of stairs enclosed in a transparent tube that angled slowly upward until it disappeared around a rib of rock.

  “Do we have to climb all the way back up?” Rigel demanded in disgust.

  “Some of it. We’re out of range for my ring to work. There’s supposed to be a door…”

  They found the door, solid and forbidding, set in the rock. Izar used an anklet amulet to open it, though he had trouble doing so. The door’s hinges uttered a loud, cliché groan, and then it creaked open to reveal a dark interior with a musty, sour smell.

  “Are you really allowed in here?” Rigel asked suspiciously.

&nb
sp; “You have to see this,” Izar said, slickly evading the question. “This is ’portant!” One of the jewels in his left ear began to emit a powerful beam of yellow light.

  He led the way into the mountain, Rigel following directly behind him. After a few steps the passage turned at a right angle and continued parallel to the rock face. Water ran silently along a shallow gutter at the base of the right-hand wall, soon disappearing down a drain hole, which apparently passed under the floor, for water emerged on the left and followed an identical gutter on that side. Then stream and trough changed back again to the right. After passing three or four such switches, the Izar-Rigel expedition heard a trickling noise somewhere up ahead, and soon came to a wide rectangular hole in the floor, extending almost the full width of the passage. The water vanished for good into the opening, splashing down on something far below. Beyond the opening lay a massive slab, sized to fill it exactly.

  “Schmoor!” Izar said in horror. “This is one of the Dark Cells! No one could levitate a block like that once it’s in place! Not even Mom!”

  “I expect that that’s the idea.”

  Imp and guard hit the floor simultaneously, and leaned over the edge, scanning the pit with Izar’s light. The cavern was about four meters deep, tapering up to the exit, but even at the bottom it was so narrow that Rigel wouldn’t be able to stretch out full length, and he was shorter than male elves were. The tiny waterfall drained away through a hole in the floor, but not before soaking every inch of the miserable cell.

  “Let’s see if I understand this, great and noble Izar. A starborn who commits a serious crime cannot be sentenced to death, because then the judge would die, and the executioner too, unless he was a mudling, in which case whoever owned him and ordered him to do it would. So the prisoner is sentenced to a long term of imprisonment instead… How long?”

  “Two thousand years.”

  “Two thousand years in a pit. Water sprays over him all the time. Air? I suppose air circulates through the notches in the cover, and that hole in the floor serves as a toilet.” Rigel shivered. “He faces two thousand years alone in this stone tomb, with the hatch closed. He cannot stretch out. He has air and water, and I expect his food is dropped to him in small chunks through the air hole, so that he must grovel for it in the dark like a beast. I assume that the jailers who bring the food are forbidden to speak to him?”

  “And they’re blind, so they don’t use lights,” Izar said glumly.

  “Shine your light over that way. Yes, in the corner. That sphere?” It looked like a cannonball. “Could a starborn levitate it?”

  “What’s it made of?” the occult expert inquired cautiously.

  “Stone, I think.”

  “A red or a Naos might.”

  But who would manage to confine a starborn with that much power? “So when the prisoner has had enough, he can roll that ball over to the drain. And once it has fallen in, there’s no way to get it back up, and of course it fits snugly. So in a day or so the cell fills up with water. The prisoner drowns, but that’s suicide and not the judge’s fault.”

  Imp and halfling wriggled back from the pit and stood up. Izar’s light was just bright enough to reveal the corridor stretching out before them, with dozens of other pits and lids waiting for inmates.

  “Let’s get outta here!” the boy said squeakily.

  “Good idea!” Rigel set off toward the distant gleam of daylight from the entrance. “How many convicts prefer to jump off the platform outside on their way here?”

  “Baham says that almost all of them do. Schmoor!” Apparently this place exceeded even Izar’s taste for the gruesome.

  “Who’s Baham?”

  “My old bodyguard. I hate him.”

  “Does he beat you?”

  “The last time he tried, I set his fur on fire.”

  Rigel turned the corner and blinked at the welcome sight of the empty sky. “So this is where they put unsponsored halflings?”

  “Maybe,” Izar said, never willing to admit to ignorance. “But Mom will get you status, won’t she, Rigel? Won’t she? They won’t put you in a Dark Cell, will they?”

  “I doubt it very much,” Rigel said with much more confidence than he felt. “I am the Saiph-bearer. I carry the king of swords. Nobody is going to mess with me.” Besides, he had another card to play. It might be an ace, but he wouldn’t play it until he knew more about the rules of the game. He didn’t know yet whether aces were counted as high cards or low ones.

