The King of Talbos (The Eastern Slave Series Book 6)

by Victor Poole

  "And you did this all last night?" Ajalia asked. She felt slightly nonplussed. "How did you do all of it?"

  "Well, it wasn't very hard," Delmar told her, but his mouth was curved with pleasure. "Do you like it?" he asked, looking at her.

  "I love it," Ajalia said. "It's beautiful. I don't know how it's possible."

  "I will tell you what I think," Delmar said. "I think that Bakroth started to move the energy around. He got the power, either from the sky king, or because he had learned already to see the energy in the earth and sky. I think that Bakroth made a deal with the sky king, like I told you, and he and his companion carried the piece of sky land that the sky king had apportioned, and laid it down in the earth. I can see the anchors," Delmar added suddenly. He was speaking so quickly that his whole body was heaving with jittery excitement. "I saw the places where Bakroth, or his companion, where someone tied down the sky land to the earth. That's why Slavithe is so quiet, and so serene," he added suddenly. Ajalia glanced curiously at Delmar, and he laughed at the expression in her eyes. "I know I haven't been anywhere else," he said easily, "but I've been here, to Talbos, and I've read the records about the old places. Cities are supposed to be noisy, aren't they? And full of broken things?"

  Ajalia blinked rapidly. This, she thought, was a fairly apt description of most cities, but she had never thought of Slavithe as a place that lacked broken things.

  "I suppose you're right," she said reluctantly.

  "Well, Slavithe isn't like that," Delmar said. "It's not very dirty, is it?" Ajalia had to agree that Slavithe was not dirty, except in the areas where the poor tenements lay. "And even where there is dirt," Delmar said, "it's piles of rags, and sticky dirt, like wet slime, isn't it?" Again, Ajalia admitted that he was, indeed, correct. "So I think that the white stone of Slavithe is all formed of a mixture of stone and magic from the sky," Delmar said. "I think that it's malleable, like a white clay, and that it was made very quickly. I think the whole city was made almost at once, like I changed the mountain in a night."

  "What does the new palace look like?" Ajalia asked suddenly. Delmar laughed again, and said that she would be able to see it in just a moment. They came around the curve where the road rejoined the main mountain path that stretched up to where the old king's palace had stood, and Delmar stopped, and pointed up the mountain.

  Ajalia followed the direction of his arm, and felt a shiver of surprise. An exact replica of the dragon temple, constructed out of a deep gray stone, lay in the place where the black palace had been.

  "What did you do to the road?" Ajalia asked. Trickles of shock were tumbling down her spine; she felt a cold pinch in her neck. The magic Delmar had used on the mountain had seemed to her wondrous, but the reality of what he had done, and of what he was capable of, now came thoroughly into her head. The sight of the dragon palace, which was just like her own temple in Slavithe, but made of a heavy gray stone that wore marbles of white and black through it, and the sight of the road, which ran smoothly down the mountain like a sledding run of ice, made Ajalia feel distinctly uncomfortable. She turned to Delmar.

  "Did you do all of this last night?" she demanded. Delmar nodded; he was watching her closely.

  "Do you like it?" he asked. Ajalia turned back towards the mountain, and the gray dragon temple. The mountain here was oddly different; something about the great peak seemed different to Ajalia, aside from the wild green plants that clung now to every surface of the rock, and as she stared at the mountain, she realized that the long cruel peak that had made a deep shadow over the old king's palace was missing.

  "What did you do to the top of the mountain?" Ajalia asked. Her heart did a flip, and she looked around at Delmar. "I don't know how I feel about this," she told him, but her heart was now beginning to pound unpleasantly hard, and Delmar was looking at her with the dangerous glint in his eyes again. "Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked sharply. Delmar smoothed out his face.

  "Oh, no reason," he told her. "I made a land passage to Saroyan." Ajalia gathered up the reins of her horse, and turned towards the gray dragon temple.

  "I want to see my new house," Ajalia said firmly, and she did not see Delmar's face stretch into a broad smile. Mop gave a shout, and began to tumble violently up the smooth road. "Have you spoken to Savage much?" Ajalia asked. A rushing noise was in her ears, and she felt displaced. She felt as if she had missed a year's worth of happenings, when she had stayed with Delmar's relations in the wooden palace. "Why didn't you change the lower slopes on the other side of the mountain?" she added. Delmar laughed.

