by John Daulton
“And how will we make them sweet? What is the trick of the treat?”
“You will see, little Sava. But first, let us fill up my bag.”
With a smile so wide it seemed as if it might just run right up and clip her ears, Pernie dove back under the waves again. And for the next few hours, she and Djoveeve had a wonderful time, spotting the invisible. By the time they were done, Pernie was nearly as good at catching them as Djoveeve was. It was only the fact that the old woman could hold her breath for what seemed eternity that gave her any advantage at all.
When at last Djoveeve’s bag was full, the two of them marched out of the surf together, each with a hunger worked up for all the work they’d done.
“Now for the magic,” Djoveeve said as she dumped the bag’s contents into the sand. “But you’ve got to have a good imagination to make it work.”
Pernie winced upon hearing the word. Imagination. Hah. She knew there wasn’t going to be any magic now. Grown-ups always called lying “imagination,” and at ten years old, she was tired of it.
Djoveeve saw the look on her face and shook her head. “You have to have faith sometimes, little Sava, or life is misery. You must learn when to believe.”
“Seawind said I shouldn’t trust anyone. He says you have to assume everyone is your enemy, and that all words are lies. He says the truth is in the in-between, in the movement of eyes and the beating of their hearts. He said I should listen to their hearts if I want to hear the truth.”
“He is right. You should. In that way, listening to your enemy’s heart is like seeing the sugar shrimp. A calm face can’t hide an excited heart, once you know what you are looking for. It is seeing the difference between what is real and what is meant to deceive.”
Pernie made a bored face, one side of her mouth twitching toward her cheek. “I know that.” She looked impatiently down at the squirming pile of shrimp. Together they made a shifting pile that looked like water that’s turned to gel and filled with sand. They didn’t work very well together, Pernie thought.
“These little creatures are liars too,” the old woman said, squatting down near the pile. She picked one up, and Pernie watched as it tried to keep pace with the changing backdrop, its appearance changing rapidly as Djoveeve’s hand moved, matching in incredible succession whatever it was that lay behind it that would be in Pernie’s line of sight as she looked its way. That’s when Pernie realized what it actually had to do to hide from her.
“Hey,” she said as the idea dawned upon her. “How does it know what I am looking at?”
Djoveeve once again wore that grin of victory. She nodded, clearly pleased. “I had hoped you would see it for yourself. You are a clever girl, and Tidalwrath chose you well.”
Pernie didn’t care about stupid Tidalwrath. She was moving her head around, moving herself around, changing angles as rapidly as she could, moving her line of sight so that one minute the shrimp was between her and the sand, the next between her and Djoveeve’s arm, or her leg, or her hair. No matter where Pernie moved, no matter how fast, the shrimp changed immediately.
“So how does it know that?”
“These little creatures read your mind.”
Pernie frowned. “They do?”
“Yes. That is part of their magic. They are the best little diviners in the sea. They know what you see before you do. The only reason we can see them at all is because it takes them that tiniest fraction of a second to adjust their skin. There are no other creatures that can do that.”
Pernie nodded, happy to have something interesting to understand. “So what is the trick of the treat?”
“That’s where the imagination comes in. You see, they are also little transmuters, though they don’t actually know it yet.”
“How come they don’t know?”
“The same way you didn’t know you were a teleporter until you were frightened enough to make your first teleport. I’m sure you remember that.”
Pernie nodded that she did. She’d never forget that terrible day when the orcs came and tried to kill everyone. One of them had been about to cut Master Altin right in half. She hadn’t even known she was about to do it at all. She just, well, she saw the orc going, and then it happened. She was right there on the orc’s back, the distance between them just gone, as if it never was. She simply found herself there on top of it and began to stab the awful thing as fast and furiously as she could. How could she not have?
Djoveeve saw the glaze in her eyes and nodded, watching Pernie watch the memory. “That’s right, little Sava. And these tasty creatures work the same way. When they are worked up into a fright, they find their transmutation ability.”
