Not Quite Scaramouche

by Joel Rosenberg

  Erenor turned back to him, his usual smile firmly in place. "I was perfectly respectful, Pirojil. But I was truthful. This dowager empress – just like the other – can no more work a spell than you can."

  "But she was a wizard, and when she was a wizard she had an apprentice," Walter Slovotsky said.

  Andrea Cullinane nodded. "He's been a journeyman, working his way through to mastery for a long time now. He should be able to work the spell. His name is Henrad."

  Chapter 17

  Henrad

  Andrea Cullinane took Walter's confidence that he could get her inside on faith. This time it made sense. Oh, she would have taken his word that he could do it, but under other circumstances she wouldn't have taken his word that it was the right thing to do. Too often, in her opinion, he liked things complicated for their own sake. No wonder he and Erenor seemed to get on so well. That tendency probably explained Walter's affair with Aiea while he was still married to Kirah – and never mind their own encounter on the way to Ehvenor. She kept her grin to herself. There was something about Walter on a slowly rocking boat...

  But that was the thing about Walter Slovotsky: he was full of boast and brag, but he could be counted on, almost all the time, to do what it was that he actually had promised to do – if you could correctly parse what he said he would do.

  His word was good; it was just, well, complicated.

  It would have been simpler now, if she would have joined the others walking up to the main gate, but that would have the drawback of everybody in the castle prematurely knowing she was there.

  Walter's style was to prefer it complicated, but he was right. Once she had made arrangements with Henrad, she could turn her attention to politics. The politics were important, and she should still have some influence here and there, from her days as empress, and then as dowager empress and mother of the heir.

  But the sooner that Kethol, Pirojil, Erenor – and Leria; Erenor was right that she had to go along – were on their way, the better. She didn't have much hope that they would actually turn up Forinel – the late Elanee would have had no compunction in having him killed, after all – but perhaps the threat hanging over the heads of Tyrnael and Miron could be turned to some immediate political use.

  Politics.

  Fooey.

  She took a deep breath. Walter Slovotsky liked juggling half a dozen things – and women – in his mind, but Andrea Cullinane had always preferred to keep things simple, to concentrate on one problem at a time.

  "This one is pretty easy," Walter had said. "It's why magicians – Other Side magicians, not real wizards – always have pretty assistants in scanty outfits. While the girl bends over to flash a little cleavage, it's no problem at all for the guy in the black suit to slip a pigeon into his pocket, or a coin out of it."

  He slapped Jason on the back, perhaps with more force than was absolutely necessary. "For purposes of this discussion, Baron Cullinane, you're the pretty girl assistant, Ellegon is the magician, and Andrea's the pigeon." His all-is-well-with-any-world-clever-enough-to-hold-Walter-Slovotsky smile was firmly intact. "And me? You can think of me as the stage manager." He clapped his hands together, twice. "All right everybody: places please."

  The chill night air whipped her hair behind her as Ellegon circled high above the castle, his massive wings beating more quickly but much more shallowly than usual, which made for a quieter, smoother ride, and probably explained why Kethol wasn't making gagging sounds from behind her, which no doubt pleased Erenor and Ahira and Pirojil to no end.

  Poor dear.

  He wasn't meant to fly, and if everything went right, he would be doing a lot of it in the near future, having to protect that Leria girl at the same time.

  Up here, everything below seemed remote and unimportant, like a doll house with impossibly finely crafted features. It was easy not to care about the destinies of those tiny, ant-sized people far below.

  *The morality of altitude.*

  Karl used to talk about that.

  *I know.*

  She closed her eyes for a few moments. It was true what they said, about grief going away, bit by bit. Sometimes you could hardly measure the progress, but she could now look back fondly – yes, missing him – but without any ache at all. It just didn't hurt anymore, which felt somehow disloyal.

  *I won't tell if you don't.*

  Fair enough.

  Guards walked the parapets of both the inner and the outer walls, but the watches weren't properly staggered, Walter had said. She couldn't see them walking their tours – it was far too dark, and they were too far below – but Ahira's darksight could, from his position slung below the dragon's belly, like a baby in a carrier.

  A mental chuckle echoed in her mind. *I just might tell him you thought that.*

  Ahira wouldn't mind. He had a sense of humor.

  *He's not overly thrilled. Something about how there are times when he wished another one of you could see into the infrared, and he could tell the difference between blue, indigo, and violet, and – it's time. Here we go.*

  The only question in her mind was as to how much of a fuss Walter would make at the front gate, and the answer to that came as the party wound its way up the hill toward the gate: a signal rocket hissed off into the night, shattering the quiet with a loud boom and a shower of green sparks.

  Silly question, really: How much of a fuss would Walter Slovotsky make? Why, as much as possible, of course. *Hold on.*

  Ellegon spread his wings widely, and the world tipped on its side until he was in a steep bank that became more of a fall than anything else.

  She closed her eyes as she fell, her fingers clenched tightly in the straps. She didn't need to see the ground rushing up toward her, to hope and pray that Ellegon would brake in time, to –

  G-forces mashed her down against the cushioning blankets beneath her, and her breath came out in a whoosh as the dragon snapped from a dive into horizontal flight, then cupped his wings to brake their speed before he landed on the parapet more quietly than Andrea would have thought possible.

