by David Brin
From the way the townsfolk scattered, Dennis presumed Kremer’s northern clansmen still didn’t think of themselves as Zuslikans, though the town had been the Baron’s capital for a generation.
When Dennis next looked back at the little niche-shrine, the old woman had departed, no doubt scared away. Gone also was his best chance to find out more about the Old Belief.
The troop of soldiers was followed by nearly a score of young civilians, downcast and tethered to one another at the wrist.
“Press gang!” Arth whispered harshly. “Kremer’s buildin’ up th’ militia. War can’t be far off now!”
It reminded Dennis that he was still a hunted man. He looked up and saw, high in the sky, a set of broad black wings sailing in an updraft. A pair of small human figures sat in a light wicker framework beneath the glider, steering it lazily toward a thermal south of town. The underside was painted to resemble leathery wings, to take advantage of the traditional dragon reverence that filled most Coylian fairy tales.
Fortunately, these people had never developed telescopes. Those scouts would not be likely to pick them out in Zuslik’s crowded streets. He and Arth only had to worry about foot patrols.
When they made their break in the balloon, however, it would be a different story. Those gliders might present a problem.
Discretion seemed well advised. He let Arth lead him away from the busy square, resolving though to return to study the statue in more detail later.
The Hall of the Guild of Chairmakers was overrun with children.
The chairmakers’ guild was the poorest of the maker castes. Unlike that of the stonechoppers, the hinge and door builders, and the papermakers, it had no secrets to protect. Anyone could make a chair or table “starter” with twine and sticks. Only the law kept the guild in its monopoly.
Youngsters ran all over the place. The floor was a litter of string and shredded bark. Arth explained that open guilds like the chairmakers’ hired mostly children and old people—unsuited for the high-volume practicing that took place at salons like Fixxel’s.
Under the supervision of a few master chairmakers, boys and girls assembled furniture starters to go into the homes of the needy. After a year or so of using these tables and chairs, the poor would sell the practiced models to somewhat better-off folk and buy another set of crude starters with part of the proceeds. The furniture would slowly work its way along the socioeconomic ladder as it grew older and better—upward mobility for things, if not people.
A red-robed priest moved among the children, accompanied by two master chairmakers, blessing the finished starters. Dennis couldn’t remember which deity the red gown represented, but something about the color seemed almost to remind him of something.
“Another patrol, Dennzz.” Arth pointed out a troop of guards passing by, one street over. “Maybe we better be getting’ back.”
Dennis nodded reluctantly. “All right,” he told Arth, “let’s go.” It would be at least a week before the escape attempt, and there would be other chances to explore the town.
They ducked down a side alley and emerged on the Avenue of Sweetmeats. Arth bought pastries, and Dennis tried to make sense out of the chaotic but apparently efficient sled-rail traffic pattern as they walked.
Still, he couldn’t shake the image of the red-robed priest from his mind. Somehow it made him feel simultaneously angry and frustrated.
Arth grabbed Dennis’s arm as they were approaching the little thief’s neighborhood. He looked up and down the street suspiciously. “Let’s take a shortcut,” he said, and led Dennis between a pair of stalls into another alley.
“What’s the matter?”
Arth shook his head. “Maybe I’m just nervous. But if you sniff a trap five times, and you’re wrong four of ’em, you’re still ahead if you avoid th’ smell.”
Dennis decided to take Arth’s word as the expert. He saw a stack of crates against the wall of one of the wedding cake buildings. “Come on,” he said, “I’ve got a tool that’s super at detecting traps. We can use it up on the roof.”
They climbed to the first parapet, then up a garden trellis to another level. Dennis reached under the robe Arth had lent him and pulled the little camp-watch alarm out of one of his overall pockets.
Arth stared at the flashing lights, entranced. He appeared totally confident in the Earthman’s wizardry, sure that Dennis would be able to tell, from this magic, whether it was safe to go out onto the streets.
