A Sorcerer and a Gentleman

by Elizabeth Willey

  Her arrival was precipitous and unexpected, but this was characteristic. She came, the messenger had said, in a chariot drawn by black goatlike animals with long horns; the messenger had preceded her to the Palace by minutes, and the Emperor had instantly broken off his audience with the new Ambassadors to be sent to two tributary nations in Pheyarcet, away on the Road. He had rushed into a more formal robe and rushed to the formal room with his Lords of this and that, Count Pallgrave, the rival Barons Broul and Cashallar, and his brother Prince Fulgens, who had been in the conference with him.

  There were very few people for whom the Emperor would rush to do anything.

  “Lady Oriana,” the herald said, bowing deeply, knee bent.

  Lady Oriana, tall, cloaked from head to foot in ice-blue satin and white fur, entered slowly and stood, examining the Emperor with eyes the color of her cloak.

  “Greetings, Your Majesty,” she said.

  “Welcome, Lady Oriana,” he lied.

  Her mouth moved very slightly: perhaps a smile, a Sphinx’s smile. Conscious of the effect she created, she moved forward a few steps. “Your Palace has grown since your accession,” she commented. She had not received an invitation to the attendant festivities, a conspicuous discourtesy after her close and extensive dealings with the late King.

  The Emperor inclined his head, accepting it as a compliment. “As has our Empire,” he said.

  “And in much the same way. Yes, Landuc is larger now than when Your Majesty took the Orb of Pheyarcet and the Scepter of the Well; it is larger than in Panurgus’s day; but it is not so large as it was a few days since.” Her smile widened very slightly.

  “What does this mean, Lady Oriana?” the Emperor asked, showing no concern.

  She looked from him to his courtiers and her eyebrows moved a hair’s-width upward. The Emperor narrowed his eyes.

  “Your journey,” he said, “has doubtless been arduous; some refreshment perhaps would be welcome. Let us retire to a more congenial place for such a collation as might please your ladyship.”

  Oriana’s smile widened as she bowed her head fractionally in agreement. Cremmin, at the rear of the assembled peers, scurried through the back door to carry out the Emperor’s implied order. The Emperor rose and left the throne, bowed to the sorceress, and offered her his arm. She was half a head taller than he, and looked down at him with that same weighing, calculating expression before setting her hand very lightly on his arm and accompanying him through the side door.

  They went to the Gold Salon, three doors down the white-and-gold corridor. The Emperor dismissed the peers with a glance; Pallgrave began to follow and was given a pointed glance of his own, so that the Count stopped abruptly in the doorway and backed out, graceless, to close it. Within, the Emperor seated the sorceress on a sofa upholstered with gold-flecked red velvet and took a gilded chair at right angles to her.

  “It is never wise to ask a sorcerer what is meant,” Oriana said, still scrutinizing him, “unless one is prepared to know the answer.”

  “Your comment begs for clarification, madame.”

  “My comment,” she said, “would, to some, require none.”

  “To say to an Emperor, that his Empire is not so large as it was a few days past, is to either insult him or tease him,” the Emperor said, leaning back. “Clearly you have some information about the realm for which you think we would trade with you.”

  “Your Majesty has, of course, let it be known that you will not deal with sorcerers. If you verily have no interest in my information, which I flatter myself is of the variety in which monarchs generally take great interest, then there is no need for clarification.”

  The door opened and three liveried servants entered and set out, with efficient haste, trays of canapés, cold meats, and fruits, three chilled bottles of various light wines and one of a heavy sweet red. During their half-minute intrusion, neither the Emperor nor the sorceress spoke.

  The Emperor suggested one of the wines and, on Lady Oriana’s slight nod, poured glasses for them both. He was on the horns of a dilemma: he did not like sorcerers, did not want to do business of any kind with them, but Oriana’s abilities to divine and see and foretell were legendarily accurate, and Panurgus had used her. If she knew something about his Empire—something about it shrinking or being smaller—it was of acute importance that he know what it was, the sooner the better. The Well might do anything, in its present sullen state.

