by David Drake
Though Valles had accepted the new government, the rest of the island was a more difficult matter. The fact that Waldron and his fellow northern landowners supported Prince Garric was reason enough for the smallholders of the island's south and east to hang back and even threaten to secede from Valles' authority under their own county councils. Valence's signature on the orders Royhas and Tadai drafted did at least as much to keep Ornifal united as the threat of Waldron's army could.
Liane unfolded the legs of the portable desk in which she transported the latest set of documents. It was an intricate piece of cypress cabinetry with bronze fittings, originally the property of her far-traveling father.
Royhas was present to answer questions about details of the documents, not that in the past days Valence had seemed to care about anything beyond his own afterlife. Royhas was the king's longtime friend, but that didn't matter anymore to Valence either.
Garric had to attend the sessions because the Blood Eagles wouldn't admit anyone else against the king's orders, and because Valence would by and large listen to Garric as to no one else.
Garric heard laughter in his mind. “It doesn't matter which of us gets the credit so long as the job's done,” his ancestor murmured down the ages.
“If you'll sign—” Liane said, putting the first of the documents on top of the desk.
Valence brought up the leather quirt he'd been concealing behind him and lashed himself across the back. The thongs popped against the stiff black horsehair. “The Beast will eat us all!” he cried.
Garric grabbed the king's wrist with one hand and the quirt with the other. Valence struggled feebly. “The Beast will take me!” he said.
“Stop that!” Garric shouted, flinging the quirt against the wall. He shook Valence without meaning to; when he realized, he let the king go and stepped back.
“Sir!” Garric said in gasping anger. “You need to be a man. Men have died for you!”
Valence shrank to the floor and began sobbing. The three others looked at one another with a mixture of disgust and discomfort.
Royhas shrugged. “There's nothing that can't wait a day,” he said quietly. “I'll have a word with the guards so that they inform me when, ah, the time might be more propitious.”
Garric turned the desk over and refolded its legs. “I told Tenoctris that I'd find time to take her to the queen's mansion,” he said as his mind wrestled with other things.
Valence had been King of the Isles in name and ruler of Ornifal in all truth. Now...
Because Garric was dealing with the portable desk, Liane walked to the corner and picked up the quirt. Valence could get another one, of course. Or he could hang himself with the belt of his horsehair tunic if he wanted to, and then where would they be?
Garric followed his companions into the anteroom, closing the beautiful door softly behind him. Will the same thing happen to me when the strain gets to be too much? he thought.
“Not until the sun goes black and all the seas dry up!”thundered the voice in his mind. “And not even then!”
“Oh!” Cashel said, tossing his quarterstaff vertically and balancing it for a moment on his upright index finger. When it tilted farther than he could allow for, he let it drop and caught it at the balance in his right hand. “Doesn't it feel good to have some room again, Zahag?”
The ape squatted, scratching his ribs with his right hand while his head rotated farther to either side than a human could have managed. The Pandah bireme that had landed them at Valles' outer harbor was already on its way home.
“Room is fine,” Zahag said without enthusiasm. “I don't like the feel of this city, though. I think we ought to go someplace else. Fast.”
“Oh, it's all right,” Cashel said; though the truth was, he felt a sort of overhanging pressure himself when he let himself think about it. Also, his skin prickled. “Anyway, I'm going to have to find work before we can eat. I thought it'd be easy to get a job loading ships till we learn what's where, but...”
Compared to the bustle of Erdin and Divers on Pandah, the harbor of Valles was dead though not quite deserted. Less than half the many slips were occupied, and most of the vessels which were present looked unserviceable even to the eyes of a landsman like Cashel. There was no cargo on the quays, and the taverns and stalls which sold rough clothing and the trinkets dear to a sailor's heart were mostly shuttered. The business of the evening should have been just getting under way.
“Well, where are we going, then?” the ape asked in a peevish tone. “We didn't have enough to eat on shipboard to keep my ribs apart, and I'm not going to miss another meal.”