  Chapter 16

  The Gazebo had obviously been inspired by the Parthenon in Athens or some other ancient Greek temple, but whichever olden-time lord of Dziban had imagined it had dispensed with the intricacies of internal structure, creating instead a soap bubble miracle that would drive an earthling engineer into therapy. The exterior walls were rows of huge pillars of crystal, supporting an architrave beam on which rested a gable roof of stained glass, spanning at least fifty meters without even rafters to hold it together. Impossible or not, this glass big top was a fine place to hold a party, and that was what Regent-heir Kornephoros was doing that evening. The moonlight reception in honor of some minor relative’s coming of age had been going on for hours and had barely gotten started.

  Just under the impossible roof, along the inside of the architrave, ran a line of spacious theater boxes for spectators. Rigel Halfling, Talitha Starborn, Izar Imp, and Mira Silvas sat in one of them, a lounge that would have comfortably held twenty people. They were waiting for an audience with the regent-heir and might be kept waiting for a lot longer yet. Rigel had no complaints so far. The chairs and couches were comfortable, although higher than terrestrial furniture, and the tables were laden with exquisite food and wine, served on request by two pages dressed in classical Greek costume, muslin draperies that were nearly as revealing as their normal wraps. They looked little older than Izar and were the first starfolk whom Rigel had seen doing anything resembling work, but royal service probably counted as an honor. No matter. They had just provided Rigel with an excellent breakfast, three-course lunch, and four-course dinner. He felt almost caught up.

  On the floor far below them the elite of the realm glittered and shone. A full orchestra played music that made his feet tap and his heart ache to join in, while overhead the pages’ female counterparts were performing a stunning aerial ballet, trailing colored fire.

  It seemed that starfolk didn’t dress up for formal dances, they just wore their normal wraps—Senior Prom, Annual Swimsuit Edition. Indeed, most of the guests seemed to have dressed down rather than up, dispensing with most of their usual jewelry and trinkets, which was probably the magical equivalent of leaving their weapons at home. A few of the participants flaunted jeweled collars, wide disks of beads with a central hole to encircle their slender elfin necks. The collars extended out to their wearers’ shoulders and hung down in front and back like bibs. He had seen some of these earlier, during his tour of the city, and Izar had told him that they were badges of office.

  This was still only the earthling hobo’s second day in the realm and he was about to meet the head of state. Now that was social climbing on steroids! So why had Saiph suddenly begun to tingle? It was only a faint shiver, but it must be a warning of something brewing. Saiph hadn’t let him down yet.

  Mira was wide-eyed. Relieved of her Alrisha servant duties, she had been issued a change of clothing, a Mother Hubbard–like brown tent and a poke bonnet so absurd that Rigel had to exercise all his strength of will not to smirk when he first saw it. Junoesque by human standards, she looked squat and beefy in elfin company. Whatever she had been doing since arriving in Dziban, she was now enjoying her visit to the surreal realm, even dropping hints that she would enjoy a longer vacation in the Starlands. He didn’t know why she had been included tonight; if it was because she’d witnessed the Nanaimo massacre, his fate might be decided right here and now. The court appearance might be a mere formality.

  Talitha seemed tense, but perhaps she was mad because
her father was keeping her waiting, or because she hadn’t been invited to join the party, or because she hadn’t yet had a chance to explain to her son’s new bodyguard exactly what he was supposed to be guarding against. Izar was always right there, big ears akimbo.

  The imp had spent the second hour there trying to teach his bodyguard to perform magic, but Rigel had proved unable to levitate even a feather above the palm of his hand.

  “Three-year-olds can do that!” Izar yelled when he ran out of patience. “Babies can do it!”

  “Not this baby. How much can you lift?”

  Izar looked askance to see if his mother was listening, which she was. He muttered, “Lots. But even halflings can reach blue! Can’t they, Mom?”

  “Some can, if they have been taught, dear.”

  “If magic develops late,” Rigel said, “then perhaps I’m not old enough yet. I’m only a year or so older than you are, you know.”

  Izar refused to believe that, and had to be told how earthlings aged faster than starborn. He found it even funnier that Rigel didn’t know his own birthday, but it was clear that he was rapidly becoming bored to insanity, levitating cushions and people’s drinks, rolling balls of cold fire across the floor.

  “Why did Grandsire tell us to wait here?”

  “I told you,” Talitha said patiently. “He was busy earlier. It is good of him to take the time to see us at all tonight.”

  “Can’t I go to sleep now? Just for a little while?” Sleep was his escape from the unwelcome.

  “No,” his mother said for the third time. “It would be disrespectful to your grandfather. He will see us as soon as he can, but he must attend to his guests first. He has told you often enough that royalty has an obligation to set an example of good manners.”

  “Tell me, Oh exalted starling,” Rigel said. “How is sponsoring arranged? What will happen at my hearing?”

  “Dunno,” Izar said grumpily. He knew that Rigel was trying to distract him and wasn’t about to cooperate.