A Man of His Word

by The Complete Series 01-04 (epub)

  His chance to question might be coming to an end. He began planning his next query, but the proconsul forestalled him.

  “Why would a fairy ever tell his secret name to anyone? Two reasons. Master Rap. One is that life can sometimes become the less pleasant alternative. Intense pain applied long enough will persuade anyone to do anything, and may move a man faster when applied to his dear ones. Apart from their names, fairies are as human as imps, or fauns, or jotnar—and they dislike watching their children suffer.”

  Rap remembered the bloodstains Little Chicken had found in the fairy hut. Whoever had done that had been punished—how? Why? He shivered. “And the second reason, my lady?”

  “That is a great mystery. Rarely, a fairy will volunteer his name, or her name, to certain persons, like your goblin friend. What exactly did she ask him?”

  “She asked all of us the same question—what our dream was.”

  At the gate guards were lining up, snapping to attention, drawing swords to greet the proconsul. Blades flashed bright enough to hurt the eye of the beholder.

  “Most people don’t know what they really want from life, Master Rap. We all think we know, but we often deceive ourselves in one way or another. We think we want to help a cause and secretly desire only power. We think we love, when what we feel is lust. We crave revenge and call it justice. Our self-deceptions are endless. Apparently the fairyfolk can always tell, and this is a curse upon them, for if a fairy meets someone who has a clear, driving, unswerving aim, then the fairy is driven, also—driven to tell his secret, occult name. You and the imp evidently do not have such an aim. You do not know what you are truly seeking. The goblin obviously does.”

  “He told her he wanted to kill me!”

  “Then that is everything he wants from life. He would willingly die to achieve that one satisfaction, and the fairy recognized that. Whether she approved or disapproved would not matter; she could not escape her compulsion. She told him her name and so gave him a word of power to help him achieve his goal.”

  “But,” Rap protested, “I told her my—”

  “Then you lied. Unwittingly, I am sure, but either you do not want it enough, or you really want something else. The fairy would know your heart better than you. It is their only power, and their curse. Be silent a moment.”

  She stopped before she reached the honor guard now flanking the gateway. The commander advanced a step and saluted an empty patch of air several paces in front of her. He waited, then made a ritual reply, and waited again. Puzzled, Rap glanced at Oothiana. She was smiling mischievously as she watched the farcical performance. Apparently the legionaries saw the governor as being accompanied by a large escort. The one-sided ceremony continued for a few moments, but finally the imaginary force was given formal permission to proceed, and Oothiana began walking again. Her humble prisoner trailed alongside, being equally honored by the stiffly saluting soldiers. He wondered if he was riding in an invisible coach drawn by imaginary horses.

  As he passed below the Imperial star, Rap lost his occult view of the town and harbor, and the palace grounds were revealed to his farsight. They surprised him—trees and folds in the hillside had been cleverly used to conceal many more buildings than he had suspected. Most were low wooden structures, largely open to the friendly climate. He identified stables and barracks nearby and grander mansions at higher levels. This was a garden palace, much more pleasant than Holinarn’s bleak castle in Krasnegar, or the forbidding impish stronghold at Pondague, which he had glimpsed from afar while tracking Inos.

  As they rounded a bend and drew out of sight of the bewitched guards, Oothiana began to laugh. He turned to her in surprise.

  “I love doing that,” she said.

  He smiled. Suddenly she was no great lady, but a pretty girl, not so very much older than himself, sharing her mirth at the juvenile prank she had just played. Not as beautiful as Inos, of course, but fair enough, and human under the grandeur.

  “After hiding my powers so long,” she said, “I enjoy being free to use them.”

  “Doing sorcery, you mean?”

  “Yes, although that was only magic, and a small, illusion-magic at that.”

  “I didn’t know there was a difference.”

  “Oh, yes. Magic is what a mage does. It’s temporary. A sorcerer can also do sorcery, which is permanent, quite different. For instance—”

  Rap’s farsight picked up the newcomer at the same moment as hers did. He wheeled around. The road was flanked here by a grassy bank smothered in pale-blue flowers. On the top of it stood a dwarf, who had certainty not been there a second earlier.

