Thus the sorcerers and sorceresses were the heroes of the day, and were honored by cheering crowds for all of the afternoon and evening. Lavenci and I took no part in it. Down in the Skeptical temple Wensomer lay in a trance, her eyes linked to those of a pigeon flying high over the city, and enmeshed by an auton. She reported on the fates of the remaining Lupanian tripod towers, and we did not leave our post until the sun was down and the city was plunging into another victory revel. We walked to the river, then took a ferry down to Wharfside.
"So unfair, little brother, they should be honoring the way you defended the temple," said Wensomer, trailing a hand in the water while Essen and I rowed.
"What about little half sister destroying the towers?" mumbled Lavenci.
"That too."
"I would prefer like a nice ale," said Essen. "Think I'll have one at the Lamplighter. Be a bit quiet, though, with Andry gone, Costi escorting Riellen, and you with ladyship, Danol."
"I'd prefer a bed behind a door bearing the words 'Do Not Disturb,'" I admitted.
"I'll write them on mine," said Lavenci.
We arrived at the academy to find that it had been largely unpacked from the cellars, and that Madame Yvendel had a welcoming revel well and truly in progress for us.
"Oh, my dear Essen!" exclaimed the rather rowdily drunk Madame Yvendel as we entered. "I have heard so much about you."
"Ah, er, ladyship, charmed, but, er—" managed Essen, trying to back through the door that I had already closed.
"Don't even think about leaving! I heard you were once Danolarian's commander, I want to hear all about the heroic things that the two of you did."
"While staring at the ceiling," muttered Lavenci to me. "Should we offer to help?"
"If he's not a big boy by sixty-four, he never will be," I replied. We allowed ourselves to be honored by the students and academicians of the secret academy for an hour or so. By that stage Wensomer had passed out on a pile of cushions, with Wallas asleep on her stomach and Solonor asleep in her cleavage. Madame Yvendel was sitting on Essen's lap, stroking his beard, and whispering in his ear. He had a hand on her leg, so the interest did not seem to be entirely one-sided.
Lavenci's bedchamber had also been fully unpacked and restored, and by the ninth hour we were lying in each other's arms. I was learning secrets that even Laron did not know, for she believed that secrets not shared were the best kept secrets. With the Lupanians defeated they no longer mattered, of course.
"Azorian was actually a medicar," said Lavenci, her head pillowed on my shoulder, and an arm draped across my chest. "Medicare were thought best qualified to set up the systems
that supported life on board the voidships. He could not speak war castings, however, and could only do a tiny heat casting."
"But you could, only on a very small scale," I deduced sleepily. "That worm analogy."
"Yes. He did not just heal my hand, Danolarian, he changed me inside to become a Lupanian. He then poured his unpolluted life force into my soul until he fell dead, but it meant that Verral now had one sorceress with the same command of etheric energies as the Lupanians. There were two mirror assemblies for the heat weapon in the voidcraft, it was only a matter of speaking the casting to activate one of them."
Lavenci explained that she had hit the captive tower in the faceplate with one of her experimental trials in the second attack on Alberin. On a later night she had sliced the Lupanian flying machine out of the sky, sending its two halves crashing into the ships at anchor.
"It was powered by the Lupanian inside speaking a heat casting that turned a reserve of water into steam at very high pressure," she explained.
"So its heat weapon was its propulsion?" I asked.
"Yes, it could drop poison smoke and spy, but nothing else. Mine was a lucky shot, but Fortune must owe me a great deal of luck, so why not? I have already told Laron that I shall never use the heat weapon against the people of our own world, and that matter is not negotiable. He will get Riellen to announce that the mirror assemblies for the heat weapons have all been smashed, because the voting citizens must fight their own battles, and not depend of magic from another world to protect them."
"A good principle, in any case."
"One question?"
"Ask."
"Would I make a good Wayfarer Constable?" "Without doubt. Why?"