  "I shall try to remember all of your questions, to answer them all in turn," Delmar told her. His voice had a gently teasing note in it, which Ajalia was determined to ignore. She wanted to see the inside of the gray palace that Delmar had made for her.

  "What's this temple made of?" Ajalia asked him. She waited for an answer this time. Her black horse's hooves made a smooth clip-clop against the strangely smooth surface of the black road. She wanted to ask Delmar how he had made the road so smooth, and what magic he had done to the inside of the mountain to get the plants to grow, but she bit on her tongue, and waited for Delmar to speak. "I'm not going to ask you anything else," Ajalia told him, because he was looking up at her with eager delight in his face, and not responding. Delmar laughed again.

  "You should see your eyes," Delmar told her. Ajalia almost burst out at him, but she restrained herself. "You look angry and pleased," he added, sounding very satisfied with himself. Ajalia almost asked him why she should be angry, but then she realized that she did, indeed, feel quite irate. "You're mad that you missed it," Delmar told her, "but I don't care. I wanted to surprise you, and I did. You are surprised," Delmar said with a laugh. "You still believe in your heart that I'm a failure at everything, and that you are going to have to shepherd me through life. I was thinking about our fight, while I was gone," he added, "and I was thinking about how I keep hurting you, like you said. I think I feel like a failure, because you take the lead on everything. I have ideas, too, and I can do things. Like this," he added quickly, pointing at the mountain, and the temple.

  "Wait," Ajalia said suddenly. "You made a land passage to Saroyan?" Delmar looked as though he were about to burst open with glee.

  "Yes," he said with dignity. "And Leed and Philas are there now."

  "What about Fashel?" Ajalia asked at once. Delmar laughed. "What?" Ajalia demanded. Delmar laughed harder, and she stopped the horse, her face burning red. "What are you laughing at?" Ajalia asked. Her voice was sharp; she was half-tempted to laugh along with Delmar, but she was not yet sure if he was laughing at her.

  "She married Savage," Delmar said finally, and then collapsed again into smothered laughter. An expression of disbelief, and then of irritation, crossed her face.

  "Fashel did what now?" Ajalia asked. She felt a hot battle of interesting emotions strangling over her insides. A part of her wanted to laugh at the idea of Savage and Fashel as a married pair, and a part of her wanted to find Fashel, and shake her for being impulsive and foolish. Ajalia nudged at her horse, and she and Delmar followed the now-cartwheeling Mop up the smooth road.

  "Does Fashel like Savage?" Ajalia asked finally. Delmar met her eyes solemnly.

  "Fashel likes Savage nearly as much as I like you," he told her. She looked at his face, and tried to see if he was tricking her.

  "Do you mean that?" Ajalia asked. She felt a great personal interest in Fashel, since she had involved herself as much as she already had in the young lady's future, and she felt now almost as though Fashel had gone out and fallen in love deliberately, to spite her. Ajalia told herself that she was being ridiculous.

  "I do," Delmar told her. "She adores him."

  "And what happened to Philas?" Ajalia asked. "When did Leed get here?" she added, frowning. "What else has happened? I was only away for a few days." Ajalia was beginning to feel as though Delmar did not need her at all; she would have guessed, before this, that such inde
pendent and innovative action on Delmar's part would have pleased her, but she felt now suddenly exposed. She thought that Delmar's relationship to her had been built primarily on her protecting and guiding him. Now that he apparently no longer needed her to do either of these things, she felt rather abandoned.

  Delmar was watching her as they walked up the road.

  "Have you made a flying horse yet?" Ajalia asked.

  "No," Delmar said.

  "Why aren't you answering any of my questions?" Ajalia asked him.

  "Because you don't want me to answer anything yet," Delmar told her. "You want to figure everything out yourself, so you feel involved." Ajalia's mouth began to work slowly back and forth.

  "Well," she said, and her voice came out gargled. Delmar laughed again.

