King of Swords (The Starfolk)

by Dave Duncan

  He thought for a moment. “And even I never healed that fast before.”

  “Perry J. C. Mason! I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.”

  “And this morning, on the barge, I mentioned Tarf and Tegmine to you, and you didn’t ask who I meant. Humans can’t read names.”

  “G’damn it! I really must be getting old.”

  “So who sicced the bear on me?”

  She sighed. “I did.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  This time she gave him a real smile. “I deserve that. But I’d tried to make friends with you three times, dissembling a different person each time, and you kept shutting me out. Your defenses were too high. Not that I blame you for that; you had a helluva raw deal, son.”

  He thought back. “A blond girl on the Swartz Bay ferry?”

  “That was one of me.”

  She had come across as seriously weird, he recalled.

  “Yeah, but a bear?” Her admission about the bear hurt more than anything else she’d done to him, and she had plenty to answer for.

  “Stuff it,” she said. “There was no risk—you wore Saiph, and it was a struggle for me to even delay its response. You had about two seconds of terror, and then you knew you’d stabbed Bruin to death. Don’t tell me that it didn’t feel good. You were able to bring your pain under control in minutes, and if you hadn’t been able to, I was ready to give you a fake morphine shot and do it for you. Don’t start being a crybaby now, Rigel, my son.”

  Being 1,755 years his senior made his mother very hard to argue with.

  “Let’s talk about the rest of the raw deal, then.”

  She nodded, covering a yawn. “’Scuse me. It’s been a very long day and I’m not used to them any more. Okay, here it is. I was never one of those alley-cat types you met at Alrisha, but I’ve always enjoyed a good tumble. You have two brothers and a sister somewhere—full-blooded starfolk, of course. After I became queen I found that ruling and pairing don’t mix. Pretty soon all my partners would start asking for favors for brothers, sisters, cousins, and aunts. I still needed company, though, so I got into the habit of keeping a lusty young bed-warmer on hand. I’d boot them out as soon as they tried playing politics. That worked better, although few of them lasted longer than a couple of months. And then…”

  What she had not spelled out was that in switching from consorts to gigolos, she’d also switched from starfolk to mudlings. Obviously.

  “Then me?”

  “You. Stars! Imp impending! I knew I was fading. That’s starborn talk for aging. I was dumping more and more of the job on Kornephoros. I hadn’t conceived in six hundred years and never dreamed that I still could. I decided I couldn’t face all the tattling and scandal. So I slipped away with your father and went to ground. Went to Earth, literally. I picked Canada because it was sanitary and had a nice cool climate—Winnipeg in January is wonderfully bracing.”

  “And you took Saiph with you?”

  Electra nodded. “We took all sorts of amulets, but the birth went terribly wrong, and none of them would stop my bleeding. I didn’t dare go to a hospital. Think of the ruckus it would cause if I’d changed into someone else on the table, someone from a different species. Imagine them trying to match my blood group! Type E, Rhesus squared? I should have had more help. Your father did the best he could, but he decided he needed to introvert and bring back a trustworthy mage. By that time I was in no state to look after a newborn. Your Gert had just had a stillbirth, so he…”

  She saw his doubts and her eyes narrowed. “Something bothering you, Son?”

  “That was very convenient, wasn’t it?”

  “Not as it turned out,” she snapped. “There’s no such thing as baby formula in the Starlands. We had always planned on finding a wet nurse for you, some human welfare case who was due to give birth at about the same time as me, and would welcome a cushy job as royal nursemaid. We had a wonderful domain picked out…” She glared. “We would have taken her child there with her, understand? None of that changeling crap! When I went into labor, your father checked on all the candidates and learned that Gert had just lost her child. He more or less told her, ‘Look after this for me, I’ll be right back.’ And that was that.”

  Silence. This was going to be as close to the truth as Rigel ever got, and he might as well accept it. He smiled.

  “She skipped, of course?”

