by Dave Duncan
D’ward drew a deep breath and then out-bellowed the captain. “Stand aside! I am the Liberator.”
“Turn around and liberate elsewhere! You and your followers are forbidden entry to Nioldom, on pain of death.”
“It is prophesied that I shall go to Tharg and bring death to Death.”
“Go another way, then. I shall count to three. One!”
In the terrible silence, Dosh could feel the sweat running down his ribs. D’ward seemed to have run out of bright ideas. The way the wind played with his curls was very appealing, but it wasn’t going to be enough to get him past the Niolian military.
“Two!”
Dosh prepared to throw himself flat.
The nun laughed. “Well? Do you want my help after all?”
D’ward sighed. “Yes please, ma’am.”
She took a step forward. She had her sword in her hand and she raised it, pointing it straight at the captain. Dosh didn’t think he could have held such a weight steady, but the point was not wavering. In a voice as strong as the men’s she cried, “Repent!”
It was if the soldier had not noticed her until then. He started violently and dropped his sword. It fell on the stones with a clang. His lips moved, but no sound emerged. Behind him, the bristling ranks of javelins wavered, their blades glittering like shards of ice in the sunlight.
“Repent!” she cried again. “You dare oppose the Liberator who is prophesied? Rather you should join his ranks and march in his service. Repent, I say! Throw down your arms or die on them. Stand aside!”
The captain spun around and screamed orders. The Royal Niolian Guard dissolved in panic. In seconds the road was clear, while on either hand men were tearing off their armor and hurling it down on the weapons that now littered the ground.
“Thank you, ma’am,” D’ward said quietly.
She glanced at him. Dosh had a brief view of a face both surprisingly youthful and yet ageless, beautiful but stern—sad, lovely, unforgettable. “I keep my word. Go with my blessing, Liberator.”
He nodded, then raised his arms in benediction, hiding the nun from Dosh’s view. He called out to the soldiers over the clatter of metal and the moans of fear.
“Brothers! We are the Free, for we go to bring death to Death. Your repentance has been accepted; you are forgiven. Those who wish to join our pilgrimage are welcome. Leave your weapons, arise, and follow me.”
He began to move and at once pebbles rattled under the Warband’s horny feet behind him. Dosh was butted forward by a shield, so that he had no choice but to follow. Smiling, D’ward marched along the road, his arms outstretched to the Niolian military that knelt on both verges. A few were still armored, many had stripped almost naked, almost all of them were sobbing with terror, hands reaching out to the Liberator and beseeching his blessing. The blue nun was nowhere to be seen. A horde of excited pilgrims came yelling and jabbering along behind.
Thus did the Liberator enter into Rinoovale and Nioldom.
22
Lospass, between Jurgvale and Niolvale, was neither very steep nor very high, one of the easiest passes in the Vales. Sloths, on the other hand, were well named. If they moved faster than mushrooms, it was not by much. Eleal Singer and Piol Poet had been on their journey for several days, and only now were they truly into Niolvale. The air was muggy, scented with a vegetable odor that seemed alien to her. In her childhood, the troupe had rarely visited Niolland. Most years they had returned home to Jurgvale from Jiolvale by way of Fionvale.
Piol had been clever to suggest the sloth and cart. As they rattled out through the city gate of Jurg, Eleal had seen a couple of the Cherry Blossom House bouncers inspecting passersby, but they had not looked twice at her or her malodorous conveyance. She was used to the stench of the sewerberries now, although they had nauseated her for the first couple of days. They certainly deterred everyone else. Other people went by the wagon like birds in flight, no brigand had accosted them to poke through their cargo in search of gold. Niolians used sewerberries to make the patina on their famous black bronzes, Piol said, and only Jurgvale could grow them. No matter. No matter, either, that the travelers were both so saturated with the foul stench that no inn would admit them. They had been blessed with fair weather; they had slept under the stars or under the cart, and they had eaten as well as could be expected when Eleal herself was doing the cooking.
