“Why,” Thorog said, staring, “do you walk that way?”
“ ‘Cause I peed my pants on your bed,” Shandie said, and was gone before his cousin had finished making sure he hadn’t.
3
Seven hundred leagues to the west of Hub, in a cold and clammy dawn, Ambassador Krushjor shivered under a fur robe on the deck of an Imperial war galley. Fog hung over the sea like a white mystery, and the sea roiled slowly and painfully below it, dark and menacing. In a pouch at his belt lay very imposing documents, rolls of vellum decorated with heavy wax seals — an edict granting safe conduct to the imperor’s trusted and dearly beloved cousin and a missive welcoming the thane of Gark to the City of the Gods. Aged clerks, well inured to hypocrisy, had muttered oaths as they penned the words.
If a jotunn felt chilled, imps froze. Rowers, archers, legionaries, officers … their teeth chattered like castanets all around him, and their swarthy hides were a livid blue in the dubious light. Moisture glistened on their armor as it glistened on plank and rigging and sword.
The possibility of treachery had been evident to both sides right from the start. Thane Kalkor had listed many possible days and sites at which he might appear to learn how the imperor had answered his arrogant request. This was one of the places and one of the days, but not the first, for the wheels of the secretariat had turned with glacial slowness, and even the ambassador’s decision to bring the reply himself had not saved it from being delayed by bad weather.
Krushjor glanced at the sky, contemplated time and tide, and decided to hang around for another half hour in the hope that some of the imps might contract pneumonia. He, after all, knew for certain what they could only suspect — that the documents in his pouch were worthless forgeries. The safe conduct had been carefully phrased so that it became effective only when it was delivered, and there was not one chance in a million that his dear nephew Kalkor would blunder into a trap as obvious as this one.
A long way to the south, in a fog even thicker, a bonfire crackled and steamed on a reach of rocky coast. A bowshot seaward, a rugged sea stack provided a notable landmark, although it was presently invisible. Shiny, lethargic swells drifted in to the shore, summoning just enough energy as they died to break the surface and slap small ripples of froth on the shingle. Seabirds like toy boats bobbed at the limit of vision. The rocks and grasses were as wet as the sea, the air heavy with scents of weed and the restless ocean.
Shivering, stamping his boots, and tending the fire, an aging jotunn named Virgorek cursed his vigil and the Gods who had brought him to such a pass. He was Nordland born, blue-eyed and blond like all jotnar, but burdened with a most atypical fondness for security. Long ago, at fourteen, he had killed a man who had raped his sister. And killed his sister, also, of course, for submitting. The incident might have boosted his career considerably had the man’s family not possessed more fighting men than his own. Discovering that his life was worth less than a cormorant’s egg, Virgorek had fled from his homeland and sought his fortune in the Impire; and in time he had found himself living in the capital, serving on the staff of the permanent Nordland embassy there.
The pay was excellent, for few of his countrymen could tolerate indoor work, and they pined without the smell of salt water in their nostrils. He had estimated that a couple of years of such drudgery would earn him enough to return to the sea and buy his own boat so that he could end his days in respectable fishing, brawling, and smuggling. He had overlooked the sheer impossibility of anyone but an imp managing to hang onto money in an impish city.
After five years of this degradingly honest labor, he was wiser, but also older and poorer and no more content. Indeed, when he contemplated his debts and domestic problems back in Hub, he could think of no sane reason why he should return there.
Meanwhile he must spend two hours at dawn here, on every one of eleven specified days, in the slight hope that Kalkor would choose this one time and place out of a handful of others. Virgorek had no way of knowing whether the documents he bore were the real ones or merely more of the forgeries. This was the seventh time he had gone through the same useless ritual, and the only good thing about this one was the fog. This was authentic orca weather.