  Electra shrugged. “He wasn’t gone an hour…”

  “But she’d already left town.” Gert would have been terrified that it had all been a mistake and They would come and take her baby away, whoever They might be.

  “She was gone. And then, to make things much worse, we discovered that your father had put the wrong amulet on your wrist. The one he’d intended to give you would have let us track you. He certainly didn’t mean to give a newborn a Lesath! Rigel—Rigel, my son—I swear by the stars that I have been looking for you ever since. Twenty-one years I have scoured North America from coast to coast. I knew your name before you were born, and ‘Rigel’ is not a common name on Earth. I got very close to you several times. Oh, you mean Rigel Whosit, the skinny boy with the white hair? But Gert, or whatever she was calling herself at the time, had always moved on already, whereabouts unknown. I knew I could pick your face out of a hundred million male earthlings, if I ever set eyes on you.” She chuckled. “I found three halfings, as it happens. The other two were the wrong age, but I delivered them to their proper place, which is here. And they were both musicians. That switched on a light for me. Now it was, Rigel the minstrel? Sure I know him. Heard he’d gone west again. By then, I had realized that you had never left Canada.”

  “You were seancing all this?”

  “No, no! I was down in the field, hiring detective agencies, placing ads in newspapers, interviewing people, and scanning every medical journal I could lay my hands on for reports of strange new syndromes. I thought the Starlands could look after themselves, because I never dreamed it would take me so long—and it wasn’t long by our standards. Then one day I heard you singing in Granville Island Market in Vancouver, and I knew my quest was over.”

  It was a cute story if it were true. “I’m not much of a minstrel by starfolk standards.”

  “You’re hell on skates by human standards. I wept to hear singing like that again. The next step was to try to become your friend, and you took to me like Teflon to water.”

  He thought of Talitha’s insistence that Electra would never have abandoned a baby, any baby. He thought of the poor mudling sod, whoever he was, who’d lucked himself into a job as the queen’s gigolo. How would the kid have felt when he suddenly found himself watching his lover die in labor in a strange city in a strange land—heck, probably a strange world. Small wonder that the kid had lost it so badly that he’d chosen to trust a screwball like Gert.

  He believed her now. Rigel rose and walked over to the bed. He bent to kiss Electra’s cheek. “You are forgiven, Mom,” he said.

  She took his hand and squeezed it. Her eyes glistened, but they always glistened. She did not look the way a mother should look, and she wasn’t wearing any clothes under the sheet. He went back to his chair.

  “So tell me about the riot in the Walmart store. You said it was Tarf’s doing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? What was he up to?”

  She sighed wearily. “He was hunting for me. Vildiar’s angels must have guessed or found out that I was on Earth somewhere. There are other continua I could have been visiting, but Earth was the most likely. Hadar set his hounds on me. So while I was hunting you, they were hunting me, with much less pleasant intent.”

  “Vildiar knew about me?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. You would have been of no interest to him.”

  “But they found you?”

  “I’m pretty certain they found you, a lost halfling of about the right age. They put two and two together. And after that they kept track of you.”

  Shit! “I led them to you? I
didn’t know I was being followed.”

  “As long as they just seanced, there wouldn’t have been any way for you to know.”

  Even so, he hated the thought of trash like Tarf watching his every move. “How long did that go on?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “But when I appeared, obviously tracking you, it was time for action. The Starlands would never have learned how I died, but the realm would have started falling apart, and Vildiar would have stepped forward to act the savior, claim the throne, and try to save it. I’m pretty sure that he would not have succeeded. There’s a mystical bond between the Starlands and their ruler that must be transferred by a laying-on of hands, but Vildiar has never been overly troubled by scruples or rules.”

  Rigel was going to have to spend the rest of his life learning the ins and outs of magic, stuff the starfolk picked up in infancy. “So how did Tarf recognize you?”

