He stripped off his fencing armor and mopped at his sweaty chest with a towel, tossing the armor and towel toward a far corner before he picked up his tunic and reclaimed his gear, his back to the emperor and his mother. That he was allowed to be armed in the Presence didn't mean that he wanted Beralyn and anybody else with a grudge against him to know just how well armed he was, or with what and where, after all.
One throwing knife went into the sheath in his sleeve, while another one went into a sheath hidden under the skirt of his tunic. As he belted his sword about his waist, he took the opportunity to check and be sure that his Therranji garrotes were still in his pouch. A brace of pistols completed his everyday armament – well, that and the other knives he had hidden, one sheath tucked just inside the waistband of his trousers, which he transferred invisibly (he hoped) to his boot as he bloused the legs of his bulky, loose trousers.
"You and Aiea will be at table tonight," Thomen said, as Walter pulled the door open. It was not a suggestion.
"Looking forward to it," he said, as he exited into the hall and closed the door behind him. Lying was an important tool of statecraft, after all.
With only two of the barons in residence, he had been hoping to skip it. There would be enough state dinners when Parliament convened, in just a few tendays.
A nice quiet dinner in their rooms would have been preferable. Aiea, having spent her morning as a member of the effete nobility, was spending her afternoon with her class of castle servant children, teaching them the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic in the storeroom halfway up the southeast guard tower that she had converted to a classroom, although with her adopted mother due in Biemestren any day, she could probably lay that job off on Andrea, if she wanted to. Both of them liked to keep busy, and while both mother and daughter could and did handle themselves well among the nobility here for Parliament, both seemed to prefer teaching to that.
Understandable, really. Teach a kid to read and write and calculate, and you open up the world to him, even if it was a strange world.
The guard across the hall eyed him suspiciously; Walter headed down the long hall, toward daylight.
Not that Walter had seriously considered trying to eavesdrop on Beralyn and Thomen. Yes, there would be some advantages to being a fly on the wall at their conversation, but that was the only way he would hear something interesting. Beralyn played her hand closely, and Thomen was too loyal a son to tip her hand.
It would have been nice to have the room wired, but the technology for that was still, probably, years away – and talk about whisper channels and echoes and secret passages had long kept conspiratorial and private conversations in whispers, or out in the open air with no one about.
Walter Slovotsky rubbed at the back of his neck. It still itched, and he could either see the Spidersect healer about it first, and have the itching healed, or go brace the wizard about the bugs.
A lesser man would have picked the Spider, and Walter Slovotsky didn't mind passing for a lesser man.
Thomen knew what Mother was going to say before she said it, at least in general outline. There were times when he found it irritating, but this wasn't one of them.
"Well, Mother," he said, "what approach is it going to be today? Political: me marrying, and producing an heir, why that would make the Empire more stable, and bring peace to the land. Or personal: you want grandchildren, and it is my responsibility to produce them. Or philosophical: life does go on, but only for those whose line follows the past into the future. Or practical: if I keep – "
"Enough." Her lips pursed tightly. "You know how I feel, and we'll speak no more on that." Did she actually believe herself? "Actually, I was going to ask you about the seating at table tonight."
There was trouble on the border, more and more stories of ores up in the hills of his – what had been his – barony, a baronial governor who had probably been involved in a conspiracy against the Crown... and Mother wanted him to worry about dinner seating.
He shook his head. It was strange, and he wished there was somebody he could talk about it with: he had had to manage most of the same problems when he was regent, waiting for Jason Cullinane to assume the Crown.
Keep the governors and barons honest; raise taxes and armies; judge and condemn; forgive if not forget – he had taken it all seriously, yes, but he had had the luxury of distance, of knowing that, finally, it was somebody else's responsibility, not his.
"Well," he said, "Niphael arrived just this morning, and Nerahan's party has been sighted on the Prince's Road – "
She interrupted him with a raised eyebrow.
“– as you well know, since you read the same telegraph message I did, probably before I did – so let's put them at the head, next to me."
She smiled slyly. "And Lady Leria Euar'den?"
