Faery Lands Forlorn

by Dave Duncan

  The view was restricted on both sides by high walls of greenery, but Rap could see that it contained nothing more dangerous than rats. He scanned the faces of the people, also, seeking some sign that the goblin had attracted attention, or that his own absurd tattoos had been noticed, but he detected nothing more than mild curiosity, soon to be forgotten in the press of the day's business. Once the three castaways took refuge on the verge with everyone else as a troop of cavalry went cantering by, and the legionaries paid them no more heed than they did the genuine peasants.

  Most of the natives seemed to be imps, but Rap identified a few trolls and troll half-breeds, and once a troop of dwarves—short men, thick and broad, with rough, grayish skin. They carried picks and rolled as they walked. Rap had never seen dwarves before, but one brief glance was enough to convince him that they probably deserved their reputation for meanness.

  Now it was almost noon; Milflor had been much farther away than Rap had expected. Swaggering along the dusty track, Thinal chattered disparagingly about the town, drawing on memories of Sagorn's visit long ago. Even though it was the largest settlement on Faerie, he said, it was tiny by mainland standards—a quaint, rambling little place sprawled aimlessly around a fine natural harbor. The beach was one of the finest in all Pandemia, so the shore was lined by great mansions belonging to rich aristocrats, most of them retired Imperial officials enjoying the fruits of a lifetime's corruption.

  The harbor was famous for its beauty, he said, a bay sheltered by a high and rocky headland. The water there was deep even close to shore, making for good mooring. The proconsul's palace stood on the crest of the ridge. Then he chuckled.

  "Now, just a minute!" Rap said. "What has the proconsul's palace got to do with us?''

  Thinal shrugged. "You don't think we'd be welcome? Sagorn might be. And Andor certainly would. He'd be dancing with His Nibs' daughter before sundown. Sleeping with her by dawn, if she was worth it.''

  Rap caught a frowning glance from Little Chicken, walking on Thinal's far side. Obviously the goblin felt the same uneasiness. For a moment all three fell silent, being cautious as they overtook a shambling knot of elderly farm workers. A family of very small people went by in the opposite direction, hauling a cart: a man, two women, and about eight assorted children, all of them sour-faced and grubby. Thinal wrinkled his nose and said "Filthy gnomes!" with disgust, and quite loudly. The gnomes paid no attention, and soon the squeaking of their cart died away behind.

  "I thought we were partners," Rap said. "Won't you tell us what exactly you're planning when we get to town?"

  "Just a little comfort, Rap. Lift a purse or two. Get us decent clothes and a place to stay. That's all."

  "I don't want to stay. I want a ship out of here."

  Thinal smiled rather shiftily. "Not that easy, friend. You don't have a patron, either of you.''

  "Patron?"

  "Protector. In Krasnegar you belonged to the king—"

  "I served the king."

  "You belonged to him, even if you didn't know it, Anyone'd tried to put fetters on you, Holindarn would have wanted to know why. Here—who cares?"

  "So?"

  "So you and the Chicken are a couple of likely-looking types, healthy and husky. Who's to complain if you finish up in a chain gang somewhere, planting rice or felling trees? That'll be the end of all your adventures.''

  "Then let's get out as soon as we can get a ship."

  Walking eyes down, hands behind him, Thinal just smiled at the ruts.

  "You're not planning to leave?" Rap demanded.

  "I'll see—see what Sagorn decides. We might want to investigate Faerie a little. There could be valuable pickings here."

  The imp turned a bland gaze on Rap then, and Rap was at a loss. He glanced again at the goblin and saw dark wariness. Little Chicken would not discuss the island's secrets, either; ever since the fairy child had died in his arms, that topic had been off-limits for all of them.

  "Will you help me get back to the mainland, then?" Rap said, hating his need to beg. "Either buy a passage for me, or help me find a job as crewman. I don't mind working."

  Thinal did. He scowled at the thought. "It's not quite that simple. The winds are shifty around here. And then there are the Nogids."

  Rap wondered why he hadn't heard all this before, although he remembered Thinal had dropped some hints. "What's a no-gid?"

  "Islands. The Nogid Archipelago, between Faerie and the mainland. Sailing ships get becalmed in the Nogids."