“Then get it for yourself,” Cashel growled. He set off up the nearest street because he figured it was as good a direction as any. He was hungry, too. Now that the first joy of returning to land had passed, he felt the cramps and stiffness from a day's confinement aboard a ship where there wasn't room to turn around.
A trio of middle-aged women came in the opposite direction, each carrying beer in a leather pail. They'd been talking, but they fell silent and slanted to the other side of the street when they saw Cashel and Zahag approaching. Cashel would have asked them about where he could get meals and a place to sleep—to be paid for in the morning—but their suspicious behavior made him bite his tongue.
Things like that made him wonder if he should've left Barca's Hamlet. Of course he'd had to, because Sharina was leaving; but sometimes he wished she hadn't had to go. Cashel had been hungry often enough in Barca's Hamlet, and cold, and tired, and he'd been laughed at for being slow. But he'd never wondered where home was until the day he left it.
“Aria would have given you money,” Zahag said bitterly.
“Why should she do that?” Cashel said in surprise. “Anyway, Aria didn't have any money. She was Folquin's guest just like we were.”
“Right,” the ape said, “and he'd have given you his whole treasury if you'd said you'd stay if he didn't. You're about—”
“Zahag,” Cashel said in a hoarse nimble.
“Right, chief,” the ape said quickly. “Right, I don't know what I was thinking about to talk that way.”
A man wearing two tunics layered to show the gilt embroidery—tatty by now—on the inner one had been standing in a door alcove. He stepped forward and said, “Say, buddy. Did I hear that monkey talk?”.
“You may have heard the ape speaking, my good man,” Zahag said in a tone he didn't use often in Cashel's hearing. “If you did, you noticed his diction was much better than that of a pimp from the docks district.”
“Hey!” the man said in delight. “Say, would you like to sell him?”
Zahag bristled, then looked up at Cashel in frightened surmise. Cashel put a hand on the ape's hairy shoulder. “No,” he said, “but I'd like if you could tell me where I could find work, bed, and a meal, sir.”
“Say, for your trained monkey I can find you a bed and somebody to warm you in it!” the local said. “I can find a couple somebodies for a gentleman of your discernment and I'll pay you cash to boot. What sort of price were you—”
“No,” Cashel said. He didn't raise his voice, but he tapped his staff on the pavement so that the ferrule struck sparks. He'd taken “pimp” as just an example of the ape's usual bad temper, but apparently Zahag knew more about these things than Cashel did—or wanted to. “All I want is a place who'll hire me for work. Honest work.”
The pimp grimaced and turned away. “Go to the palace,” he threw over his shoulder. “They're hiring strong backs to haul rocks.”
“Sir?” said Cashel. He didn't know where the palace was. The pimp kept walking away.
“Sir!” Cashel repeated at a level that rattled shutters. The pimp stumbled, then faced around again.
“How do I find the palace, please?” Cashel said in his normal voice. At his feet, Zahag slapped his thighs and cackled enthusiastically.
The pimp managed a professionally bright smile. He pointed in the direction Cashel was already going. �
��Three blocks up there's a boulevard with a median and statues on it,” he said. “That's Monument Avenue. You turn left and keep going till you hit the palace.”
Cashel looked at his hands, frowning in concentration. Zahag plucked the hem of Cashel's tunic. “I know which way left is,” the ape said. “Let's get going. In Pandah, they feed the king's table scraps to beggars at the gate. Maybe they're civilized here too.”
“It wouldn't kill us to miss a meal,” Cashel muttered. Still, the idea of food sounded better and better, maybe because Zahag kept on about it. The sun was getting low, so he lengthened his stride to arrive before the king barred his house for the night.
Zahag fell into a four-legged lope. If his knuckles minded the cobblestones, at least it didn't slow him down.
Cashel chuckled. The ape looked up and said, “What do you find so funny?” His voice was sour; likely the hard pavement did hurt.
“I was thinking the only time I've moved like this,” Cashel explained, “was following an ox team to the water after an afternoon's plowing. Anybody who thinks oxen can't move hasn't seen them when the yoke comes off.”