  Yet, he thought, anything to do with his Empire would certainly come to his attention. What value could he place on having the information sooner? She had struck hard and peculiar bargains with the late King Panurgus, and the Emperor preferred to remain out of the webs of sorcery, unencumbered by vows, outside interests, and hidden clauses.

  “Madame,” he said, “one must distinguish between curiosity and interest. We are curious about your remark. We have, however, no interest in and no intention of transacting any bargain for further information related to it or any matter.”

  Lady Oriana lifted her bright coppery brows slightly. “Very well,” she said, and sipped her wine.

  The sorceress departed an hour after arriving. She drove her black beasts from the Palace to the Gate of Winds and passed unchallenged through that portal of the City of Landuc. Veiled and hooded, she smiled to herself as she went along a Ley and made her way to the Road at a Blood-Gate. She had had her information for two days, but had delayed her journey until she knew she would be able to enter and leave Landuc quickly. Today was a favorable one for travel; many of the Gates regulating the Road were passable, and so she made good time, spinning along in her chariot. She gave no notice to the faint outlines of superimposed cities and hills, forests and oceans, villages and wastes, as they slid past; her black beasts, blinkered and accustomed to such use, pulled the chariot and hurried their hooves along to the broad plain where Oriana dwelt.

  The Castle of Glass was surrounded by a deep, glittering empty moat and a high, slick greenish wall ornamented by pale hollow objects whose empty eyes looked out in every direction from the Castle. In the milky-white paved courtyard, two sere and wrinkled men took the chariot and beasts from their mistress, bowing obsequiously.

  Lady Oriana refreshed herself on entering her residence, then went to her highest workroom, where a tall mirror stood in a pivoting, swivelling silver frame. The mirror, curiously, was not smooth; its surface was rippled, composed of many small, rounded lenses, and it was not silver, holding instead fragments of scenes, of colors, of shapes caught among the myriad lenses. The mirror was a relic of the early days of Pheyarcet, forged before Panurgus had utterly dominated the Well; it too looked out in every direction from the Castle.

  She performed certain necessary preliminaries and looked on the scene it showed her: the Emperor Avril and the Empress Glencora in a box at a theatre.

  Oriana dismissed the image for another.

  This showed her a city beside a grey, stormy sea. Outside the city walls, a plain stretched, and on the plain there was encamped an army. In the city’s harbor, ships rode at anchor, a great navy, and from their masts fluttered banners bearing a device which was not the silver octagon on crimson usually seen on Landuc’s vessels.

  The image burst apart into prismatic shards. Oriana started back, alarmed, and began a sweeping gesture with her hands.

  “Ah. Lady Oriana,” said the man whose image coalesced to replace that of the city and harbor. His mouth, framed by a neatly-pointed dark beard and moustache, smiled, yet there was no coloring of the smile in his voice. He wore a plain blue-black doublet without jewelry or ornamentation, and his bearing and expression were those of authority.

  “Your Highness,” she said, collected again, and curtseyed, perhaps mockingly.

  “ ’Ware thy step, fair Oriana,” said the man. He was seated before a dark drapery, a detailless background which gave no hint of his location. “We’ve rubbed along harmoniously in the past. ’Twere regrettable that I be forced to some measure we’d both
find painful to dance.”

  She laughed. “Your brother is a fool, Prince Prospero.”

  “That’s debatable, depending on which thou speakest of,” Prospero said, drawing on a pipe whose bowl was carved and painted to resemble a curling-horned ram.

  “As long as your brother is a fool,” Oriana replied, disregarding the other’s unconcealed contempt, “we two, you and I, may continue in our present courteous relations. I will tell you a thing, Prince Prospero: I would rather see the Orb and the Well in your hands than Avril’s; Pheyarcet prospers not in these days of his lame, blinkered rule.”

  “That reined you not from calling on him,” murmured Prospero, fixing her with his eyes.

  “He is a fool,” she said again.

  “He refused to cheapen Empire for sorcery.”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “I could have told you ’twould be thus.” Prospero smiled. “Ill-judged of him.” He looked at her for a long half-minute, saying nothing. “Last time,” he said, exhaling smoke, “ ’twas Esclados played Pandarus, tendering tidings to Avril—tidings which he bought from you, for Esclados can barely see his own face in a mirror.”