He returned her smile, but didn't bother to dispute the family name. Whether or not Leria was the heir to the Euar'den dynasty that had ruled Tynear wasn't terribly relevant, save as that would soften the blow to the Biemish barons if he married a Holt.
If.
She was lovely, at that, but...
... but what? Forinel? He was long gone, and almost certainly dead. Could she still be pining after him? She seemed awfully comfortable in the presence of her three regular bodyguards – but she had been through much with them, and while one of them did sleep across her doorway each night, were there more than that going on it would have been reported to him, via Mother, if nobody else.
He shrugged it off. An emperor had more important things to worry about than why a lovely young woman seemed to harbor some dark secret.
It was all such a juggling act.
Back before the wars, back before it all fell apart, back when he was a boy, bis father had brought him to the fair in Biemestren, once, and it was there that Thomen Furnael had seen his first juggler. He had thought, until his father corrected him – and Father was never wrong when he spoke so certainly – that it was some form of magic, but no: it had merely been skill that had kept a cascade of objects in the air.
An egg, a knife, two brightly colored juggling sticks, and at least in his memory, a full score other objects had flown through the air, seemingly more gently guided than carefully thrown by the bare-chested man whose eyes never left the stream as he continued his endless patter, in exchange for just a few coppers thrown into the wooden bowl at his feet.
But something had gone wrong, and the juggler had cried out, his finger flying to his mouth as everything that he had kept juggling fell about him in an absurd rain.
Thomen was willing to bet that the juggler's mother had never bothered him about seating plans ...
Chapter 2
Bats, Belfries, and Burnings
Meddle not in the affairs of wizards, for you are not immune to itching, bolts of lightning, or being turned into a newt.
– Walter Slovotsky
There are some things man was not meant to know, Walter Slovotsky thought as he climbed the seemingly endless steps that wound up and around the tower.
One of which, for example, was why wizards, like owls, tended to roost in the least accessible place available. Or maybe it made sense, if you closed your eyes and looked at it sideways. The southwest tower was as far away as you could get from the donjon and still have the protection of the castle walls, which kept Henrad available, but not too nearby.
Normal folks didn't like to hang out around wizards, except, of course, when they really needed one. Sort of like cops, except cops couldn't issue lightning bolts from their fingers, and wizards didn't eat doughnuts.
The wind blew, cool and dry, from the west, and Walter had barely worked up a sweat by the time he reached the top.
The arched doorway was open, but light didn't seem to penetrate into the darkness beyond. Maybe there was some movement off in the murk – darkest gray on black, shapelessness in motion – but he wouldn't have wanted to swear to it.
"Henrad?" he called out. "Henrad?"
Meddle n
ot in the affairs of wizards, Walter Slovotsky thought, for your skin is thin and not invulnerable to lightning bolts.
Well, at least that would be more understandable than his preferred version: Meddle not in the affairs of wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to light.
Other Side jokes – even if they didn't involve such foreign things as cigarettes in a urinal – had a very small appreciative audience here, and most of that audience wasn't all that appreciative anyway.
It was a sad day when you couldn't get a laugh out of your own joke.
He didn't know what protections Henrad had in place, and he didn't have the genes to feel for them, and his reputation for recklessness was mainly for show, not for real; he would no more walk unannounced and uninvited into a wizard's residence than he would dance blindfolded along the ramparts, hoping for good luck and pure thoughts to protect him from falling and breaking his neck.
For one thing, his luck wasn't that good, and for another, his thoughts weren't that pure.
Stash and Emma Slovotsky's baby boy was only an idiot when absolutely necessary.
"Henrad? It's me, Walter Slovotsky."
Silence.
Then: "Come in," a distant, seemingly directionless voice whispered.
Slovotsky stepped forward into the dark, with the sensation of passing through a sheet of cold dryness that made his testicles tighten painfully, as though they wanted to climb back up into his body cavity.
The windows had stood open and unshuttered, but the only light that seemed to penetrate was a wan gray, apparently radiating from the juncture of curved wall and ceiling.