  He had chosen a vantage point where he could look down on them. On level ground he would not have reached to Rap’s shoulder, but he was thick and broad, with the oversize head and hands of his race. His hair and beard were a metallic gray shade, curled like turnings from a lathe, and his face had the color and texture of rock.

  But if dwarves aged like the races Rap knew, then this one was in his sixties and therefore could not be Zinixo himself; moreover a warlock would not wear such obviously shabby work clothes and heavy boots.

  “Raspnex?” Oothiana said coldly. “I thought you were keeping watch.”

  “Change of orders.” He gestured over his shoulder with an oversize thumb. “He wants you. Now.”

  Oothiana stiffened and drew a nervous breath. “In the Gazebo?”

  “In Hub. You have some explaining to do.”

  Instantly all expression left the lady’s face. That had to be magic, Rap thought.

  “I—yes,” she said calmly. “All right. This is one of the intrud—”

  “Not wanted. I’ll take care of him.”

  Oothiana nodded, glanced at Rap as if about to say something, and just vanished. Rap jumped, then looked warily up at Raspnex, who was regarding him contemptuously.

  “Never liked fauns. Stubborn lot. Roisterers and spendthrifts.”

  Rap could not see how humility would improve his situation much. “Will you let me go if I promise to be boorish and niggardly, like a dwarf?”

  Raspnex growled, an unpleasant grinding sound. “You told the lady your green friend wants to kill you, so I’d assume that—”

  “You were spying?”

  The older man scowled. “I was. Mind your manners, faun. You want to share a cell with him, or would you rather not?”

  “Share,” Rap said. “He wants to kill me in public. He won’t hurt me without an audience.”

  “You pick odd buddies! Jail is along—”

  “I’m hungry,” Rap said.

  The dwarf rubbed his beard, staring at Rap as if puzzled. Then he growled, “Come here, lad.”

  Rap walked over and climbed the bank. He stopped as soon as his eyes were level with the dwarf’s—two beads of gray flint staring out from a face of pitted, weathered sandstone. Even the wrinkles around those eyes looked more like cracks.

  “You know what’s going to happen!” His voice was a subterranean rumble. “How come you’re not more scared?”

  Silly question. Rap would feel plenty scared if he let himself think about the matter. Fortunately, he hadn’t had time yet to brood and screw himself up into a funk. “You’re not dead till your heart stops,” he said; one of his mother’s little homilies. His heart was thumping pretty firmly right now.

  Raspnex pouted. “Kinda fancy the proconsul?”

  “Fine lady.”

  A faint nod. “Not just faun. What else are you?”

  “Jotunn.”

  “Gods, what a horrible mixture! Explains that flash of temper we saw, though, doesn’t it? Still, might work. A jotunn would’ve tried something brainless, and a faun would’ve just sulked. How are you for stubbornness, with those bloodlines?”

  Rap had no trouble keeping his temper reined in when he knew he was being bated. The man had called him over to put him within punch-swinging range. Only idiots fell into traps that obvious.

  The dwarf grinned suddenly, showi
ng teeth like quartz pebbles. “Here,” he said. He held out a sandwich of black bread and hot, greasy meat.

  “Thank you, sir!” Rap grabbed the offering. As he bit into it, he noticed that some of it was already missing.

  “Don’t thank me; thank the skinny recruit with the buck teeth. What’re you smirking about?”

  Rap spoke with his mouth full. “Never thought I’d ever meet a better thief than Thinal.”

  Raspnex chuckled. “Jail’s that way, faun. Be off with you!”

  The jail was a long way north, at the end of the cape. Rap’s feet knew the way and took him there, pacing unswervingly along the middle of the road, making confident choices at every branch or intersection. He remembered how Inos had been abducted by Rasha in the same manner.