  Oriana’s eyes narrowed. She began to speak and stopped.

  “This time,” Prospero went on reflectively, “you’d sell without his agency. Thy fair-faced flattery offends me, O Lady who dwells in the Castle of Glass, and it reminds me thou’rt treacherous as a Salamander unbound.” He put the stem of his pipe between his teeth again.

  Oriana smiled tightly. “I will also remind you that I keep my word,” she said.

  “That is true. When you are bought you are bought, an the fee be high enough and cunningly entailed.” He blew a ring of bluish smoke, which tinted itself rosy slowly as it dissipated.

  “I would be pleased to conclude some bargain with you which would serve us both advantageously,” Oriana said. “For example, to know how you detected my Summoning of Vision toward Ithellin.”

  He snorted, smiling unamiably. “Doubt not that you would that, yet I’d not purchase privacy at such a rate. I compliment you on your subtlety and efficiency, Lady Oriana. Your work presses at the very boundaries of our Art, o’ershadowing them. However, mine presses at other boundaries. ’Twere regrettable for your Art to stunt mine. I think they cannot be consonant.”

  The sorceress’s expression was a mask of blandness. “You decline to deal with me?”

  “I mislike to allow any such knowledge as your spells gather.”

  “I have never broken a contract! Do you imply that I would?”

  Prince Prospero shook his head, holding the pipe and looking into its bowl. “Nay. I’ll have none—not even you, dear, honorable Oriana—to know how I fare and whither and when.”

  Oriana lifted her eyebrows. “Oh?”

  “Naturally, I’d not say that had I no means of enforcing it,” he said, drawing on the pipe.

  “Oh?” repeated the sorceress, coldly. “You challenge me?”

  “Alas, no. I’ve struck aforehandedly. Wilt find it laborious and taxing now to use thy Mirrors for the duration of the war, madame. I apologize for the discourtesy, but I remind thee that thy past intrigues leave me scant ground to build trust with thee.” He gestured, a wave of his hand, and the Mirror misted and dimmed, then cleared and showed Oriana only her own haughty visage.

  She commenced at once another Summoning of Vision. But the spell was only words—when she Summoned the Well to it, the Well flowed weakly, an insufficient power to act on the words and structures. The Mirror of Vision misted, but the commands she had uttered slipped away and did nothing.

  Oriana rose and left the room, hurrying to another chamber at the top of the Glass Castle’s glittering keep, and there sought to find what Prospero had done—a barrier to the Well’s flow, she suspected, such as the late Panurgus had often shaped, though she had never known how such barriers were made. All that day and the night through she labored vainly to fathom what spell he had laid about her and found no trace of any. At last, hissing a curse on the Duke of Winds through her teeth, she went down again, and vented her frustration other ways.

  Dusk had come early, or so it seemed; low, thick clouds had swept in and by their shadow advanced the season to its darkest. The Imperial household’s lamplighters hurried through the Palace of Landuc, touching flames to wicks and hearths against the sudden night and cold. Yet the clocks had not struck the first night-hour, and so the gates of Landuc stood open and traffic still pressed through, some with torches and lanterns swinging and some merely benefiting from borrowed light. A city’s lamplighters’ guild is not so easily moved to respond to circumstance as those bound to the Emperor, and so the main thoroughfares were dark, even those leading to the Palace, and everywhere called voices uncertainly for misplaced associates and streets. “Loto? Your pardon, sir; he has an orange coat as well. Loto! Come up here, sluggard, we are scorching late!—Fire and Flame, this may be Chandler-street, but ’tis snuffed for all I can see of it.—Chandler’s one down, my lord!—Mistress Sigune, may I offer this lantern and my arm?—My purse! My purse!”

  A lightless messenger, riding up the dim and jostling road on his post-horse, saw his goal illuminated before him as he approached: windows sprung lit from obscurity to outline the wings, the towers, the walls, and then the lanterns were lit at the very gate he neared, a sight that heartened him to haste. The stone archway glowed with the Well’s promise of haven and help. He fumbled at his neck for his pass-token.