Now they were in Niolland, the sun shone, the road stretched out level before them, winding between little lakes, fording streams. Niolvale had more water than any other vale, Piol said. Men wearing only turbans were harvesting rice from paddy fields. The villages were blobs of white walls and red tiled roofs against the green and silver landscape. It was very idyllic.
But not too helpful.
Eleal awoke from a wonderful daydream of…of what? She wasn’t sure. Her nights were full of dreams of D’ward, but a strangely changed D’ward—thick and chunky, instead of tall and lean, and wearing a floppy mustache. Lack of sleep seemed to be catching up with her, for the curiously wrong image had started haunting her days too.
A fragment of melody surfaced and then submerged again…. The name escaped her.
“Piol?”
“Mm?”
“Do you know a play called The Poisoned Kiss?”
The old man blinked at her. “No. Who wrote it?”
“I have no idea. Perhaps there isn’t one. I just thought it sounded like a good title. Um…Where does one start looking for a Liberator?”
“Don’t know. There is only one road, so we may as well stay on it until it forks. Then we ask someone, I suppose.”
“Who will let you near them?”
He chuckled toothlessly. “I can stand downwind.”
True. She looked around. Niolwall was retreating behind them. To the east it disappeared completely and the bottom of the sky was flat. Niolvale was the largest of all the Vales, rich and prosperous—as was only to be expected of a vale whose patron god was the Parent. There was a village ahead, with a high-spired temple. It must be Joobiskby, and the road would certainly divide there.
After a few minutes, Piol began to cackle softly to himself. She demanded to know what was so funny.
“Remember the time we were playing The Fall of the House of Kra in Noshinby? Trong was playing Rathmuurd and he went to draw his sword—”
“No!” Eleal said firmly. “I do not remember that and I certainly do not know who had put the molasses in his scabbard. She must have been a real little horror, though!”
They laughed together. They had been doing this for days—reminiscing about the old times, the good times, the plays, the actors, the places, the crowds, the triumphs, the catastrophes.
After a moment, she said, “Do you remember Uthiam doing Ironfaib’s Polemic? She won a rose…. That was the year I missed the festival, but I shall never forget her in rehearsal. Oh, she was marvelous!”
“That she was,” Piol agreed sadly. “Do you know it?”
“Most of it, I expect.” Every word!
“Let me hear it.”
“Oh, you don’t need to suffer through that,” Eleal said hastily. She had just remembered that the reason she had missed seeing Uthiam perform at that festival was because she had been away tending D’ward, which was probably why the lines had come to her mind.
“Look!” she said. Two ancient, harmless-seeming peasants were tottering along the road ahead of them, moving even more slowly than the sloth. “Why don’t you go and ask them if they’ve heard any news of the Liberator?” When she thought Piol might argue, she added, “You can easily catch up with the cart again if you run hard.”
This was taking too long! She felt an itchy-scratchy urgency to meet D’ward again.
23
“‘A jug of wine beneath the bough,’…” Julian intoned. “‘A loaf of bread and thou/Beside me singing in the Wilderness/Oh, Wilderness were paradise enough!’ That last rhyme needs work! I mean, it looks all right—”
Ursula peere
d across the table skeptically. “You left out the book of verse.”
“Would depend what’s it’s printed on. Might make good bumf.”
She laughed. Ursula’s laughter had all the innocent gaiety of a child’s, quite out of keeping with her normally gruff manner. “You’re impossible!”
“I’m extremely easy, as you well know!” He raised his glass and she clinked hers against it. They sipped in mirror image, smiling the contented smiles of lovers.
The sun had set; the red moon, Eltiana, hung amid the wakening stars. Location? The side of a small, unnamed, and apparently uninhabited valley somewhere south of Niolvale. The air was cooling rapidly, but the campsite lay well below the snow line, and the weather had cooperated splendidly. For several days—Julian was deliberately not keeping count—they had ridden their dragons over glaciers, icefields, ridges, plateaux. They had gone up and down vertical cliffs. It had all been thumping good fun. The days had been thumping good fun, and the nights even more so. Spiffing!