  Helpful fingers tugged at her rigging from behind, but she slapped them away and unleashed herself from the harness, then slid down one of the ropes, glad of the thick leather gloves that protected her hands from rope burn.

  She was the last one; Kethol helped her down to the walkway, with his usual clumsiness that came from a delicacy about where he placed his strong hands. She would have made fun of that, but he was so uncomfortable around her that the slightest comment would probably have made him impotent for years. She had learned more years ago than she liked to remember how careful you had to be when teasing boys, and then men.

  It wasn't by accident that Ellegon had landed near one of the stairways that led down from the parapet to the outer bailey. With Pirojil in the lead, she followed Erenor down the stone steps to the calf-high grasses, Kethol and Ahira following along behind.

  *I'm gone,* Ellegon said, as the dragon slipped, snakelike, over the far wall. It was only a hundred or so yards to the woods from here, and once in the woods Ellegon could quickly get far enough away that the flapping of his wings wouldn't draw unwanted attention to the rear of the castle complex while the arrival of Jason and party was drawing wanted attention to the front of it.

  Unless, of course, the dragon drew attention to himself by breathing fire.

  *I'm a young dragon, but I was hatched centuries ago, not yesterday, and I'm perfectly capable of controlling myself at both ends, thank you very much,* he said, sounding just a little irritated. You would think he would have developed a sense of humor about himself in his first couple of centuries.

  *Yes, you would, wouldn't you?*

  While there were stone stairways at several places inside each of the curtain walls, of course – making it easy for defenders to get onto the wall was part of any castle's design, just as much as making life difficult for attackers was – the only place that the inner wall had any outside stairway was at the front gate, to
permit soldiers to cross the outer bailey as they went to and from the outer wall.

  But that stairway – built of well-aged wood that could have been torched in a moment, should the situation have warranted – was always guarded. In wartime, there would have been a soldier with a lantern and a bucket of lantern oil posted on the wall next to it, but even now it was seen as a weak spot in the fortification, and defended.

  Castles weren't well-designed to keep people in, but they were intended to keep people out.

  If the rope wasn't where Walter had left it, they would have to try lassoing an outcropping on one of the ramparts, and such things were made deliberately wide not only to support a wartime additional structure, but to prevent that very thing. She didn't think much of their chances of doing that, although Kethol and Pirojil seemed to think it likely, and Erenor, unsurprisingly, presented it as little less than a fait accompli.

  He thought a lot of himself and his companions, that one did. With any luck, he'd be right.

  Well, if nothing else, they always had the option of walking up to the wooden stairway and calling attention to themselves.

  There would be some sort of fuss, no doubt, but...

  Walter had chosen the place well; it was well-shadowed by one of the corner towers, so much so that Andrea couldn't see the rope at all, and only knew it was there when Kethol started climbing up it, Pirojil steadying the rope below.

  Alternately pulling with his arms and locking the rope with his crossed legs, it took him an inordinately long time to make his way up to the ramparts, and when he did he had to hang there, just below the level of the walkway, as a pair of soldiers marched by, chattering some gossip about one of the decurions and a lady from Arondael that Andrea would have liked to have heard more of. It wasn't just that it was often politically useful to know who was sleeping with whom – although it could be – but one of the things that Andrea missed about Biemestren was gossip.

  Out in the barony, there just wasn't any, except for what went on among the servants and some of the townspeople, and U'len's rendition of that just wasn't satisfying. If you were interested in people, you pretty much had to be interested in at least listening to gossip.

  Finally, Kethol reached the top and dropped the end of the rope he had carried down for Erenor, then pulled from the top while Erenor half-walked his way up the side of the wall, reminding her of that silly Batman show that she used to watch on reruns.

  Ahira went up at the same time, every bit as quickly, using Walter's rope and going hand over hand, disdaining to grip with his stubby legs.

  The outside of the wall had a slight inward slant – the idea, so she understood, was to make it possible to drop rocks or pour boiling oil down the side and have both splash outward at attacking troops – which helped some, although the stones had been angled and the gaps mortared to avoid leaving any real purchase for fingers and toes.

  Then Pirojil knelt and extended the loop at the end of Kethol's rope. "Just hold on, my Empress," he said, "and let them pull you up." He tightened it around her foot, then gave three quick pulls on the rope.

  She would have been insulted at the insinuation that she couldn't do it herself, but she had tried climbing a rope before, and it was much more difficult than Kethol made it look, much less not as easy as Ahira did. Women didn't have the upper body strength that men did. More strength of will and character, much of the time, certainly, but when it came to transporting a weight, even one's own weight, from one elevation to another, men were superior.

  Hmmm ... men were better at lifting weights, and at pissing on fires to put them out. Andrea Cullinane figured that that was a fair trade for women's longer lives, the ability to keep the species going, and multiple orgasms.