  Electra shrugged. “I told you we can’t dissemble all the time, and no dissemblance is ever perfect. I’ve been a tourist in Byzantium and Chichén Itzá and Kublai Khan’s pleasure dome. I’ve watched gladiators, autos-da-fé, and Aztec flower wars. And yet, even after I’d spent twenty-one years in Canada, you saw through me right away. You knew somehow that I wasn’t right.

  “Hadar and his gang decided to dispose of me with a Cujam. Ages ago, some mage imagined an amulet that would drive earthlings crazy without affecting starfolk or even halflings. If they were ever detected, it would allow them to keep their heads and make a clean getaway. But then, by accident or evil design, some other mage twisted that magic to produce an amulet called Cujam, which has been copied so often that ‘Cujam’ is now the name of a class of amulets. The starborn are still immune, but the earthlings’ berserker frenzy is specifically directed against them. A Cujam went from being a getaway to being a deathtrap. All Tarf had to do was leave the amulet on a shelf and introvert to safety. Later, when the store was deserted, he could just extrovert back to retrieve it.”

  Rigel had never expected to feel happy to have killed someone, but he had certainly upgraded the galaxy by offing Tarf Halfling.

  “Why couldn’t you just introvert back home?”

  “All my amulets were out in the Winnebago.”

  “But by amazing good fortune Starborn Fomalhaut arrived to save the day. Who was he hunting?”

  “No one.” Electra was quiet for a moment, studying her hands on the sheet. “Rigel, lad, how serious are you about Talitha? Are you just looking for another scalp on your belt, or are you ready to make a serious commitment?”

  His heart hit the stars. “You mean we can make a serious commitment? It is possible for a starborn and a halfling to… to pair, as you call it?”

  “Not formally.” Diamond eyes drilled into him for a painfully long moment before she said, “You would always be a servant by day and a lover slipping in through a secret panel at night, but if you are big enough to accept that humble status and ignore the sneers, then your love can be very long term. I won’t say ‘lifelong,’ because your lifespan is limited, and hers is not.”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. It would be a strange and shameful existence, slinking in the shadows, sharing only a tiny part of her life.

  “I think you’re up to it,” she said. “I’ve watched you for several weeks on Earth, and several days here, after your whole world went insane, and you impress me.”

  That felt good, even though he didn’t fully trust her motives. “You, maybe, but I’ve never impressed girls.” She was his mother, so she wouldn’t laugh at him. “I have no scalps on my belt yet.”

  Electra smiled. “I’m not surprised. It would have to be hard to explain once they got your shirt off. You haven’t told me if you truly love Talitha.”

  “If she will accept me, I will love and serve her all the rest of my days.”

  She seemed to reach a decision. “Very well. I will believe you and trust you with a secret. Fomalhaut wasn’t hunting anyone. He was seancing Halfling Tarf. Fomalhaut is a member of a small band of high-rank mages who call themselves ‘Red Justice.’ They have been in the dangerous business of trying to curb the Vildiar assassins. Fortunately, Fomalhaut is an extremely fast thinker. While he was watching the chaos at Walmart, he recognized you for a halfling, extroverted to save you, and then realized that the mob was after me as well. So he introverted all three of us to Alrisha.”

  “Why Alrisha?” Rigel demanded.

  She shrugged in an effulgence of blues and greens. “I don’t know for certain. He had to dump us somewhere, and Muphrid is his underling, easy to bully. He must have thought we would be safe there for a day or two, and he was in a hurry to get back to Nanaimo to try and nail Tarf. He didn’t succeed, obviously.”

  “And the dragonflies were not sent by Muphrid?”

  “Stars, no! Muphrid is a third-rate panderer and voyeur. I doubt if his magic is even into yellow. But Tarf and the gang tracked us down somehow. Whether they were after Saiph or me or both, the swan was an easy target for them. And I was still vulnerable, having no amulets. You saved your dear old mom from a very vulgar ending. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” All very slick! It made sense, and the Red Justice story explained why the mage had refused to discuss his motives with the ignorant boy halfling. But it still wasn’t the full truth.