“Don't you know any smart animals?” Zahag grumbled.
Traffic increased as Cashel and the ape got away from the harbor. The problems in Valles seemed to have affected sea trade more than they had ordinary life. Though they passed a number of buildings on Monument Avenue that had been burned out recently. Smoke, and not just clean woodsmoke, tinged the air around them.
“Umm,” Zahag said. “People have been dying here. Can't you smell it?”
“Yeah,” Cashel said. “I can.”
“I told you we ought to go someplace else,” the ape muttered. He was so close to Cashel now that his shoulder brushed the youth's calf at every stride.
A large body of troops filled the half of the avenue Cashel was following. They walked faster than the same number of sheep would have, but...
When a narrow cross street joined the avenue at the right angle for a sighting, Cashel cocked an eye at the sun. Unless the palace was closer than he had any reason to believe, the troops weren't moving fast enough for his purposes.
“Let's go over,” he said to Zahag. The other side of the avenue was crowded with traffic mostly moving in the opposite direction, but maybe he and the ape could cross back when they'd gotten around the troops. The median itself was choked with peddlers' stalls where there weren't bronze statues on squared stone bases.
Zahag slid beneath a produce cart while Cashel squeezed between it and a flimsy stall from which a shrill-voiced woman sold fried fish on bamboo skewers. As he and the ape pushed into the crowd on the other pavement, Zahag turned his head to view the troops they'd just skirted.
“Hey, look at their livery,” the ape said. “They're not from here. Blue and sea-green are the colors of Third Atara. We worked there a week when I was with the kid and the cripple, but the collections barely amounted to our rations. The baron didn't leave any money loose for other people.”
Zahag walked on three limbs while he fed himself a banana with the remaining hand. He ate it skin and all, and Cashel guessed it was too late to ask where the fruit had come from.
“I've never been there,” Cashel said, because politeness required a response. He'd never heard of the place until this moment. Between the two divisions of soldiers there was a pair of hired litters. A number of men and women on foot walked beside the rich folk being carried. “Looks like it's some nobles, don't you think?”
“Look!” Zahag shrieked. “Look!”
He stopped in the street and began to jump up and down, gabbling in his own language. Anyway, it wasn't any language Cashel had learned.
“What's the matter?” Cashel said in exasperation. It was bad enough fighting traffic that wanted to go the other way. Having folks bump him because he was standing like a post in the roadway was even worse. Maybe the ape had gotten the last of the banana down the wrong pipe and was choking. He sure hadn't been wasting any time eating it.
“The kid and the cripple!” Zahag shouted. “The kid and the cripple!”
Everyone around Cashel and Zahag was now staring either at the talking monkey or the soldiers on the other side of the median. The soldiers and the civilians in the midst of them turned their heads to see what was causing the commotion on the other side of the street.
A legless man rode in one of the litters. Cashel didn't .recognize him, but he was pretty sure the youth in a red robe walking alongside was the wizard from Folquin's court when he and Sharina arrived there originally.
The fellow on the other litter was a nobleman, sure enough. He wore a gilded breastplate which must have been uncomfortable, leaning on the cushion like he had to do, and his matching helmet sat on the litter at his feet The slim woman walking beside him turned her head.
Cashel hadn't recognized her because it hadn't crossed his mind that she was anywhere within a month's journey. He gaped.
“Good evening, brother,” Ilna called across the median in a tone of cheerful satisfaction. “I was hoping I'd find you here.”
The 4th of Partridge (Later)
Ilna hugged her brother, feeling a terrible sense of loss. She hadn't realized how much she... Well, she hadn't depended on Cashel because Ilna didn't depend on anyone but herself; but how much she'd grown up expecting the presence of Cashel's calm strength. Having him back made her aware of what she'd missed. Having him back temporarily. Ilna didn't suppose Cashel's life would lead him to Erdin, where she'd decided her own duties lay.