  Three times carriages veered around him in clouds of dust and oaths. Other pedestrians were rare, but once he came face to face with a full maniple marching toward him. Apparently his ensorceled behavior was not unknown in those parts, for where a free man would have been mindlessly trampled into the dirt, the centurion bellowed for the lines to open, and Rap proceeded along a corridor of oak-faced legionaries heading in the opposite direction. Not one of them met his eye.

  His way led across grassy meadow, through groves of trees, and alongside formal gardens. Many of the buildings were shielded from his gaze, smaller shields within the greater shield around the whole complex. He identified the recruits’ barracks, but not the particular buck-toothed lad who had lost his lunch. He saw workshops and a library and private houses. He admired flower beds and herb gardens.

  He also saw a great many statues, some of them so ancient that they had weathered into shapeless pillars. They flanked the paths, being especially common at crossroads. He assumed that they represented former proconsuls or imperors or both, for almost all were male. Most were depicted in either uniform or antique costume, but many of the newer ones wore nothing at all, or only a helmet. He could think of few things sillier than a man brandishing a sword when he had no clothes on, but he saw some of those, also.

  And at last he arrived at a patch of forest, an unkempt stretch of trees and undergrowth. His feet continued without hesitation along a winding dirt track through the middle of this. His eyes caught glimpses of many little huts hidden away in the bushes, but each one was enclosed in its own fence of occult shielding, so he could not tell who inhabited this strange settlement. He thought he could guess, though. The flimsy wickerwork structures were identical to the houses in the fairy village, and on the same miniature scale.

  Finally his feet turned off along a narrow side path. He headed into a wall of shielding and broke through, and a few more steps released the compulsion on him. He stumbled to a halt a few paces from a cabin door. Lounging on a log in the shade, idly fanning away flies with a handful of fern fronds, sat Little Chicken.

  His angular eyes widened, then he grinned.

  “Welcome to prison, Flat Nose,” he said.

  3

  She had escaped from jail—Inos clutched that thought as she would have clutched a rope while dangling over a precipice.

  The caravan had departed before noon and struck out at once into unfamiliar terrain, skirting the hills she knew from Azak’s hunting trips. She had thought she already knew what true desert was, but she had been mistaken.

  The sun’s light was a naked blade, its heat a bludgeon. The drab land lay dead and wrinkled as if it had been moist at the creation of the world and ever since been steadily shriveling and crumbling in that sadistic glare. A few goatherds and a scattering of miners were all who lived there; except of course for ants and millipedes and scorpions and poisonous snakes. And lots of flies. Lots and lots of flies.

  Camels were noisy and smelly and untrustworthy. Their gait was better than the motion of a boat, perhaps, but similar enough to make her queasy. With no reins to hold, she felt like a useless passenger in a very uncomfortable chair floating high above the arid dirt. In a few days, when she had become more familiar with camels, and when there was no doubt that the fugitives had safely escaped from Rasha—then, Azak said, he would happily give his supposed wife a few lessons in the finer points of camel riding. Meanwhile, the nose rope of her mount would remain attached to the baggage animal in front, and if she needed anything she should just ask Fooni, and excuse-him-he-was-busy-now.

  But they had escaped from Arakkaran. That one thought was a lake of cool water in the barren mental landscape, a jewel without equal, rain in a drought.

  As the sun dipped to the dark sharp edges of the Agonistes, the caravan came to an oasis. It was disappointing, not at all the soothing romantic setting Inos had expected. There were no buildings. The palms were few and scraggy, and the grass had been grazed to the roots over the years by thousands of caravans converging on the capital. There was a well for people and a couple of muddy ponds for the livestock, but no shade or shelter from a scorching wind that sprang up unexpectedly to blow dust into eyes and teeth. The camels expressed their opinions very loudly and unmistakably, and Inos agreed wholeheartedly.

  Having been returned to ground level, with legs unexpectedly wobbly, she learned that her first duty was to erect the tent in which Azak and his supposed family would spend the night. Azak, she discovered, was now Third Lionslayer and hunting for Second, who had so far managed to avoid him.

  The tent was erected, but Fooni did most of the work, while mocking and berating Inos for her incompetence with invective as shrill as a knife on glass.