This was how to rough it. This was how fieldwork should always be. Just the two of them, face-to-face across the little table, sitting on their folding chairs, eating off china with tableware that was a very good imitation of sterling silver. The wine was chilled. The turkey-shaped thing that T’lin had run down had been expertly fricasseed by the indomitable Dommi. The campfire crackled and blazed cheerfully nearby, its smoke drifting upward in a breeze so gentle that the flames above the candlesticks hardly wavered. Doubtless there would be cheese and coffee in a few minutes, as soon as Dommi finished erecting the tent. T’lin was a few hundred yards off, still polishing his precious dragons.
Meanwhile, a man and the woman he loved, the stars, the jagged peaks, the trees…Odd sort of trees, not quite conifers. They looked pinelike at a distance, but their needles were tiny stars and the fragrance they put out smelled more like incense than pine. No matter, they would do.
Wary of tearing their frills, dragons shunned forest, but T’lin had found a convenient avalanche path down from the icy highlands to a meadow beside the little river. Ursula had fretted that the woods might be inhabited by the nasty cat things called jugulars. Julian refused to worry about them, on the grounds that if you had to worry about a jugular, it was already too late.
She looked up and caught him studying her. Her chin was too square to be classically feminine, yet it suited her. She wore her hair shorter than he usually liked to see, but that, too, suited her, and it shone like jewels in the firelight. Her eyes were very large and all womanly mystery. She was more Venus de Milo than Mona Lisa, but beautiful in a way all her own. And she was a herd of tigers at lovemaking. Tigresses?
He thought of Euphemia and wondered for the thousandth time what he’d ever seen in the slut. It wasn’t just that she fulked with Carrots—she just wasn’t good for anything else. His Omar Khayyam joke would have floated clear over her pretty head, whereas Ursula knew a hawk from a handsaw and probably what act and scene they came from. She understood that John of Gaunt wasn’t necessarily very thin….
“Happy?”
He jumped and glanced around. “Ecstatically. Night is my favorite time of day. I’m ready for my coffee now, though.”
Dommi was still tightening the tent ropes. He wouldn’t be long.
“Perhaps we should have coffee in the lounge?”
Julian frowned at the dark mass of the trees around them. “I think we forgot to pack the lounge. How about the palm court? Or the croquet lawn? I’m sure Dommi brought the hoops and mallets.”
“It’s the Service makes it possible, love,” Ursula said softly.
“Makes what possible?”
“All this. Dragon rides and servants. A touch of civilization in the bush—lady and gentleman on safari. Without the Service and its mana, you and I would be hacking our way through jungle and eating roots and sleeping under bushes.”
Wanting to talk business, were we?
“If it wasn’t for the Service,” he countered, “we wouldn’t be here at all, my little turtledove. Would we?”
“But we mustn’t let Edward Exeter mess it all up, must we?”
He sighed. The moment was too precious to spoil with reality. He did not want any pikes in his millpond tonight.
“Is that the nub? ‘I say, old man, you’ve got to put a sock in this Liberator prank, you’re queering our pitch with the natives!’ Is that what we tell him?”
Ursula placed her glass down carefully on the spotless white tablecloth. “Yes, that is part of it for me. We live well, I admit. But we work hard for it. You know how bloody rough the missionary cycle can be at times—rough and dangerous, too. You know how boring it can be, studying the language, learning all those sermons, spouting them. You know what homesickness is. We do good, dammit! We don’t get paid in pound notes, but we are entitled to compensation, and I don’t feel one damned bit guilty about it. So, yes, that’s a consideration for me. Isn’t it for you?”
Julian shrugged and evaded the question with a mental image of a toreador and his cape. “I don’t think that argument will impress Exeter.”
“Which one will?”
“Dunno. I’ll decide when we’ve talked with him and I know how his wheels are turning. Do we have to discuss it now, when I’m halfway through composing a sonnet to your eyelashes?”