Halphemos and Cerix were talking to their monkey. The bearers had lowered Cerix's litter to the pavement. Halphemos and the monkey squatted alongside; the monkey scratched his belly with a hind foot. The three displayed the wariness of separated associates who each think the others may have reason to reproach them.
Robilard had gotten out of his litter. At the dock he'd tried to hire a third vehicle for Ilna, but she'd refused it contemptuously. The baron would probably have dismissed his own litter then, except for a justified fear that Ilna would scorn him as indecisive as well as a pampered fop.
She smiled slightly. Robilard wasn't a bad fellow, for a noble. Someday he might grow up to be a man.
Cashel looked at Halphemos. He asked, “Did that wizard tell you how Sharina's doing?”
Ilna shook her head. “They were separated just after you left Pandah,” she said. “Now that I've found you, we can look for her. One thing at a time.”
She cleared her throat. “I was wondering what you might have heard about Tenoctris and... and the others.”
“Nothing,” Cashel said, shaking his head. “The last I saw, they were being swallowed down by...”
He shrugged. “By whatever it was that ate the ship,” he went on. “A storm, I thought, but that fellow Halphemos said it was something else.”
The troops accompanying Robilard were oarsmen equipped with helmets, javelins, and short, curved swords. They were trained for sea fights, not as heavy infantry, but they still formed a barrier that civilian traffic, no matter how angry, couldn't push aside. For the moment the men waited for their commanders to make up their minds. Judging from their nonchalant demeanor, it wasn't a new experience.
Lord Hosten had marched at the head of the column because he knew Valles. Now he led a middle-aged civilian back through the ranks. “This is Master Talur, our agent for the port and the southern districts. Baron,” he said to Robilard.
Talur, whose complexion seemed darker than usual in Valles, bowed to the baron. “I didn't expect to see you, milord,” he said. “Ah—things are quite unsettled now, to be frank. I might almost wish you hadn't chosen this moment to visit.”
The agent wore layered tunics cinched by a broad silk sash and covered with a short cape embroidered in geometric designs. Ilna knew the garb was in the latest Valles style, but she was sure she heard a touch of a Haft accent in the man's voice. The thought gave her an unexpected twinge.
“A matter of honor brought me here,”
Robilard said stiffly.
“But we're interested in the local situation so that we can avoid needless danger,” Hosten put in. When he saw his young master start to frown, he quickly added, “Consistently with honor, of course. Obviously we want to spare Mistress Ilna from unnecessary risks while she's under our protection.”
Ilna felt a smile tug the corners of her mouth. She didn't imagine her opinion of humanity as a whole would ever change, but in the course of her travels she'd met a surprising number of individuals she could respect. Lord Hosten was one of them.
“Yes, of course,” Talur said, noticeably relieved. “The riots that expelled the queen are over, but there's rumors of Admiral Nitker invading Valles with the Royal Fleet and also that the queen plans to retake the city by wizardry.”
“But these are only rumors?” the baron said. “Certainly I was treated courteously when we docked. Not as a potential enemy.”
“Rumors,” Talur agreed, “but very credible rumors, both of them. Still, the new government has the city in a posture of defense, and as for wizardry—well, they ousted the queen to begin with.”
He looked around reflexively, then added, “And not before time. If she hadn't been stopped—”
He turned his hands palms-up.
“Yes, well, none of this changes our plans,” Robilard said. “I have to pay my respects to King Valence, of course, and then I'll see if he can help me locate the friends for whom Mistress Ilna here is looking.”
He nodded to introduce Ilna to the agent. Ilna found herself frowning; she knew the baron was trying to help, which rubbed her the wrong way. What prevented Ilna from objecting aloud was her knowledge that Robilard's access to the king might well help locate Tenoctris and Liane... and Garric... faster than Ilna and her wizard companions could do unaided.
“And we'll want to discuss quartering the crew, sir,” Hosten added.
“Yes, of course,” the baron agreed. “It would scarcely be courteous to march into Valles and put up a hundred armed men in the local inns without informing King Valence.”