“So what do they do, turn into a candy or piece of cake?” Pernie asked hopefully.
Djoveeve tilted her head back and laughed. “No, dear child, not quite. But it is something delicious in much the same way. And this is where your imagination comes in, for they are not shape-shifters like me. Their transmutation ability is not so good as that. At best they might be C class if they could be ranked. But that is quite good enough for this.” She laid the shrimp in her left hand and took her knife from where it lay atop her folded clothes. “Before you kill them,” she said, with a marginally wicked smile, “you must think of the sweetest thing you can. I always think of maple syrup, the kind that we had when I was a little girl, not much younger than you. My father had a grove of maple trees, and it was the best flavor of my life. Yours will be something different. Perhaps that birthday cake you are wishing for. So conjure that up in your mind, not the image of the cake, but the flavor of it. Remember it so well that you can feel it on your tongue.” As she spoke, her words came more and more slowly, her eyelids drooping a little as she allowed herself the memory. “Hold the thought there, and then gently find the place between the shrimp’s legs, where they meet at the belly. Feel for it with your thumb.” She spent a moment feeling into the invisible shrimp in her hand, probing with her thumb. “Once you have it, slowly push your knife into it, just like this. Not too fast. You have to let it feel the pain. It will flicker, then turn gray, and in that instant, you must plunge your knife in before it can camouflage itself again. You have to be quick, kill it quick, from there.”
She stopped speaking for a moment, letting her own memories come back to her as Pernie stared, openmouthed, watching. Then, sure enough, just like the flicker of a candle in a breeze, the shrimp turned gray and Djoveeve stuffed her knife tip right into its guts. She opened her half-shut eyes and smiled.
With a few quick strokes of her knife, she opened up the shrimp, stripped its shell, and cleaned its innards out. She presented it to Pernie, who still stood watching with her mouth still agape.
“What’s the matter, little Sava? Is it too cruel for you to do? I admit that there are not many who can make themselves do what needs to be done to the little things for the sugar secret to work. If you haven’t the stomach for it, I’ll prepare them. Though it will be maple and frostberries in them all. I just can’t seem to remember anything else well enough to make it work, and for whatever reason, only sweet memories do the trick.”
Pernie shook her head no. She had no qualms about torturing the little shrimp to make them sweet. Pain was a reality. Pain was how she trained her little, low-slung mount. She was rapidly beginning to realize that there was a great deal of good that came from pain. And she kind of liked doing it too.
She ran to where her clothes were and pulled her knife out of the sheath. She ran back and fumbled in the invisible pile of shrimp until she found a nice big one to try it on.
She missed the flicker on the first one, and she stabbed too quickly on the next. But by the third try, she had it, holding it just right, seeing the big pink-frosted cake Kettle had made for her last year and then tasting it in her mind. She tasted it as she twisted her knife into the wriggling shrimp’s little guts, pressing the point in just enough until the creature became briefly visible. She plunged the knife in the instant she saw it
, so hard she actually stabbed through it into her palm. But it worked that time. She knew it because the creature turned pink just before it died.
“I think I did it,” she cried, staring up at Djoveeve hopefully.
“Let us find out,” the old assassin said. “Here, push it a bit farther down your knife, and take my shrimp too. Push it on there as well.”
Pernie did as instructed.
“Do you remember the fire limes?” she asked, the sunlight flashing in her smiling eyes. Pernie nodded that she did. “Take them to a fire lime and hold the shrimp in the bubbles that come from its shell. Only a half minute on each side or they’ll be overdone. Then try one and see.”
Pernie could hardly get back into the surf quickly enough to test it out. And sure enough, immediately after the minute it took to cook them, she discovered that Djoveeve had been telling her the truth. One shrimp was maple and the other a sublime shellfish slice of Kettle’s birthday cake, three whole bites apiece.