  Fooni was one of the sheik’s great-granddaughters. She had been attached to Inos as tutor and guide. Fooni was worse than the flies. Having seen only her eyes and hands, Inos had no clear idea of Fooni’s age, but she could be no more that twelve. She was tiny, shrill, impudent, and infuriatingly knowledgeable about the nomadic life of a camel train. She treated Inos as a moronic, benighted foreigner; nagged her, rode rings around her on one of the baggage camels, and wasted no chance to humiliate her. Inos spent the next half hour trying to locate Fooni accurately on her list of Those Who Deserve to Die, and eventually put her in fourth place, right after the dowager duchess of Kinvale.

  But the tent was erected at last. It was emphatically not the neatest of the many black tents that had sprouted among the palms and it was the last to be completed. Inos was on the point of heading off to fetch water when she noticed that the other women were carrying their jars on their heads; she sent Fooni instead.

  Then she busied herself with laying out the bedding mats. There was little room to spare, especially when she arranged a safety zone around Azak’s sleeping place. If any of the three women accidentally touched him in the night—his hand or even his hair—she would be burned.

  Having done what she could in the stuffy, flapping dimness, Inos emerged into the twilight. Kade sat on the entrance mat amid a swirl of white feathers.

  “By the sacred balance, Aunt, what are you doing?”

  “Plucking the fowl, dear.”

  Inos knelt down beside her on the rug, horrified and guilty. A royal princess plucking a miserable scrawny chicken? How could she have been so cruel as to subject the old woman to this? And her feelings were not helped by the twinkle of amusement in Kade’s blue eyes. She was apparently smiling under her yashmak.

  Inos gulped. “I didn’t know … Where did you learn to do that?”

  “In the palace kitchens, when I was small.”

  “Let me.”

  “No, it’s quite a restful occupation. You can gut it for me, if you know how.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Kade said contentedly. “I do. It is great fun to try something one has not done for so long. It all comes back!”

  Inos said. “Oh.” And then words failed her. Dear Kade! She had obviously accepted this expedition and was making the best of it. Had Inos lost such an argument, she would have sulked for days.

  Kade never sulked. “To be honest, dear, I was finding that opulent palace life a little dull. Travel is alw
ays very stimulating, is it not?”

  “Yes. Very.” Inos decided she would peel the onions and enjoy a good weep. She glanced around the bustling campground and there was no sign of the despicable Fooni. She was probably deep in gossip with other children, or women.

  “I never realized,” Kade said, “how beautiful the desert would be—in its own way, of course.”

  Beautiful? Inos looked again, more carefully. The sky was blood-red behind the peaks, the first stars were twinkling in the east, and all around the campground the little braziers were glowing in the dusk. The wind had dwindled until now it seemed almost cool on her face.

  “I suppose it has a certain … unusual charm,” she admitted. “But the best part is that I think we have escaped from the sorceress!”

  “Too early to tell, dear.” Kade held the runtish fowl at arm’s length and squinted at it. “If she knows where we are, she can come and get us any time, I’m sure.”

  “You don’t seem too worried by that prospect”

  Kade sighed and picked at a few stray quills. “I am still inclined to trust Sultana Rasha, my dear. As for Hub—”

  “What color pajamas,” Inos snarled, “does a goblin wear? Sugar pink, to set off his green skin? Or arterial red in case he spills something on them?”

  Kade tut-tutted dismissively, although she kept her attention on the scraggy little carcass. “I’ve told you, dear, I can’t believe that they were serious about that. Certainly the imperor …”

  Inos told her ears to stop listening. Kade had an unlimited ability to believe what she wanted to believe and she was determined not to admit that warlocks and imperors might ever do anything ungentlemanly, or a witch anything unladylike. Easy for her! She wasn’t going to be bearing ugly little green babies.

  Before Inos could find a logical argument to rebut Kade’s unpractical instincts, Azak came striding up with a swish of his long Kibr. He sank down on his heels and stared at Inos.