  "And?"

  "And anthropophagi. Canoes. Fricassee of sailor. Cabin boy au gratin with a coconut in his mouth."

  "They really do eat people? Why . . . I mean, what has that to do with me? You think I might get sold to a feed lot by way of trade?"

  Thinal shook his head. "I mean most ships in these waters are galleys. Whether I pay gold for your passage or you work it, you end up chained to an oar. Even a free rower is chained to his oar."

  "Why?"

  "Tradition? Or because the captain wants to decide when he's worked off his contract?" Thinal shrugged, and for a moment seemed to revert more to his old friendliness. "I guess there's no such thing as a free sailor, Rap. Not around here. You might shake hands on a promise that you'd be released when you reached the mainland, but you'd still be just trusting the captain." The oily smile crept back. "Of course a servant of the famous Doctor Sagorn would be quite safe. He has friends in high places, so he'd be a good patron! You'd best be patient, Rap."

  They had reached civilization. The thief was the expert now.

  Sugarcane had given way to open fields, then those became muddy paddies and finally smallholdings of shacks and vegetable patches. At last the travelers topped a slight ridge, and Milflor ran down to the sea before them. Its renowned occult defenses, supposedly proof against monsters and headhunters, were revealed as no more than a decrepit stockade, half buried in weeds. Its gates hung awry on rusted hinges. The tumbledown gatehouse looked as if it were used only by vagrants; nor could Rap's farsight find any trace of magic shielding like the barrier around the castle at Krasnegar. He concluded that the magic defense was as fictitious as the dangers it was alleged to keep out, just one more puzzle in the overall mystery of Faerie, the mystery that so intrigued Thinal.

  Inside the palisade, he saw trees and more trees, small buildings, shrubbery—and people. He caught one glimpse of distant blue water and ships sheltered by the high headland beyond. The cape was rocky in patches, but also bright with grass and flowers and trees, and the scattered buildings there seemed larger and more substantial than anything his vision or farsight detected on the mainland. But soon he found himself down among the streets of the town and was lost among the people.

  Long ago Andor had tried to describe Milflor to him, while they sat in a dismal attic in subarctic Krasnegar. "Shabby as a miser's nightgown," he had called it. In the past few weeks Thinal had tried, also, interpreting the same set of memories in his own snide fashion. "A woodlot with dog kennels." But neither of them had prepared Rap for the reality. He had never seen a city, and his efforts to imagine Krasnegar grown large and lush had done him no good at all.

  Milflor was certainly lush. There had been rain that morning; vibrant tropical greenery dripped and glistened everywhere, loading the air with heavy odors of blossoms and decay. Narrow streets, unpaved, unfenced, went weaving through the woods like animal tracks, and yet their mud steamed in hot sunlight, for these trees were like no trees Rap had ever imagined. They were not the solid, saturnine spruce of the taiga, nor yet the dense tangle of the jungle he had so recently left. Their canopies floated high overhead, transparent as lace, more like clouds of dust than foliage, letting sunlight fall through unhindered. Wind-stirred and dancing like gnats, their branches hardly darkened the sky. Palms Rap knew now, but Thinal babbled airily about acacias and eucalyptus and other strange names, although he was obviously unsure which was which.

  The undergrowth, though, was a dark soup of shrubs and
vines and flowers, half drowning the buildings. The houses were mostly small and no more substantial than the huts of the fairy village—timber and wicker and shingles. Rap saw crumbled ruins rotting away right next to new construction. If Milflor was old, it was also eternally being made new. And he felt as if some trick of the light, or a sweetness in the air, had bathed it all in pure and potent magic.

  He had forgotten what crowds were. He had never been in a crowd of total strangers, of unfamiliar people thronging by in unfamiliar dress. They were imps, mostly, but draped in gowns or wraps of a brilliance that rivaled even the ever-present flowers. They jostled and jabbered all around him in unfamiliar accents, wielding mysterious burdens, driving donkey wagons or pulling carts, surrounded by laughing children, splattering mud.