  Strong hands, both Ahira's and Erenor's, helped her the last few feet up to the walkway atop the ramparts. Erenor's hands lingered on her just a second more than absolutely necessary before letting go. That was an easy man to read, although she was privately frustrated that she hadn't been able to tell that he was a wizard herself. She had lost the ability to see the inner fire when she had sacrificed her own magical abilities.

  That wasn't what she missed most, of course. What still ached was the missing magic itself: just the using of magic, the electric, almost sexual vibration that coursed through her body and mind, washing over her in an embrace more intimate than any other passion could be – her nipples hardened at just the thought.

  But that was gone from her, forever...

  There was a reason wizards were called magic users, after all: using the magic was pleasure, in and of itself. No wonder so many overused it, finding themselves addicted, getting more and more addicted and more and more insane with every passing year.

  So being without it was probably all for the best, all things considered.

  But why did she find herself missing the magic more than she missed her dead husband? Did that make her a shallow person? That wasn't something she would have confided to anybody, not even Ellegon, and she was grateful that he was out of range now and wasn't fond of reading her mind anyway.

  She followed along behind Ahira and Kethol, Erenor following her, conscious of his eyes on her. Pity that high-heeled boots were so impractical except on horseback; while she felt the tug of years, she knew that she still looked awfully good, from any angle, particularly in her traveling leathers. It was remarkably pleasant to be looked at with barely concealed lust.

  Hmmm... perhaps she should be doing more sit-ups, and try to tone her belly just a little more.

  They reached the base of the southwest tower, and started up the steps.

  "Halt there!" sounded from behind. "What are you doing here?"

  She turned to see a soldier approaching, his thick face sweaty in the torchlight, his mouth opening to call out again.

  Pirojil had already spun around, his sword in hand –

  And Erenor muttered a single syllable, and the soldier dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, his head hitting the stone with a solid thunk that made her wince just to hear.

  His smile was infuriatingly self-satisfied. "He'll be fine, when he wakes up," he said.

  She had used the trick herself, and remembered the technique, if not the details. You spoke all of a spell except for the last syllable of the instigator, and held it in your mind, waiting, like a phone where you've dialed all but the last digit. Then all you had to do was release that last syllable. It was tricky – if you needed to use another spell instead, you couldn't use any of the same dominatives without sacrificing the memory of this one – but it gave you the ability to quickly use the one in your mind with no notice whatsoever.

  "Bind him," she said, "and stay here." She shook her head and continued up the stairs, two steps at a time. Yes, it was more elegant to put the guard to sleep with a sleep spell than it would have been for the others to knock him down and out – or kill him – but it created the same problems for them. There were a series of timing glasses at the main guardpost, and unless this one made his circuit in time to turn his upside down before the sand ran out, the decurion on duty would sound the alarm.

  And, worse: any wizard – probably any apprentice – in the vicinity would have seen the flare of Erenor's inner fire as he used his spell. Unless Erenor was a lot better than he said he was, he wouldn't be able to hide his flame from the likes of Henrad, not even when his magic was quiescent.

  'That's quite so, my old teacher," a voice sounded beside her ear. "It would seem to me that the lot of you have committed rather a solecism by bringing another wizard into my domain, unbidden and unasked, and entirely unwelcome. Even if he is," a sniff, "little more than an illusionist with delusions of grandeur."

  She reached out, and felt only air.

  "No," the voice went on, "it's not invisibility. I can do invisibility quite easily, mind. This is different. It's one of my own spells – I enjoy letting my senses walk about the castle, leaving my body behind, as a nightly consti

  tutional." />
  Nightly?

  "Yes, nightly," he said, "and if you will stop subvocalizing and simply talk, it will be simpler for both of us. I'd rather not try to actually read your mind; I'm afraid that I couldn't help but tiptoe through the parts of your memory of me, and, well, Mistress Lotana-that-was, I'm entirely afraid that I would not find a pleasant picture of that dirty, uneducated stripling boy whose inner fire you noted, and whom you took on, all those years ago."

  She had stopped climbing, and found that she was breathing and sweating more heavily than just the exercise should account for.

  "Be still for a moment," the voice said, this time from directly behind her. "I shall return."

  "Henrad, I – "

  "Be still, I said."

  She leaned back against the cold stone of the tower. Her progress around the spiral staircase had brought her all the way around the tower, hiding the base of the staircase where, presumably, Pirojil and the rest had the guard secured.

  But it did give her a view of the front gate, and of the assemblage surrounding Jason and his party.

  It was hard to make out individuals in what little light there was, but it was easy to see that there had been no bloodshed – at least, not yet – and if something were going to go horribly wrong, it would likely have happened already. It would have been preferable if they could have simply slipped inside the inner ward as though they had entered with the rest of the party, and then presented themselves to the majordomo for quartering.

  General Garavar was not going to like the idea of anybody being able to sneak into Biemestren castle unobserved, and would have a proper fit.

  That might work well for castle security, but it would make life difficult if Walter had to sneak anybody else inside again. It had been tricky enough this time.

  "You can come up now," Henrad said. "I've taken care of the guard matter. I informed the guard captain that one of his soldiers was making enough noise that I was bothered enough to deal with it, and I've told your companions that they should do as you originally planned, and just climb down to the inner bailey and mix with the rest."