'To enlist, to be with you, to learn of the world, to learn common sense."
"I shall petition the directant," I replied, impressed. Soon after that we were both asleep. It was the following afternoon before we awoke again.
XXX
There was no clean end to the war. A glass dragon destroyed one of the fleeing towers, burning through the cowls and pouring flames onto the Lupanian kavelar and handling beast. One Lupanian glasswalker simply abandoned his tower not far from the Alber River and vanished. Lupanian clothing and the naked body of a peasant were found nearby, so we presumed that he went into hiding. The last of the towers fell into a ravine above a meltwater river. It was found empty, and while many thought the Lupanian had drowned while climbing out, no body was ever found.
Some people found the prospect of two Lupanians roaming free to be very worrying, but there was little that the alien sorcerers could do. Their incredible powers depended on Lupanian etheric auras being freshly arrived on Verral. Research by the Metrologans showed that there was nothing a Lupanian could do that we could not, it was just that they could do it on a truly vast scale on our world—but only for a short time. Worse, they were mere ethersmiths, not sorcerers who understood the subtle nature of magical processes. One can imagine their desperation and bewilderment when their ability to use the heat weapon and fabrication castings failed. Nevertheless, they had very nearly conquered Greater Alberin, and the rest of the continent was already sufficiently impressed by their initial displays of power to surrender. What sort of empire might they have established? When the three wrecked towers were raised from Alberin's harbor, two of the drowned Lupanians were found to be female. Had they planned to establish a dynasty?
The handling beasts that survived the war are still alive. Today you can see them wallowing in the mud pit at Alberin's Zoological Gardens, and using their tentacles to catch fruit thrown by children. Laron ordered that all towers and fragments of towers were to be salvaged and brought to Alberin. You will all be familiar with the complete and relatively undamaged tripod tower that stands just inside the wall beside
West Gate, but the rest have mostly been dismantled and stored away in various places. The upper and handling cowls from one are on display in the throne room of the former palace, now known as the People's Educative Museum. For me it is quite unsettling to see children playing with the jewellike controls of the tower that once stood terrible and triumphant above the ruins of Gatrov, but that is the lot of all veterans. By the middle of the year the worst of the damage to Alberin had been repaired, including the towers of what was now the Elected Presidian's Palace. The place where the Inquisition building had once stood was merely cleared and replaced with cobblestones, and a monument to all sorcerers.
Some days after the battle, Laron addressed a huge noontime rally. After congratulating all of Alberin's citizens for their defense of the city against the greatest odds that any army had ever faced, he announced that all known heat weapons had been smashed. This was not so much because he believed that using Lupanian weapons against our own world's folk was morally suspect, but because Lavenci thought so and had told him as much. She was the only person on our world who could cast a heat weapon over one of the mirror devices, so her opinion carried considerable weight. The drawback of this policy was that Alberin's enemies became quite heartened, and began planning an attack. Defeating the plague of electrocracy while it was still in its earliest phase was a very popular cause with the neighboring monarchies.
It was a month later that the former regent arrived with all his original forces, plus several thousand extra warriors, courtesy of the Fralland k
ing and various other neighbors. He had been emboldened by Laron's declaration that Alberin now had only conventional weapons. His problem was that a very intensive campaign of training can turn a strong but amiable shopkeeper into a strong and dangerous warrior, and that month saw the citizens of Alberin put through some exceedingly intensive training. To concatenate a long and passably nasty story into its happy ending, the regent's army of restoration was defeated and scattered, and the regent himself captured. As a Wayfarer inspector, I spent weeks accepting the surrender of men from the regent's shattered army, who had fled and hidden after we broke their advance. Most were from Alberin, after all, and just happened to have been on the wrong side. I directed them to what was being called the Enlightenment Encampment, where Riellen was giving lectures on Alberin's new political system. Those from the other towns and cities were sent back eventually, but Riellen first wanted them educated and enthusiastic with regard to voting and representative government. The wives of those prisoners who lived in Alberin combed the camps for them, and one by one dragged them off home, no doubt for some very harsh words and no prospect of dinner. The last I heard, the by now former regent was in what was called the University of the Dungeons, studying a course in electocracy, and not due for release until he had passed several exams with first-class honors.