The dory had crept almost within hailing distance before he saw it. His first sensation was annoyance that some stupid local fisherman had blundered into the rendezvous and would have to be killed in case he gossiped. Then he noticed the solitary rower’s gold hair. And finally he registered that the man’s back and arms were bare. In that weather, such deliberate discomfort ruled out any normal fisherman. Virgorek’s heartbeat speeded up considerably, and he began rehearsing the passwords.
Just before he beached, the rower expertly turned the dory and backed water for a few strokes. Then he rested on his oars.
“What do you catch, stranger?” Virgorek called.
The response took long enough that he had almost given up hope, but the newcomer was merely studying him and the enveloping fog.
“Bigger than you expect” came the expected reply at last.
Virgorek held up his pouch.
“Bring it!” the visitor commanded.
Reluctantly the ambassador’s emissary stepped forward into the icy clutches of Westerwater. He waded out through the puny waves. Before he reached the boat, his teeth were starting to chatter, and the freezing water was almost up to his groin.
“All blood is red,” he said, thinking that his own might be turning blue by now.
“And beautiful,” the rower said. He was wearing nothing but a pair of leather breeches, and his lips were white with cold. Even the damp could not darken his heavy pale hair. His eyes were an intense blue, glittering arrogance. His face was callous — and also clean shaven, which was strange indeed if he was a raider, a sailor on an orca ship. Even more strange, he bore no tattoos. He still looked mean enough to eat trees.
But the passwords had been correct. With relief that his vigil was over and he need never return to this godsforsaken headland, Virgorek fumbled at his pouch.
“Get in,” the stranger said, waving a thumb at the bows.
The ambassador’s emissary hesitated, and the raider’s fingers strayed to the hilt of the dagger in his belt. Virgorek scrambled aboard and huddled himself into a shivering knot. The boatman pulled a few strokes, sending the little craft leaping seaward. Then he hauled the oars inboard and scrambled back off his thwart. “You row. Warm you.”
Virgorek unwound and edged over to sit amidships; then he was toe to toe with the raider. Maybe Hub was not the worst place in the world to live. Maybe a diplomatic career not the worst fate a man could suffer.
“Give me the pouch,” the stranger said.
“It is for the thane’s eyes only.”
The steady sapphire gaze was a nightmare of unspoken threat. “I will give it to him.”
He must be one of Kalkor’s men, and one of the most trusted. By definition, then, he was a killer with no scruples at all.
Virgorek passed over the pouch and took the oars. He had not rowed in years, but a jotunn learned boats before he learned fighting, and fighting before speech. He put his back into it, to show this uppity youngster, and in a few moments he began to feel his blood run warm again.
The raider’s change to inactivity must be chilling him, but he showed no signs of it. He leaned back, a statue of hard muscle and icy stare, and for several minutes said nothing. Then he bent and found a third oar, which he pushed out aft and tucked under his arm to steer. He seemed to have no compass, and the world ended less than a cable length away in all directions. He did not look worried. He did not look as if he ever worried.
Virgorek pulled and pulled and soon began to feel hot. He had been letting himself get soft — palms, and arms … He did not slack the pace he had set.
“How far?” he panted.
“Far enough.”
With his free hand, the stranger opened the pouch. He took out each roll in turn, staring hard at the seals an
d inscriptions as if he could read them. Almost certainly he would be faking … he wasn’t even moving his lips! Very few jotnar ever learned to read, because their eyes were not good at close work.
But then he returned the safe conduct to the bag and tossed the imperor’s letter overboard unopened. Virgorek considered a protest and then thought better.
Then the third scroll, the letter from the ambassador, followed the second. That was too much.
“Hey!” Virgorek said, lifting his oars from the water. The vellum would float, and the ink might not wash out if it were recovered quickly.
“Hey what?” the stranger said, unwinking.
“That’s important!”
“No it isn’t. It would merely warn Kalkor that the Impire plans to set a trap for him. He knows that.”
Suddenly the raider smiled.