The air smelled of rotten meat and old sweat, leavened with a surprising hint of peppermint, and a deep, rank odor of something foul and unfamiliar.
Okay, Henrad, Walter Slovotsky thought. Enough with the mystery of the wizard schtick. I've seen it 'before, I've liked it before, I've been impressed with it before, and I'll be impressed with it again, but I'm not here to be impressed.
The tower was perhaps twenty feet in diameter, but it seemed to be a much farther distance off in the murk that gradually brightened, smoky shadows twisting and writhing silently, weaving themselves into a dim, gray skeleton. Wisps of flock rained out of the darkness in a silent, tiny tornado that whirled around and around the skeleton, little bits sticking first to the gray bones, and then to each other, as the tornado grew larger and larger until Walter Slovotsky had to close and shield his eyes and hold his breath to avoid inhaling the dust.
Soft, warm pieces of flock battered at him, filling his ears instantly, pounding themselves into creases in his face, filling his nostrils until he clapped his free hand over his mouth and nose and started to back up out of the wizard's workshop, forcing himself to maintain a clear picture in his mind of where the arched doorway was, hoping that his sense of direction, his almost inhuman sense of kinesthesia, wouldn't abandon him in his time of need – no, not hoping but knowing that it wouldn't because he was, after all, Walter Slovotsky, and he could no more be off-balance and disoriented than a tree could fail to be made of wood.
And then, suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, the flock storm was gone, and he stood, slapping at himself to clear the coat of flock and dust from his hair and clothes, Henrad standing in front of him, head cocked to one side, a twisted smile playing across his thin lips.
"Henrad, you look like shit," Slovotsky said.
Henrad was in his late twenties or early thirties, but between the thin, lifeless gray hair that drooped about his scalp, the gray pallor and deep lines of his face, and the obvious pain with which he stood, leaning on a crooked branch that he used as a staff, he looked decades older.
"Thank you so much, Walter Slovotsky," he said. "Now, having informed me, can you be on your way, if that's what you came here to say? I am rather busy."
Yes he was, but with what? Most of what Henrad was doing for the Crown was agricultural magic – sterilizing weeds, bewitching the corn and oats so that it frightened deer and crows, rainmaking, and like. But planting season was a memory, and the fields of green corn and golden wheat and rich, brown bitteroats were almost ready for harvest in the north, and were already being harvested in the southern baronies. This should be a time of relaxation for the wizard.
"Yes, apparently you have been busy," Walter Slovotsky said. 'Too busy and too distracted to notice that every bug in the Eren Regions seems to have taken up residence outside my window, not to mention the rest of the city."
The wizard chuckled thinly. "I wouldn't say I haven't noticed; I would say that the time hasn't been right."
Walter Slovotsky rubbed at the back of his neck, where the Spider's balms and fingers and mutterings had relieved the itching and smoothed away the insect bites. "Well, what are you waiting for? Spring?"
"No." Henrad fingered his thin, gray beard. There were some men who shouldn't grow a beard, and Henrad was one of them. The hairs on his cheeks were thick enough, but the hair on his chin was too sparse, and the stringy strands of gray hairs were in bad need of untangling.
His thin, cracked lips parted enough so that Slovotsky could see that his yellowed teeth had more gaps then last time. "No," he said. "Bats."
"Bats?"
"Yes, bats. Those leather-winged creatures that flit from here to there and back again at night. You have heard of bats, haven't you?"
Slovotsky nodded. Yes, he had heard of bats. Pretty much the whole world had heard of bats, and of the crystallized potassium nitrate that could be found underneath sufficiently aged piles of feces, bat guano in particular. Grind it, grind it some more, then mix it – in the right proportions, and preferably wetted with wine or urine – with well-ground charcoal and sulfur, then mix that some more, and more, and what you had was gunpowder. Not the magical imitation that the Slavers Guild of Pandathaway had invented, but the real thing.