The critical discovery of the war had been Lavenci's. By a combination of logic, mathematics, and reductive analysis, she had worked out that no Lupanian who had been on our world more than seven days used a heat weapon. This seemed odd, because Azorian had been here longer, yet was still able to do a clumsy, microscopic version of the heat weapon casting until the day of his death. After a great deal of thought, she had realized that the Lupanian warriors had gorged themselves on the etheric essence of our people, but Azorian had not murdered anyone and ripped their etheric essence away. All but the last few Lupanians to arrive had been absorbing the essence of prisoners without realizing that the more they fed on us, the more like us they became. After seven days, they could no longer conjure the heat-weapon casting. By the time the eighth cylinder landed, they had realized something was wrong, and by the last attack on Alberin they were using their four operational glasswalkers very, very carefully. Even with so few heat weapons left, however, the Lupanians could have subdued and ruled entire continents, so it was a close-run thing. Every time I think of that space of six heartbeats when Lavenci changed the world, I silently offer a prayer of thanks to no god in particular.
Chapter Twenty-Four
WRECKAGE
By Fivemonth Halland had been made the first governor of the Province of New Gatrovia. The former baroness was now his administrative advisor and had publically declared herself to be his mistress, while his wife was pregnant with a child that she publicly and loudly declared was his. The ever-sympathetic Presidian Laron had arranged for him to make quarterly trips back to Alberin, however, where Norellie just happened to be employed as an academician of her strange witch-magics with Madame Yvendel. While far from an ideal existence, Halland felt that all in all, life had improved. The general feeling right across Greater Alberin was also that life had improved. The general feeling among its neighbors was that their own people wanted to be next. Riellen finished writing her charter, and Laron had it proclaimed at a huge rally on a bright autumn day in Fivemonth. It was staged in the square before the palace now renamed Electors' Plaza, and the fifty thousand gathered there were absolutely silent as Riellen suddenly announced that this was to be her last speech in Alberin.
"Free voters of Alberin, I am here to congratulate you!" she declared, holding her hands high in triumph. "You have established rule by elected servants of yourselves, you have vanquished the imperialist Lupanian invaders, you have repulsed the reactionary and oppressive regent, and you have driven off the invading monarchist armies. You will never be defeated!" At this there was cheering that lasted at least a minute. I was watching anonymously from within the crowd, and was a little distracted at that moment—having just seized a hand that was fumbling for my purse and snapped one of its fingers.
"Free voters of Alberin, it is now time for me to leave you!" Riellen declared next, and this time there were cries of genuine horror and dismay that lasted a lot longer than the earlier cheering. "I must not stay in Alberin. If I do, you will think that elected rule will only work if / am there. You must learn to rule yourselves, through the presidians that you vote for, and all their advisors."
There was more cheering. By now several bystanders around me had seized the cutpurse, but were merely restraining him until the end of Riellen's speech. Now came the part that stunned me. It stunned the other fifty thousand who were listening as well, but I was rather more its focus than anyone else.
"You are beginning to worship me, and this must not be allowed to happen," pleaded Riellen. "I am no better than anyone else. I was once in love, but my young man did not love me. In my foolishness, I poisoned him, to make him seem sickly and unattractive to other girls. For this crime I was caught, tried, and sentenced to exile. Free voters of Alberin, I am not above the law, so I must now go into exile, forever. Make sure that no future ruler of Alberin ever uses official power for personal gain. Arrest those rulers who violate your laws, punish them, and elect new servants of the voters to replace them. Free voters of Alberin, all together now, after me:
"The voters
"United
"Can never be defeated!"