Virgorek dipped his oars again quickly. He didn’t like that smile. A few years among imps made a man feel tough, but now he wondered if he was any more important than those discarded scrolls. That sort of thinking untoughened a man awfully fast.
“Why is he doing this?”
“Doing what?” The blue eyes widened; the smile widened.
“Going to Hub! Putting himself in the Impire’s clutches! They’ll never let him escape!”
Still smiling … “Who knows? I’ve never met anyone brave enough to question him.”
Oars creaked. Water hissed by the planks. The pace was telling on Virgorek now, and he regretted his initial enthusiasm.
The raider leaned slightly on his steering oar and the dory veered, and yet nothing showed in the ubiquitous white fog.
“Why don’t you ask him?” he said. “When we get to the ship?”
Virgorek wondered if he had ever known real fear in his life before. “No! I don’t think I will.”
“Then you may even see land again,” Thane Kalkor said pleasantly, “but only if you row much faster than this.”
4
Autumn rains always brought on Ekka’s rheumatics, and this year they were especially painful. Ominously bad. Reluctantly she had taken to her bed, and she lay there now, buttressed by warm bricks wrapped in flannel, sprawled back on a heap of pillows, and wishing she had not demanded to see her face in a mirror that morning. A gray complexion definitely did not go with her amber teeth.
And just as a final, unbearable irritation, here was her idiot son, fatter and more incompetent than ever, shifting from shoe to shining shoe at the foot of her bed and tugging his pendulous lip. An impeccably dressed nincompoop! The thought of Angilki ever trying to manage Kinvale without her was enough to make a God blaspheme.
“It’s from the imperor!” he wailed again.
“I can see that, dolt!” Even her old eyes knew that imposing seal, and she could make out enough of the crabbed scribe’s hand.
“He wants me to come to Hub!”
“So?”
“So what?”
“So, what are you waiting for? Or are you planning to refuse?”
Angilki’s already sallow face turned even paler. Perhaps he had hoped she would write a note to excuse him? He had never been more than two day’s ride from home in his life.
“But why? Why me?”
Because the imperor had recently granted his gracious leave for this lumpkin to style himself King of Krasnegar, that was why, and now the bureaucrats had found some law or reason — the two were rarely compatible — requiring the pawn to move to the center of the board. The purpose might be as trivial as a public homage or as terminal as attainder for high treason. The only certainty was that Angilki was now involved in Imperial politics and must do as he was told.
She could not face the thought of trying to explain all that to him. The less he knew the happier he would be.
When she did not speak, he added, “And the foundations for the new west portico …”
“God of Worms!” she muttered. “Give me strength! Go and pack your bags and saddle a horse. And you’d better take a lunch.”
“One lunch? It’ll take me weeks and weeks!”
Ekka shut her eyes and waited impatiently for the sound of the door closing.
5
Far to the east of Zark, below the hazy white of a maritime sky, Unvanquished dipped her bowsprit in salute to an advancing green mountain. The wind was boisterous, just right for sailing.
The crew were cheerful, not realizing how far from land they really were, and Rap was moderately content — no sorcerer was likely to detect his cautious experiments this far out in the Spring Sea, or wish to investigate if he did. He was learning. He could even adjust the weather now, within limits, and without rippling the ambience very much. Since his injuries had completed their healing, he had almost caught up on his sleep. He still had nightmares, though, and probably always would.
If Jalon and Gathmor had been his only companions, he would have taken the warlock’s boat for this trip north, but he could never ask the princess to ride in that. It might be booby-trapped, anyway, so that the warlock could follow its progress, or even call it to him. Lith’rian was sneaky, perhaps the least trustworthy of all the Four. Olybino was said to be stupid and the other two were just plain crazy. The elf was a trickster, and treacherous.