  "I like you a lot," he told her, and she thought she saw his arms make a stifled motion towards her.

  "Were you about to hug me?" Ajalia asked suspiciously.

  "No," Delmar said. "You're on a horse. I can't hug you now."

  Ajalia stopped her horse, and slid off. She looked up at Delmar, and Delmar looked at her.

  "What about now?" she asked. Delmar, she saw, was chewing at his lip.

  "But I want you to see the inside of the new dragon temple," he said.

  "Does that mean that you don't want to hug me?" Ajalia asked. She saw his arms make an abortive motion. His hands curled into fists.

  "But I want to show you the new dragon temple," Delmar told her. Now it was his voice that came out strangled. Ajalia studied Delmar's eyes.

  "You're going to surprise me with something, aren't you?" she asked. Delmar frowned, and she saw that his cheeks were turning pink.

  "No," he said.

  "Yes, you are," she said. "Is it a nice surprise?" Delmar's mouth wrinkled up, and he frowned.

  "Well, of course it's a nice surprise," he muttered, and then his eyes widened. "I didn't say that," Delmar said in a flat voice. "You didn't hear that." Ajalia saw, with a feeling like a cold finger around her heart, that Delmar was about to cry.

  "Oh," she said, and reached out for him.

  "No!" Delmar said. He seemed to be quivering with something like anger, or despair. "Hang on a minute," he told her. "I made a mistake. There is no surprise."

  Ajalia, who was now sure that there was a surprise, and that it was a very nice one, got back on her horse.

  "Well, that's a relief," she told Delmar.

  "Why is that a relief?" Delmar asked her. He sounded nervous. They began, once again, to walk towards the gray dragon temple.

  "Because I was afraid you were going to startle me," Ajalia said. "Now I will not be startled, because I know there is no surprise."

  "Oh," Delmar said. "But what if there is a surprise some time in the future?" He looked up at her with some anxiety in his eyes. Ajalia kept her gaze fixed on the road ahead. She had been frightened, when Delmar had first begun to be secretive. She had been worried that he had been hurting himself, or keeping some damaging secret from her, which, she told herself, had certainly happened before. Now she was sure that Delmar was planning some sweet and romantic gesture, and she no longer felt any desire to spoil it for him.

  "If there was a surprise in the future," Ajalia said, "I would probably have to kiss you a lot, because I would like it."

  "Oh," Delmar said, and he sounded reassured.

  They walked in silence up the long smooth road to the dragon temple. The silence, Ajalia thought, was quite peaceful. She wanted to ask more questions about this land passage to Saroyan; the Saroyan coast, she had thought, was quite some distance from Slavithe and Talbos, and she did not see how the top of the mountain over Talbos would be able to stretch between Saroyan and Slavithe. She turned in the saddle, and looked behind at the city, and the ocean that was barely visible beyond the dark houses. She wondered how the people of Talbos were adjusting to the new mountain, and to the water that Delmar had apparently brought to the city in the last few hours. Ajalia looked at Delmar, who was watching Mop, and she began to think about what she would say to her master, when she brought Delmar with her to meet him.

  Delmar had proposed bringing her master here, to manage Slavithe, but now she was thinking about what Delmar had told her about the sky land, and about the poison tree. There would be nothing for her master to manage, she thought, if Slavithe evaporated into the sky, or if Delmar lifted it bodily up into the air, and tried to replace the land in the sky.

  Ajalia smiled; she felt out of place. These are things, she told herself, that belong in a story, not in real life. She watched Mop tumble wildly over the smooth road. The boy was like a splash of fire; he bounced over the road with the verve of a flickering flame, and his limbs dashed up and down.

  "What is Mop doing, do you think?" Ajalia asked Delmar. He looked up at her, and smiled.

  "He is pretending to do magic," Delmar told her. Ajalia watched the gray dragon temple draw near; there were other houses against the slopes of the mountains. All of these appeared to be untouched, though they were now surrounded by heaps of new and vibrant green growth.

  "How did you change the whole mountain without disturbing the houses or the people here?" Ajalia asked, frowning. "Aren't there people all over? Don't they live here? How did you do this without hurting anyone, or knocking their houses down?"