  “I’ve come from Ascolet,” he told the lieutenant, as the lieutenant took the token from him and examined it. “I must see His Majesty at once. There’s war.”

  “War? In Ascolet? Do the goats rebel?” asked the lieutenant. “Sir Strephon, isn’t it?” He returned the pass-token.

  “Yes—Chard Pirope! Lieutenant Pirope, I should say. How came you here? It’s no joke, Pirope; there’s blood shed already and my father’s in great danger. I have messages for the Emperor.”

  “Then you’ll have to see him, won’t you? You, you; escort Sir Strephon to His Majesty’s presence with his news of revolting goats! And you can ask for me at the officers’ barracks tomorrow, Stuffy.”

  Ten minutes passed, and the swarthy youth’s hoarse breath puffed the flame of the lamp on the Emperor Avril’s desk to and fro despite the chimney. His face was chapped with cold and wind.

  “You have further news?” asked the Emperor curtly. He handed the letter over his shoulder to Count Pallgrave, scowling at the young man. “Where is our Governor, your father? He does not say.”

  “He feared I’d be taken, Your Majesty. Didn’t write it. He is in Cieldurne now if all has gone well.”

  “The fortress.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “With how many men?”

  “He had about one hundred twenty when I left, Your Majesty. They were going to split—leave forty to hold the manor and distract the attackers while the rest went with him to Cieldurne. He counted on gathering allies, reinforcements, on the way; but, Your Majesty, in Verdolet I saw men mustering to go, they said, to the King, and they quizzed me roughly about my destination. My lord father may have met opposition on his way to Cieldurne if the countryside rose so quickly, and my mother was with him and sisters—”

  “And eighty men of his household and in the Crown’s service,” said the Emperor. “Pallgrave, his token.”

  “Sire.” Pallgrave handed the token back to the young man, a ring on a stained blue ribbon. It was one the Emperor had given the Governor-General of Ascolet, Earl Maheris, on appointing Maheris to the office.

  “Count Pallgrave,” the Emperor said, “Sir Strephon is our guest; let him be accommodated. Sir Strephon, we see you have travelled long and hard. You shall attend us again later.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Sir Strephon said, and bowed, and left the room with a footman to whom Pallgrave muttered something.

  The Emperor scowled at Sir Strephon’s back, recalling Oriana’s remark.
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br />   The Emperor’s next messenger arrived an hour later, in true darkness and just before the night struck, after His Majesty had spoken with Prince Herne and ordered him to begin preparations to take part of the standing army to Ascolet. This messenger was in worse condition than Sir Strephon, an older man with tattered clothing and battered gear. He rode his weary horse to the Palace gates and demanded entry of the guards there, who denied it to him.

  “I’ve important tidings for the Emperor!” cried the messenger.

  “We had one of those already today,” said the lieutenant on duty. “You rode a little too slowly.” The guards permitted themselves small smiles.

  “I’ve come from the West! It’s about the war,” the man shouted, furious.

  “The war’s in the East,” Lieutenant Pirope said.

  “Idiot!” retorted the messenger, who was tired and overexcited, having lost three days on the wrong roads. He had circled the city without approaching it, misreading the signposts and kingstones, passing the same places again and again until he thought himself cursed. “My message is for the Emperor about the war!”

  “You’re drunk,” said the lieutenant. “Get out of here before we arrest you.”

  “Holy Sun!” cried the messenger. “You’ll be sorry if you keep me a minute longer when the Emperor hears of it! Ithellin is fallen!”

  “Ithellin?” said one of the guards. “I’m from Ithellin! It’s in the West, Lieutenant Pirope—”

  “I know where Ithellin is!”

  “Fallen how?” demanded the guard.

  “The Dark Prince of the Air—”

  “Don’t say it!” cried the water-boy, who had been bringing the guards’ supper when the man arrived. The superstitious among the guards brushed their arms and breasts in warding gestures to avert the attention of evil sorceries.