A gust of spray blew over the bows and did not touch Rap. He took hold of the rail as Unvanquished tipped her bow skyward. His jotunn blood thrilled to the creak of rope and spar, to the green gleam of light through the glassy edge of the wave ahead, and the swoop of the albatross astern, wheeling its wings against the sky. Fish swirled, myriads of them down in the main, and sometimes he sensed great somber shapes that might be whales, deeper in the cold dark. Most happily would he sail on forever. Landfall was going to bring back his troubles, and danger — and responsibility.
Captain Migritt dozed in his cabin, the cook cooked in the galley. Within a labyrinth of tackle stowed in the glory hole, Pooh was stalking a rat. The gnarled little gnome was about the most entertaining person aboard — Rap had already spent hours with him, hearing his yarns, chuckling at his ribaldry. No one ever talked to gnomes, and yet they were friendly, easygoing folk once you got past their odd customs and their stench, and once they got over their surprise and suspicion. He liked Pooh.
And there were voices, all over the ship … He could muffle them and ignore them, if they did not talk about him. But some of those voices did talk about him, often, and then the conversations were as hard to ignore as if they were right at his back.
Now, down in the princess’s cabin, all three of them were on about him again.
Gathmor, gruffly: “Yes, he’s changed. Do you think any man could suffer as he did and not change?”
Sagorn, supercilious: “It was not that. When he first recovered he was not like this. It was whatever he saw in his vision that did this to him.”
Princess Kadolan, concerned: “Then we must try to find out what he saw and see if we can help.”
Then both men together, saying that they had tried.
Gods! — how they had tried, Gathmor and all of the five by turns! Cursed mundane busybodies.
He had never asked to be a mage. Had the princess given him a choice, and had he been in fit state to think, he’d have refused the third word of power in the dungeon. He had really wanted to die then. He had never wanted occult power at all, except that he’d thought he could help Inos. So he’d trapped Sagorn with a dragon and become an adept. That was not a memory he cherished. Serve him right — see what it had brought him! Inos had a kingdom now. She had a royal and handsome husband, at least in name. Maybe she would be content with that? No, not Inos. She was too much a real woman not to want to have a real marriage, with children and … and a real husband. Gods! Why did a man have to fall in love? He drummed his fists on the rail. Why must a churl fall in love with a queen, and then not have the wit to know it and tell her so at once, so she could laugh and thank him politely and lay the whole matter to rest right away?
Then he’d have stayed in Krasneg
ar and been a wagon driver.
Then she’d have married Andor.
What business of his if she had?
What could he do now? Cure her burns, yes. Easy. That would be no harder than smuggling her aunt out of Arakkaran, which he had accomplished with no trouble at all. He couldn’t remove her husband’s curse, nor win back her kingdom — a mere mage could not take on the Four, no one could. Anyway, he wasn’t going to be around much longer and she must have resigned herself to losing Krasnegar when she married that big barbarian … chain a man down and mash his bones? Inos had not known about that, her aunt said, and her aunt never seemed to tell a lie. She bypassed the truth when it was bothersome, but he had not seen her lie.
And here she came now, swaddled in wool and leather, a rolypoly figure staggering along the deck to speak to him. Her white hair was blowing like a flag and her cheeks were rosy as sunsets already. So now it must be her turn to try and comfort the moping faun.
He steadied her a little — not so much that she would notice — but he did not turn. When she arrived at his side and grabbed at the rail, he glanced around as if he had not been watching.
“Ma’am!”
“Master Rap!” She was beaming. She obviously enjoyed sailing. “This is wonderful weather! Is this your doing?”
“A little of it. Not much.”
A gust of cold spray came over the side and he deflected it from both of them. She noticed and laughed shakily.
“Oh! Oh, that’s splendid! You are a very helpful traveling companion!”
“I won’t be much use ashore, I’m afraid. I shan’t dare exert power there. Especially when we get near to Hub.”
“Of course, I quite understand. I am so excited! All my life I have wanted to visit Hub. I never thought a mage would turn up to escort me — it’s quite like a poet’s romance!”
A Man of His Word Page 127