Dennis twiddled with the tiny dials. But the screen remained a chaos of unreadable garbage. The alarm, over a week out of practice, kept trying to go off regardless of what he did.
Dennis sighed and reached into another pocket. The slim, collapsible monocular had been in the packet Linnora had thrown him. Fortunately, it had only been scratched in Kermer’s futile attempts to open it.
Dennis used it to scan the streets below.
There were crowds up and down the main boulevard—farmers come to town to market their produce and purchase starters, aristocrats with their clonelike entourages, an occasional guard or churchman. Dennis looked for suspicious clumps of activity.
He focused on a group of men at the far end of the street. They idled about in front of a pub, apparently lounging.
But the spyglass told a different story. The men were armed, and they glanced intently at passersby. They had the high cheekbones of Kremer’s northmen.
Dennis adjusted the focus. A tall, armed man with the look of an aristocrat emerged from a building behind the toughs. He was followed by a short, stooped fellow with a patch over one eye. They were conversing in an agitated manner. The one-eyed man kept pointing in the direction of the waterfront. The aristocrat just as insistently seemed to indicate that they would wait right where they were.
“Uh, Arth”—Dennis’s mouth felt dry—“I think you’d better look at this.”
“At what, that little box? Are you lookin’ through it, or at somethin’ inside it?”
“Through it. It’s like a sort of magic tube that makes things far away look bigger. It may take you a minute to get used to it, but when you do, I want you to use it to look at that tavern at the end of the street.”
Arth squatted forward and took the monocular. Dennis had to show him how to hold it. Arth grew excited.
“Hey! This is great! I can see like th’ proverbial eagle of Crydee!… I can count th’ steins on th’ table over at … Great Palmi! That’s Perth! An’ he’s talkin’ to Lord Hern himself!”
Dennis nodded. He felt a hollowness within his chest, as if fragile hope had suddenly turned into something heavy and hard.
“That scum!” Arth cursed. “He’s turnin’ us in! His dad even served with mine under th’ old Duke! I’ll have his intestines an’ practice ’em into hawsers! I’ll …”
Dennis slumped back against the wall behind them. He was fresh out of ideas. There didn’t seem to be any way to warn his friends back at Arth’s apartment, or in the waterfront warehouse, where construction of the escape balloon had just begun.
He felt so helpless that, once again, the strange detachment from reality seemed to fall over him. He couldn’t help it.
Arth made a grand art out of cursing. He had quite a vocabulary of invective. For a while it kept him busy while the Earthman simply felt miserable.
Then Dennis blinked. A brief, sharp reflection had caught his eye from one of the neighboring rooftops not too far away.
He sat up and looked. Something small was moving about among the vents and rooftop debris.
“They’ve got somebody!” Arth declared, still staring through the monocular at the scene at the cafe. “They’re draggin’ him down from my place.…” Arth whooped. “But they’ve only got one! The others must have got away! Perth don’t look happy at all! He’s tuggin’ at Lord Hern’s arm, pointin’ to th’ waterfront.
“Hah! By th’ time they get there all our people will be gone! Serves ’em right!”
Dennis barely heard Arth. He got
up slowly, staring at the shape on the rooftop several blocks away; it glistened and scuttled from hiding place to hiding place.
Arth exclaimed. “It’s Mishwa they’ve caught! And … and he’s broken free and managed to jump Perth! Go get him, Mishwa! They’re tryin’ to get him off before he—Hey! Dennis, give that back!”
Dennis had snatched away the monocular. Ignoring Arth’s protests, he tried not to shake as he focused it on the roof a hundred meters away. Something quick and blurry passed in front of his line of sight.
It took him a few moments to find the exact spot. Then for seconds all he could see was the roof vent the thing had ducked behind.
At last, something rose from behind it—an eye at the end of a slender stalk that swiveled left and right, scanning.
“Well, I’m the son of a blue-nosed gopher.…”
“Dennzz! Give me back th’ box! I gotta know if Mish got that rat Perth!”
Arth tugged at his trouser leg. Dennis shook free, focusing the monocular.