  Very likely he would have been overwhelmed by it all anyway, even had he not had farsight. Farsight in a crowd, in a strange town, was an overwhelming experience; it smothered him. He forgot to keep his head down to hide his tattoos; he forgot to care that the goblin might be noticed as alien. He was vaguely aware that there was something wrong—that his inner self was shouting warnings of something he should have noticed and been worrying about—but sheer overload mulched his mind. He saw the insides of the houses as well as the outsides; he saw people in the distance as clearly as he saw those close by; and he comprehended nothing.

  He knew that Little Chicken was holding his arm and steering him through the milling hordes of people—thousands of them, it seemed, hurrying everywhere, in reds and blues and yellows, all gabbling busily. He was only vaguely aware that he and his companions had reached a marketplace: a muddy clearing cluttered with stalls and tables of wares, with people—lots of people.

  Imps, and a scattering of others: dwarves and gnomes and a golden-skinned youth he guessed must be an elf, and a couple of barley-haired, blue-eyed jotnar—sailors, of course. And far away, on a street farther up the gentle hillside, two women stood deep in talk, holding babies on their hips, and they were fauns. Like his mother. Like him. Here, for the first time in his life, he would not be a freak.

  And the stalls held cloth and vegetables and shiny pots and painted pottery and straw sandals and even books and . . .

  Farsight: people and sounds and colors and people and motion . . .

  Then Little Chicken lifted Rap by the shoulders and shook him until his teeth rattled.

  "What—"

  They were out of the crowd now, some way along a weedy path that wound through thick shrubbery, down toward the seafront. Rap's attention had still been on the people. He had not been aware of leaving the marketplace.

  "You all right?" Thinal demanded.

  Rap picked up his wits from somewhere. "Yes . . . Huh?" He rubbed his neck and pouted at the goblin. "Did you have to do that?"

  Little Chicken scowled back at him. "You were asleep. You wouldn't answer."

  Rap said, "Oh!" and grabbed his mind before it went slithering right back into the bustle at the top of the slope. He must have been entranced for a long time, walking unawares right into the middle of town, for the market lay on a saddle where the hilly cape joined the mainland, at the nub of the wishbone-shaped harbor.

  "Hold this!" Thinal tossed Rap a small leather bag that clinked. Its drawstring had been cut. "And this." He added a bundle of fabric.

  "Wait!" Memory came flooding back, memory of inner warnings ignored, warnings of something badly wrong.

  Thinal hauled his shirt over his head. "What?"

  "Danger!" Frantically Rap scanned. What was it he had noticed and pushed away, out of mind? The little wooded slope was deserted. At the top of the hill was the crowd—and he hastily withdrew his farsight in case he mesmerized himself again. The muddy trail he stood on was a shortcut from the market down to the harborfront, emerging at the back of a row of scruffy, ugly buildings set on a wide and busy road. The far side of the road was the seafront, with small craft loading or unloading at little jetties. To his left lay the mainland, its shore a vista of silver beach and great mansions stretching out of sight. Off to the right lay the harbor proper, with real ships and the hilly cape topped by the—

  "God of Fools!"

  Thinal had dropped his pants and was holding out a hand for the garment he had given to Rap. "What?" he repeated, with little more interest.

  "Magic!" Rap said. "Oh, Gods, why didn't I think? We've been landed, gutted, and cooked!'' He waved a hand at the high parkland of the proconsul's palace grounds. "What's that up there? At the top?"

  "The Gazebo. Local landmark. You can see it from all over.''

  "And it can see us! It's a sorcerer's tower!"

  That was what had been scratching at his mind, wanting to be let in—the turrety little building on the highest crest of the headland. It was only two stories tall, likely no more than a single room on each level, ringed by a balcony and capped by a spiky roof. But he had been able to see it from everywhere in the town, and probably it would be visible for leagues in all directions. What really mattered was that he couldn't see the rest of the hill, not with farsight. Long practice had increased his range greatly, and he must have sensed the problem subconsciously as soon as he entered the town. Now that he was closer it was glaringly obvious. Much of the headland was a blank to his occult vision—missing, wiped, not there. Only the upper half of that little wooden watchtower was clear to him; it floated above the fog just as Inisso's chamber of puissance floated above Krasnegar.