“We’ll be in Niolvale tomorrow.”
“And he may still be in Joalland. Or he may be bloody dead already.”
She nodded. Domini materialized in the firelight like a ghost. At some point during his preparation of dinner, he had contrived to change into his white livery. He removed the plates.
“That was delicious,” Ursula murmured, although she kept her eyes on Julian.
“Thank you, Entyika!”
“Listen,” Julian said. “Let’s not argue. Let’s not even talk about it until we find out more facts. When we’ve heard Exeter’s reasons, then we can see whether or not we agree with them. If we don’t, then I’ll try to talk him out of the whole business, I promise you.” Offhand, he could think of no one less likely to be talked out of anything once he had made up his mind than Edward Exeter, Esquire.
“And if you don’t succeed?”
“You’re jumping to hypothetical conclusions.”
“Answer me.” Her voice was soft, but there was a lot of power behind it. All sorts of power.
“Then what I think won’t matter, will it?”
“No, it won’t.”
And what Exeter thought wouldn’t matter either. That was a skin-crawly idea—using mana to change a man’s mind. Nasty. Not nice. It was more or less what he himself had done to the troopers at Seven Stones, of course, but that had been self-defense. He didn’t like to think of Ursula doing it to Edward…or to any man, of course. He wondered what it would feel like, and whether the victim would even know it had happened.
Domini laid out cheese and biscuits and butter, poured coffee. When he left, the silence seemed to remain, hanging over the table like a mist. The night was cooling rapidly.
Julian said, “Darling? What exactly happens in a battle of mana?” He saw her mouth tighten and went on quickly, “I mean, if Exeter does go up against Zath, one-on-one—”
“Then he dies! Zath’s been at the business for years. Whatever scheme Exeter may have concocted to gather mana, he can’t possibly match what Zath has collected from those thousands of human sacrifices. It would be like you taking on the German army single-handed, armed with a penknife.”
“I realize that,” Julian said, knowing that Exeter must think otherwise, “but in the general case? Forget Zath. If two strangers have a magical donnybrook, what actually happens?”
Ursula drank coffee. Eventually she said, “They almost never do, because it would be a leap in the dark. You can’t tell the flyweights from the heavyweights in that league without actually throwing a punch and seeing what comes back. That’s why the Five play the Great Game with human chessmen. They never go for one another.”
&nbs
p; Julian hacked savagely at a piece of cheese. She was being evasive. The Service must know the answer. Prof Rawlinson would have investigated, even if no one else had. The library had been burned when Zath’s thugs sacked Olympus, of course; that was frequently offered as an excuse when the new boy asked too many questions.
The stars were coming out in thousands now, but the romantic aura had faded. “So you don’t know?”
“No.”
“I bet Exeter does.”
“What?” Ursula looked startled, surprisingly so.
“He’s very chummy with Prylis, the so-called god of knowledge. Didn’t you know that?”
She stared hard at Julian while she dabbed invisible crumbs from her lips. “No, I didn’t.” She was narked at being caught offside.
He felt oddly smug and annoyed with himself because of it. “Read his report on his first two years here—oh, I suppose that got burned? Pity. He told me about it before we came over. He spent two or three days with Prylis. He may very well have gone back there when he left Olympus. I’m sure Exeter knows what a mana battle would be like.”
Ursula had her demon-tennis-player look on. “I think I can handle Edward Exeter, no matter what he’s been up to these last two years.”
“You can certainly handle me all you want,” he said happily. “You ready to start now? We ought to let Domini get on with the dishes.”
“You never stop, do you?”
“You want me to?”
She laughed. “No. It’s what I like about you.”
He jumped up and went around the table to her. “Then let’s go, lover!”
24
They are no gods, they are imposters! All that lets them act like gods is that fools worship them. I tell you that they are mere enchanters, fakes, evil people masquerading in the guise of gods…”
D’ward was nearing the end of his evening sermon, building to the usual climax where he would promise to bring death to Death and invite his listeners to join the Free and follow him.