  “And who was my father?”

  Silence. Then Electra said, “It’s late. Let’s save that part of the story for another day. We have a few centuries ahead of us to get to know each other, Son, assuming that—”

  Knuckles rapped on the door.

  She grimaced. “Enter!”

  Alfred peered in. “Majesty, you asked to be informed…”

  “Thank you. I will tell the princess.”

  The secretary left. Electra stared blankly at the foot of the bed.

  “Mother?”

  She shivered, as if the room was suddenly too cold for her, and her starry aura faded to pastels. “No, it is you who must go and tell the princess! Rigel, she is losing her father and the weight of the Dziban domain is descending on her shoulders. Millions of lives now depend upon her Naos power. Her child has been stolen from her, and she stands alone in the most dangerous place in the universe—between Vildiar and the throne. She desperately needs people she can rely on. She is resting in the room directly across from this one. Go and tell her that Kornephoros is about to die and she must go to him. And then, for stars’ sake, help her!”

  “What use can I be?” he asked bitterly. “I know nothing about magic, nothing about the Starlands, nothing—”

  The queen’s eyes blazed polychrome fire at him. “She needs someone she can trust utterly, someone who will not be turned or bought or intimidated by Vildiar and his pseudo-Nazi savages. Are you up to that, my son? Or is your love so frail that it fades already?”

  “I am not a hero!” he shouted. “I wasn’t brought up to fight battles and duel dragons.”

  She shook her head. “These are the Starlands, Rigel Halfling. Fantasy is reality. You must be Sir Lancelot or be nothing. Are you truly the son I am so proud to have borne or just a fake on the make?”

  More manipulation! Rigel rose and put on his helmet. He bowed to the queen and strode out of the room without another word. Damn her!

  Chapter 30

  The opposing room was very similar to the queen’s, being almost as large and furnished with the same elephantine furniture and plaid wool. The bed curtains were closed, but Talitha sat huddled on a straight-backed chair with her hands clasped in her lap. The room’s single lamp cast an uncertain glow on pale cheeks and eyes reddened by weeping, and the way she looked up at him reminded him of deer and car headlights. He knelt at her feet.

  “The queen sent me to tell you that you must go now to your father.”

  She nodded.

  Rigel took a very deep breath. “She also told me that you are in need of a helper you can trust completely, someone who will not be turned or bought or intimidated by
Vildiar and his thugs. If that is the case, and the position is still open, I wish to apply for it. And I ask to be considered for lifetime tenure.”

  Her gaze flickered past him just as a voice said, “Brave talk!”

  Before the second word was out, Rigel was upright, sword in hand.

  Starborn Cheleb was sitting in another of the overstuffed chairs and had been hidden from him by the bed. As always, he could make no guess at her age or character, but even by elfin standards she had a bony face, and her eyes reflected the candle with an unearthly copper tinge.

  He dismissed his sword and bowed to her. “It came from the heart, starborn.”

  “Obviously not from the head. Are you congenitally insane or just driven crazy by rut?”

  Not knowing the correct answer, he snapped, “Neither! Are you always so insulting?”

  “Insult a halfling?” she mocked. “Oh, my! Well, then, hero, are you willing to join an expedition to rescue Imp Izar from his father’s stronghold?”

  “I’ll do anything my lady wants.”

  “You’re a cocky young braggart, boy.”

  “You’re an evil old cynic.”

  Talitha rose and quietly kissed his cheek, the part not covered by Meissa. “I accept your offer of help, Rigel Halfling, and will give serious consideration to your application for lifetime tenure.” She managed a brave smile. “Now escort me to my father’s deathbed.”

  He offered an arm, she took it, and even that gentle touch of her hand felt like progress. They walked out the door and down the corridor together. Cheleb did not follow. Rigel considered telling Talitha what he had learned of his parentage and decided that the time was not right.