And so went the remainder of the day, Pernie eating shrimp after shrimp after shrimp, and catching more and more until the sun was gone. She kept at it until she couldn’t swallow even one more down, no matter how hard she tried, which set Djoveeve to laughing in the sand. They rested, then practiced with the spear, and twice more across the day, they went out and refilled Djoveeve’s bag. By twilight, Pernie had broken the old woman’s long-held shrimp-eating record by four.
Chapter 26
Black Sander reined his horse in as he approached Galbrun Hall, home of the Marchioness of South Mark and seat of power for the largest of all the duchies on Kurr. He saw descending the long stair the figure of Cypher Meste, guildmaster diviner, accompanied by the captain of the Palace Guard and two younger officers. Cypher Meste did not look pleased, and her long dark hair danced about her shoulders as she shook her head emphatically to something the captain had said. She looked up as Black Sander came to a halt, and she squinted into the noontime sun. He muttered the words of a flashing light spell, to augment the solar effect, and, in the few moments that she blinked at it, shaped his features to match those of the gardener he’d seen working a half measure down the road.
Cypher Meste squinted back at him a second time, still blinking, then apparently lost interest and turned back to the crimson-cloaked captain, who was still speaking to her. Again she shook her head, and the four of them made their way to a small stone house down the lane, in which Black Sander knew was located the marchioness’ private teleportation chamber. Black Sander watched them go, his own eyes narrow and calculating until they had disappeared inside the little stonework house. He let the illusion dissolve and rode up to the front, handing his reins off to a stable boy who came running out to take his horse from him.
Once he was inside and admitted to see her—after her chambers and the hall outside them could be cleared—the marchioness glared at Black Sander through pale blue eyes that were little more than slits beneath the drawn curtains of her eyelids, violet eye shadow, and wiry black lashes that quivered at the fringe. Her sneer was a crooked red gash across her gaunt face, and the severity of it was augmented by cheekbones that protruded at such angles it seemed they must cut through the skin at any time. Her whole body was made that way, angular, and so slender her flesh seemed but tissue laid upon a lattice of rapier blades. If it were, all those blades now trembled in ire beneath the opulence of a black-and-gold gown. Black gossamer fabric, webbed with gold, flared like fireworks at her shoulders and hips, a gilded puffery that ballooned as if holding captive clouds of ink.
As he watched anger rattle through the old cage of her bones, Black Sander held his tongue. Slender though she was, thin like split kindling, he understood well enough that she was still the heart of power in South Mark, and the one person on all of Prosperion who could, with a word, actually create a worse fate for him than the War Queen. She and she alone had more connections in the underworld of Kurr than he. Not even her toady, the Earl of Vorvington, could make such a boast.
But this day, they were not comparing notes or arguing cultural realities, though Black Sander could have wished for such levity. No, this argument that they had was one about simple competence.
“It’s been five months!” she said in a low, taut tone from her place near the window of her private rooms. “I don’t ask much from you. The pay is regular, and I give you your head. And all I asked this time was that you place a simple seeing stone. Just one. And yet, all you have managed to accomplish in that time is to get the royal hounds sicced on me from Crown.”
“What did they want?” he asked, immune to the ice in her voice.
She went to an end table by a long divan, which was covered with embroidered lines of writing, each a great quote once spoken by her father, one of the finest orators in all of history. His words had calmed the people after the War Queen had bested his armies in battle two centuries ago. South Mark had been the last to go. She picked up an object roughly the size of a hen’s egg that was lying there on the divan and brought it to him, placing it in his palm. “Do you recognize this?”
She pulled away her own skeletal hand and left him staring down into his. At the topaz seeing stone he’d secretly stowed on the fleet spaceship during his brief incursion to Tinpoa Base. He’d hidden it very well. Or so he’d thought, stuffing it in a nest of wiring inside a wall panel he’d found in a vacant corridor. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would have been digging around up there, so the only thing he could figure was some sort of mechanical accident. He’d wondered what had happened to it. And why they hadn’t heard anything.