  Delmar, she saw again, looked quite pleased with himself.

  "I drew up the life that is deep within the earth," he told her. "There was a lot of green growth here. I don't know how to explain it. I said that your soul was bright with colors," he said. "Do you remember, and it's faded out? I showed you."

  "Yes," Ajalia said, thinking of the tiny figure of a child that Delmar had made, and how he had filled the child with a soul like hers.

  "Well," Delmar said, "I think that is what your soul is meant to be like, but you've been fed on, and hurt by evil people. Your real self is very bright, and I can see what you will be, when you're all right."

  "I'm all right now," Ajalia told him. Delmar did not reply to this, but she saw the way his lips turned down at the corners. "So you can see the potential in the earth as well?" she asked. Delmar nodded.

  "I can see what things would look like, if there was more light, and water, and better soil."

  "You moved soil around?" Ajalia asked. She was staring down at Delmar, who was now, for the first time, beginning to blush over what he had done.

  "Yes," he admitted.

  "But how did you do that?" she demanded. "Wasn't this all just rock? How did you get any earth?"

  "I went north," Delmar said. "And I—" here he mumbled something so quietly that Ajalia could not understand anything of what he said.

  "You did what?" she asked. "And what is up north?"

  "Desert, beyond the edge of the farmlands," Delmar said. "There are farms, and fertile fields for miles north of the mountain, in a strip along the coast. But the desert comes right up against the edge of those lands. I think that Bakroth started to make the land fertile," Delmar added. "I think he started, and then someone stopped him, and undid some of what he did. Anyway, there are farms with good soil up north, and around those farms is bare desert. Inside of the desert," Delmar said, and he took a sharp breath, "is very good soil, down under the surface."

  Ajalia studied Delmar with narrowed eyes.

  "How far down?" she asked. They were coming up to the entrance of the dragon temple now. Delmar saw the way she was looking at him, and he blushed again.

  "Pretty far," he muttered, and Ajalia turned a hard eye on him.

  THE GRAY DRAGON PALACE

  "What was that thing you mumbled, when I asked you where you found the soil?" Ajalia asked him. Delmar turned red. He pushed his lips to the side. He mumbled something incoherently. "Tell me what you're saying, so that I can hear," Ajalia told him.

  "I made it," he said finally, his ears burning red.

  "You made the soil?" she asked. Delmar glanced at her. She saw that he was afraid she would be angry w
ith him.

  "I made it," Delmar said again. "I did something kind of like what I did with the old dragon skin, and I pushed the black rock against," Delmar took a deep breath, and then studied Ajalia nervously before going on, "I pushed it against some sunlight."

  Delmar said this in such a low voice, and with his lips pressed so closely together, that Ajalia could only just hear what he said.

  "With sunlight?" Ajalia asked. "You made some soil by pushing rocks against sunlight? In the middle of the night?" Delmar scraped his foot against the ground.

  "Yes," he said. "There's a stable in the back," he said quickly, taking Ajalia's horse by the reins. "I'll show you, it's just like your other one," he said eagerly, and led the horse around the side of the big gray dragon temple.

  "How did you build this?" Ajalia asked again. She was looking up at the outer walls of the dragon temple, and it was so solid, and so real-looking, that she could hardly believe that she was not dreaming. "Is this stone? Is this made of water-vapor, like you said the Slavithe stone is?" she demanded. Delmar looked around at her, and he smiled.

  "No, it's real," he said, and he sounded pleased. "It's a very tough rock that I found under the mountain."

  Ajalia's mouth was drawn down into a deep frown. She could not have said why she felt so annoyed. Perhaps, she told herself, she was angry that Delmar had learned how to do these things on his own, without her help. Or maybe, she thought, she was jealous. She felt an irritation in her gut, and she did not have a name for why she felt the way she did.

  "This is ridiculous," Ajalia told Delmar. A narrow path lay along the side of the temple; Ajalia looked down, and saw that beautiful glassy stones had been set into the lower border of the temple wall. "Delmar!" she said sharply, and Delmar jumped, and looked around at her.