The crowd took up her chant like a rolling peal of thunder, and after one last gesture of triumph, Riellen stepped back and vanished from sight. She must have had a disguise, an escape route, transport, and papers all ready, because that was the last time she was ever seen in Greater Alberin. XXX
That was not the only resignation in that week. Lavenci resigned from her mother's academy and joined the Wayfarers. I, on the other hand, was merely a senior inspector with the Wayfarer Constables. Although I was offered an important post in the palace, and promised support if I wished to stand for election as a presidial advisor, I merely requested to be left as an inspector. With my family background, I do not trust myself with power. Roval resigned his senior post as well, and returned to the Wayfarers. He did not explain why, but I suspect that his motives were similar to mine. Thus it was that eight months after the Lupanian invasion began I found myself in the village of Walltoun in the Alter-rian Mountains. This was part of the kingdom of Hadraly, and I was on a mission to collect three refugee sorcerers and escort them into exile in Greater Alberin. With me was my new squad of constables: Wallas, Roval, Solonor, and Lavenci. We had just completed a trip to the summit of Alpindrak, where Lavenci had played the sun down with her parlor pipes, Wallas had actually watched the sunset this time, and Solonor became the first gnome to make the trip.
It was around noon on a clear, still day in late spring as we sat at the open-air tables of one of the town's taverns, with Wallas lapping a saucer of wine, and Roval reading one of my illustrated books of erotic poetry with Solonor. Lavenci was holding hands with me when a serving maid stopped with a tray of drinks and curtsied before us.
"Your pardon, miss, but are you the lass who played the sun down on Alpindrak?" she asked, her eyes wide with admiration.
"Why yes, some weeks ago."
"Er, ah, well the landlord and his missus, and his daughter— like, that's me—we thought you and yours might like free drinks for, like, being here." We were given our drinks, then Lavenci unpacked her parlor pipes and played a few tunes while some of the patrons danced. I reflected that my life was approaching perfection. I was traveling the roads with my beautiful and adoring true-love, my past was still secret, there was peace in that part of Scalticar, and we were doing some good for the persecuted sorcerers of other kingdoms. I thought back to a dream that I had experienced in Gatrov, a dream in which I had met Romance. Truly I was in her favor, and all through following her advice.
Lavenci had grown tougher and wiser during her six months on the road since joining the Wayfare
rs, and was learning all the time. She often said that she had never been
happier, and I must confess that it was much the same for me. Perhaps in years to come we might return to the academy in Alberin, or even settle in some smaller town and establish our own academy. For now, however, life was as we wanted it.
A bell began to peal out the hour of noon. Wallas walked across the table, sniffed at my mug of ale with disdain, then winked in that unnerving fashion that only cats can manage.
'The three sorcerers will be at the public postings board by now," he said.
"I know. They will be dressed as mendicant monks, and soliciting to travel with a larger group for safety."
"They have our description, so they will approach us."
"Why are you so anxious to be off, Wallas?"
"I want to tell Wensomer that I tasted Senderialvin Royal. In three days we can be at the border of Greater Alberin, and in another five—"
"All right, all right, and the sorcerers will probably get anxious if we do not appear soon." I leaned over to Lavenci, who was playing "The Meltwater Hornpipe." "Best to end with this one, darling, then it's drink up and leave." I went across to Roval and Solonor with Wallas, put the gnome on the cat, and retrieved my book.
"This is the happiest I have ever seen you," I remarked to Roval as I put the book in my pack. "Still, I keep wondering why you gave up a chance to be directant of the Greater Alberin People's Militia for life as a Wayfarer Constable."
"It was you, sir."
"Me?" I laughed. "Please explain."
"You showed me how to forgive the unforgivable, and even heal the hurt. I thought I could learn a bit more from you about outlook before moving on."
"Well, thank you, Roval, I am flattered. May I ask how goes it with you and the, ah, glass dragon?"
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