She saw the brief flicker of recognition, perhaps even read it in the slight movement of his lashes or some twitch of the cheek. She rolled her eyes and turned back to the window. “She’s watching everything,” she said, referring to the Queen. “Everything. The fortunes she is spending on defensive spells alone are preposterous, and yet, she’s got people sniffing out seeing stones. Seeing stones, of all things. How many people on the entire planet even know how to create one?”
There was little he could say, and even less that he was inclined to speak aloud, so he simply watched her as she stared outside.
“Given what they’ve just asked me, do you have any idea what they must actually suspect?” she went on. “If that child of a guildmaster were not so young or were ranked higher than her V, I’d be on my way to the guillotine. We are being spied on by the capital, and that gold-clad idiot clanking about the throne room is going to bankrupt the kingdom to do it.”
Black Sander, long used to enduring hour upon hour in shadowy places waiting for opportunities, watched and waited here. At some point she’d come back to him. Finish her complaints and give him something he could use.
“Have I not given you the names of enough teleporters to get it done?” she asked. “Have I not shown you enough personally?” She swept her arm out toward a large armoire upon which sat a beautiful mirror in a frame made of bone, a great swirling mess of carved white complexity, wrapped around an oval glass, all of which was set into a beautiful black box of enchanted tarwood. Tucked within the lattice of the bony finery were tiny carvings depicting Earth fleet spaceships. And in the mirror itself could be seen the image of Orli Pewter, standing in a vast cavern beside someone else, both of them wearing clumsy-looking suits of white material and helmets fronted by a half bubble of glass. “Is this not enough? I’ve even given you access to the enchanted seeing spells of Altin Meade himself, made for his little blank hussy. She’s regularly to be found on that ship that was sighted outside of Murdoc Bay. Surely it’s been to Earth a thousand times and back these last five months. Why can you do nothing with that? Must I go myself and simply beg passage to Earth on the privilege of my rank?”
Black Sander watched the two figures in the mirror for a while, their image the product of some augmentations by the marchioness’ personal seer, Kalafrand. Though he was a Z-class master of sight magic, Kalafrand was a well-kept secret, one the marchioness jealously hid
from the Queen. Kalafrand was a man with a single gift for seeing, and little else, almost nothing else, but he was a savant. Both genius and imbecile. Somehow, he’d been able to fiddle with Altin Meade’s complex spell, and managed to alter it some, making it something the marchioness could use, at least to a degree.
He took a step closer and watched as the Galactic Mage’s fiancée went about whatever she was doing. The last time he’d looked into this glass, she had been gardening. Now she was with some other Earth man in what appeared to be some kind of mine. The two of them worked together with the lights of their suits flashing on a patch of faintly glowing purple stone, and whatever they were doing sent out clouds of white mist like fog. There were others around them, people working with a strange Earth machine that he could only partly see in the mirror, a large contraption that had been built at the bottom of a large rectangular pit.
“You see them, thief?” the marchioness went on. “You watch what they do. See where they are. Wherever she goes; I show you everything. The woman has the privilege of Sir Altin Meade and of the Earth royalty. I give you this information freely, anytime you would ask it, and yet in all these months you still can’t get a simple seeing stone to Earth for me. Not even on a ship they are on with regularity. I make it easy for you, and yet you cannot get my seer’s eyes to Earth?”
“They aren’t royalty, Your Grace—”
In the time it took him to breathe, she’d cut him off. “Don’t equivocate with me. I pay you to solve problems, not quibble with me about identities.”
“But My Lady, it is not to quibble, but to point out that Sir Altin and the Earth woman are well guarded, more so than even the fleet ships. And they are well guarded here on Prosperion, not only in Crown, but at Calico Castle as well. Sir Altin has shrouded the old keep in nearly as many counter-spells as the Palace has. He’s taken on a guard of at least forty men. And while the general and his troops are no longer encamped beyond the walls, he’s got more traps and magicks around that place than any other Prosperion but the Queen.”