  And that was not the worst of it. He stumbled over his words as he tried to explain—

  "For God's sake give me that gown!'' Thinal yelled. He was dancing around in the nude, while Rap was waving the bundle to and fro to emphasize his warnings. Arms folded, Little Chicken was leaning against a mossy tree trunk and glowering sullenly at the argument.

  "No!" Rap said, putting the robe behind his back. "You're going to call Sagorn aren't you and you mustn't because it isn't safe and don't you see—"

  "What do you mean, mustn't?'' Thinal put puny fists on bony hips and puffed up a scrawny chest.

  "That's magic! No, you're not a sorcerer, but that's sorcerers' magic you're using. Don't you see? Magic can be heard! Bright Water told me. Every time I use my farsight I'm using magic. Every time I calm a watchdog, or you pilfer something, or Little Chi—Sorcerers can feel magic, or smell it, or something. And that's a sorcerer's tower up there! Why didn't we think? Of course there would be a sorcerer here in Faerie—right?"

  Thinal grabbed for the gown, and Rap whirled it away. "No!"

  "Yes!" The little thief was dancing with fury now. "Evil take you! I can't run around like this all day. People’ll come!"

  Automatically, unable to help himself. Rap scanned—and saw. "Soldiers!" he wailed. "In the market! And down there, as well!"

  Two squads of legionaries were marching into the market from opposite directions. Sunlight flashed on sword and helmet, on cuirass and greave, while shoppers scampered out of the way. Another band approached on the dockfront road. The centurion's bellows came floating up over the roofs and through the trees.

  "Give me that robe, young man!" Sagorn said sternly. Rap blinked and obeyed. Little Chicken went scrambling up a tree to see over the bushes. The old man pulled the robe on and began buttoning. It was an expensive-looking garment, formal wear for a gentleman.

  "Gather up Thinal's clothes," he said. "We may need them later. Hand the money to the goblin. He looks more likely to be entrusted to defend it than you do. How many men?"

  Rap told him—legionaries were lining up along the whole edge of the market, at least a full century. Seaward, the men had their swords out already and were pouring into the buildings, pushing through to find back doors facing the hillside, and where necessary clearing a path by hurling furniture and people aside like weeds.

  Sagorn winced as he thrust his feet into Thinal's sandals. "Is my hair all right? Very well, come." He set off down the trail, moving with the slow care of the elderly on the slippery.

  "There's
no way out down there!" Rap said. He wondered what jail was going to be like. Theft and murder would bring the death penalty, most like, or at least a lifetime in irons. His legs trembled with the urge to start running.

  The old man spoke without taking his attention off the path. "I doubt that they are looking for me, lad. And I shall vouch for my servants—both of you. I can talk down a centurion, I promise you."

  "Not this time," Rap said. "There's no one else on this hillside but us, no one at all."

  Sagorn stopped, carefully turned himself around, and glared. "Will you stop using your farsight! You said yourself that it may attract attention!"

  "Then stop using your brain!" Rap yelled. "You're occultly smart, aren't you? So every time you think, even—"

  "Dolt! You are an idiot! How can I not think? Tell me what you saw."

  "The path goes to an alley between two buildings, very narrow—single file. It's packed solid with legionaries. They're coming through some of the buildings, too, and they're lining up along the bottom of the slope.''

  The old man frowned, considering. "Then they have been directed to us, and your observation about magic was well founded. It may be necessary for us to split up and meet again later. There used to be a very fine inn called the Elves' Crystal. No, it may be gone by now. We'll meet at—"

  "I'm not meeting anyone!" Rap said angrily. "I don't want to stay here one minute longer than I need. If I can get away, then I'm going!"

  Jotunnish blue eyes flamed below the snowy brows. "Young fool! Go near a ship and you'll spend the rest of your life in fetters."

  "I must get back to the mainland!''

  "Why?"

  "Inos!"

  "Gods preserve us! When are you going to grow up, boy? Whatever was going to happen to Inos has happened long since. Weeks ago!"

  Why couldn't they understand? "I'm still going to find her," Rap said, "if it takes the rest of my life. I'll tell her I'm sorry or I'll weep on her grave. And if not for her, then for me. So I'll not be ashamed any more.''