What finally moved out from behind the roof vent had changed subtly since the last time Dennis had seen it, on a highway late one dark night. It had turned a paler shade, blending well with the color of the buildings. Its sampling arms and cameras scanned the crowd below as it moved.
On its back it carried a passenger.
“Pix!” Dennis cursed. The little animal voyeur had found the perfect accomplice for its favorite activity, sidewalk superintending. It was riding Dennis’s Sahara Tech exploration ’bot like its own personal mount!
The multiple coincidences and irony were overwhelming. All Dennis knew was that the robot was the key to everything … to rescuing his friends and the Princess, to getting out of Zuslik, to repairing the zeivatron … to everything!
What couldn’t a man who knew what he was doing accomplish, simply by using the Practice Effect on a sophisticated little machine like that? It could help him build more machines, even a new return mechanism!
He needed that ’bot!
“Pix!” Dennis shouted. “Robot! Come to me and report! At once! Do you hear me? Right away!”
Arth grabbed furiously at his arm. In the street below people were looking up curiously.
The strange pair on the far roof seemed to pause briefly and turn his way.
“Prior orders are overridden!” he screamed again. “Come to me right now!”
He would have shouted more, but then Dennis was knocked down as Arth took him behind the knees in a powerful tackle. The little thief was wiry and strong. By the time Dennis managed to pull free to look again, the robot and pixolet had disappeared from sight.
Arth was cursing at him soundly. Dennis shook his head as he sat up, rubbing his temple. His attack of tunnel vision had evaporated, almost as suddenly as it had come on. But it might already be too late.
Oh, boy, he realized. What I just did.
“All right,” he told Arth. “Let me go! Let’s get out of here. We can go now.”
But moments later, when soldiers climbed onto the roof, Dennis realized that he was wrong again.
7
Pundit Nero
1
On the morning after the evening of his second imprisonment, Dennis awoke with a crick in his neck, straw in his ear, and the sound of voices in the corridor outside his cell.
He tried to sit up, and winced as movement prodded his bruises. He sank back into the straw and sighed.
“Argh,” he said concisely.
It was surprisingly easy to recognize his surroundings. Although he had never been in a dungeon before, he had visited countless examples in stories and movies. He looked this one over, impressed with the verisimilitude.
Apparently it had been well practiced as a dungeon. It was dank, cold, and apparently lice-infested. Dennis scratched.
It even sounded like a dungeon, from the slow, monotonous, drip-dripping of wall seepage, to the hollow clacking of passing boots in the corridor and the gravelly voices of the guards.
“… don’t know why they had to bring in a strange-looking foreigner to help us down here. Even if he does come wit’ hoity-toity references,” he heard one voice say.
“Yeah,” another agreed. “We was doin’ just fine … a little torture, a few convenient accidents, light practice. But this place sure has been lousy since Yngvi arrived.…”
The voices faded as the footsteps receded down the corridor.
Dennis sat up and shivered. He was stark naked—they weren’t about to make for a second time the mistake of leaving a wizard with his own property. He felt around for the one filthy blanket his captors had given him.
He found it wrapped around his cellmate. Dennis nudged the fellow with his foot. “Arth. Arth! You’ve got two blankets now! Give me back mine!”
The little thief’s eyelids opened, and he stared at Dennis blankly for a moment before focusing. He smacked his lips.
“Why should I? It’s ’cause of you I’m here. I shoulda said good-bye an’ let you go your own way right after we got out of th’ stockade.”
Dennis winced. Arth was right, of course. He had been in a confused state when he screamed at the pixolet and the robot. It wasn’t the sort of thing a storybook adventurer would do.
But Dennis was a man. He was susceptible to the psychological pressures of his unusual and highly dangerous situation. He might think he’d adjusted to being stranded in a strange world with strange rules, sought by enemies for reasons he barely understood—then a disaster shook his equilibrium, making him disoriented, estranged, lightheaded.