Slovotsky had had good reason at the time, so he had thought, to let the secret out, and so he had, but that had ended the shared monopoly that Home Guard and imperial troops had had on reliable rifles and pistols, and it was only a matter of time before every hedge-lord and farm-baron from here to the Cirric could, and would have to, equip his troops with guns and cannons.
The winter of the sword-slinging hero was in the air and the frost was nipping at Walter Slovotsky's nose.
Or his ass, depending on how you looked at things.
All men were created equal; Sam Colt had made them that way back on the Other Side. It took years of practice to become adept with a sword – absent a shortcut or two – or a longbow. Pike weapons took less time. And turning a peasant conscript into a crossbowman was more a matter of teaching discipline than marksmanship. And, yes, there was more to learn in order to be able to load and fire a flintlock rifle than a crossbow, but the range was longer, and bullets, particularly conoid bullets, bit harder and deeper and more frequently than crossbow bolts ever did.
And cannons could shatter castle walls, no matter how well-built and thick.
"So let me get this straight," Walter Slovotsky said. "You haven't killed off all the damn bugs because it might bother the bats."
"No. Not bother." He gestured clumsily, as though trying to take hold of something insubstantial and delicate.
Like a thought, maybe? Walter Slovotsky frowned.
Henrad would try to grip a thought in his fingers, wouldn't he?
"Balances," Henrad said, his voice a husky rasp, "balances are delicate things, Walter Slovotsky. A bat eats a bellyful of bugs daily."
The flapping of leathery wings and high-pitched squeaks filled the room. "Enough bugs, and she conceives a swarm of baby bats; no bugs, and she dies, lonely, of heartache."
The room fell silent. "No bats to eat bugs, and the bugs multiply, their numbers increasing geometrically, sucking the blood from legions of animals, human and other – " the chirping of crickets and the crunching of fidgetbugs grew louder and louder until Henrad had to shout to be heard “– chewing on the leaves of trees, cover
ing the ground in a thick layer of insects that blankets field and farm, covers city and town, eating and reproducing and eating and reproducing until..."
Walter tried to take hold of him – a foolish move, in retrospect – but he couldn't. The air gave no resistance at first, but as his hands neared the wizard's robe, it wavered and thickened, slowing his hands before they could reach the wizard.
It was like trying to move through ever-hardening Jell-O. He gave up. There was no resistance as Walter dropped bis hands to his sides.
The sound stopped. Henrad shook his head. 'Touch a wizard? Walter Slovotsky, you have developed either a second sight or a death wish."
Slovotsky shrugged. "Maybe a little of both." He eyed the wizard closely. The mania was gone from Henrad's eyes, at least for the moment. But he still looked like he hadn't had a solid meal in a week, or a decent night's sleep in much longer than that.
"What is it, Henrad?" Slovotsky had seen this before, perhaps. Andrea Cullinane had developed a magical addiction, the need to learn and practice more magic, overloading herself until she threatened to burn out.
There are, indeed, some things that man is not meant to know, and at least some of those will drive men mad.
"Oh, it's nothing," Henrad said. "Just a feeling. I can, sometimes, detect banked fires nearby, trying to hide themselves from me." His voice lowered and his expression turned conspiratorial as he leaned closer to Slovotsky. "I think," he whispered hoarsely, "that there is another wizard about, trying to hide himself. Or herself."
Slovotsky kept his expression noncommittal. "Perhaps it's just one of your apprentices."
"No, no, no – I know their flame like I know my own. Francela and Chalres could not hide from me, even if they used none of their magic, or all of it. I'm not the young boy you used to know, Walter Slovotsky."
Well, that was certainly true. The years had not been kind to Henrad. Or, perhaps, more to the point, he had not been kind to himself over the years.
But right now, he was apparently working himself into a frenzy trying to find Erenor, and that would be good for nobody. Thomen wouldn't be happy if it came out that Walter had a wizard of his own tucked away, hidden as a Furnael soldier, and Beralyn would be sure to make him unhappier about it. Normally, there would be enough people in Biemestren who would look to put a metaphorical or real knife in the back of the imperial proctor – and with Parliament about to meet, there would be more.
Not Quite Scaramouche Page 3