But he couldn’t explain this to Arth. Not while he was freezing. Anyway, if they were to have any chance, they would have to cooperate. That meant making Arth respect his rights.
“I’m sorry about this mess, Arth. You have my wizard’s vow that I’ll make it up to you someday. Now, give my blanket back, or I’ll turn you into a frog and take both of them for myself.”
He said it so evenly, so calmly that Arth’s eyes widened in reaction. No doubt his opinion of Dennis had plummeted since the episode on the rooftop. Still, he remembered tricks the foreigner had pulled in the past.
Arth snorted in disgust and tossed Dennis the blanket. “Wake me when breakfast comes, Dennzz. Then see if you can turn it into somethin’ edible!” He rolled over the other way under his blanket.
Dennis wrapped himself as well as he could and tried to practice the blanket while he waited for Baron Kremer to decide his fate.
Time passed slowly. The tedium was punctuated by the occasional pacings of the jailers up and down the halls. The guards muttered constantly under their breath. Eventually Dennis was able to make out that they were repeating over and over a dolorous evaluation of the condition of their clients.
“Sure is dank an’ gloomy in here,” Guard One commented as he passed.
“Yep. Dank. Gloomy,” the other responded.
“Sure wouldn’t want ta be a prisoner. It’s awful down here.”
“Sure is. Awful.”
“Will you stop repeatin’ what I say? Do I have to do all th’ work? It’s really irritatin’!”
“Uh-huh. Irritating. Sure is …”
Anyway, it solved one mystery. The way they kept the dungeon in practice was by having cycles of jailers constantly comment on how terrible it was down here. Presumably the prisoners were too distracted to put up much resistance. Perhaps Kremer even hired local masochists to come down and enjoy themselves.
It was an unsavory corner of the Practice Effect Dennis wished he’d never learned about.
They finally came for him a couple of days later, after the evening swill. Dennis stood up as the wooden bolt was raised and the door swung wide. Arth watched moodily from the corner.
An officer in a severely elegant uniform casually entered the cell. Behind him stood two tall soldiers, whose conical bearskin headgear brushed the hallway ceiling.
The tall aristocrat looked familiar. Dennis finally remembered seeing him on the street on the day they wer
e captured, arguing with the betrayer, Perth.
“I am Lord Hern,” the officer announced. “Which one of you is the wizard?”
Neither of them replied.
Lord Hern glanced at Arth, then made a decision. With a bored motion he indicated for Dennis to follow him.
“Good luck, Arth,” Dennis said. “I’ll be seeing you.” The little thief merely rolled his eyes and sighed.
The sun was setting behind the western mountains as they emerged on one of the lower parapets. Dennis shaded his eyes, so long had he been in the dimness belowground.
Two more guards fell in behind. Dennis was led down service corridors, then upstairs to an elegant hallway. None of the servants turned to look at the shabby fellow clutching a blanket around him who passed by.
Another pair of guards flanked a door at the end of the hall. They opened it at a nod from Lord Hern.
Dennis followed his escort into a well-appointed room without windows. There was a king-sized bed, with a richly elegant brocade covering. A pretty young servant was laying out an elegant dark brown outfit with puffy sleeves. Through a door on the opposite side came steam and the sound of water being poured.
“You will dine with the Baron tonight,” Lord Hern announced. “You will behave well. The Baron has been known to lose track of inconsiderate guests.”
Dennis shrugged. “So I’ve heard. Thanks. Will you be there?”
Lord Hern looked down his nose. “I shall not have the pleasure. I shall be on a diplomatic errand. Perhaps another time.”
“I’ll look forward to it.” Dennis nodded pleasantly.
The aristocrat barely returned the nod. He left without another word.
Coylians, apparently, were an unenlightened and unsophisticated people. The guards merely looked curiously at the odd arm and finger exercise Dennis performed in the direction of the departing lord’s back.
He didn’t need to be told a bath was being drawn. Dennis drop-kicked the blanket over into a corner and made his way toward the sound of pouring water.