by Dave Duncan
Mearn studied her disagreeably with her ugly, mud-brown eyes. “You are all wondering why these things are expected of you. I assure you that life in the College is very pleasant, once you become used to it. You will never wish to return to the lowly peasant existence of your upbringing. However, you are not required to take my word for this. Tomorrow is the full moon.”
She paused, while five young novices puzzled over her last remark.
“At this time of year, of course, the moon is not always visible. Fortunately, the exact full moon is not necessary. Tonight will do, or tomorrow, or the night after. You will meet me here tonight at sundown. If the weather is fair, we shall proceed to a place called the Defile.”
A knot of fear tightened around Thaile’s heart. Mearn frowned, as if she had Felt it.
“If you’re a sorceress,” Woom demanded without bothering to raise his hand, “howcum you can’t just make the weather good?”
“I could.” Mearn’s expression suggested that she could do much worse than that, if provoked far enough. “But we do not use power of that magnitude without the Keeper’s permission. In time you will understand why we have that restriction. Your education will begin at the Defile, as I said. Once you have walked through there by moonlight, you will understand why you have been brought to the College. You will understand why the College exists, and why what we do here is necessary.”
“Is this some sort of ordeal?” Suddenly Woom sounded much less brash.
The sorceress nodded smugly. “Yes, it is. But all of us here at the College have undergone this ordeal. It is not pleasant, I admit. It is not without risk, but I do not think any of you will be in much danger. ” Again her eyes flickered briefly over Thaile, who began to feel a rising trickle of anger.
“Once you have passed through the Defile, therefore,” Mearn said, “you will understand much better. Until then, there is no use trying to teach you anything practical. However, I shall now outline some of the behavior expected of you. Then I shall dismiss you, and you may continue to enjoy our facilities insofar as the weather permits-” Another glance at Thaile. “Within certain moral limits, of course. “
The trickle of anger was building to a torrent of fury.
“Now,” said the mistress of novices, “are there any questions?”
“What about girls?” the insolent Woom asked. “Only one girl between four men?”
Thaile clenched her fists. One woman and four boys! She Felt Mist’s temper flare beside her.
Mearn took offense, also, and glared. “In time you may find a suitable partner, Novice, if you are worthy. We of the College pair off in the same way all respectable men and women do in Thume. We bear children, and of course many of them are Gifted. We expect monogamy and fidelity. Promiscuity is strongly discouraged. I trust you will all remember that in future. “
And again her ugly brown eyes rested on Thaile.
“There is one law that you must never break, however,” Mearn continued. “Sorcerers do not marry other sorcerers. You will find partners among the mundane population outside of the College. There is an excellent reason for that, which I shall not explain at this time. At the moment you are unable to leave the grounds, so you are expected to remain celibate. You are required to remain celibate, and if you break the rules you will be punished severely. Are there any further questions? “
“Yes,” Thaile said, her heart pounding. “Novice Thaile?”
“Where is Leeb?”
Mearn’s puny mouth shrank to invisibility. “Who?”
“I think you know who. “
“Indeed I do not.”
“Well, I do!” Thaile shouted, jumping to her feet. “I want—”
“Sit down!”
“No! I want Leeb, and I want back the years of my life you stole from me, and I am not going to do anything you say until I get them!”
“Novice!”
Thaile was too furious and too uncertain and too frightened to stay and argue. She could stand no more. She knew that the only alternative to anger was to burst into tears, and that would be disaster. “I want Leeb!” she screamed. “And I will never go near that awful Defile place!” She turned on her heel and ran out of the School, into the downpour.
She floundered across the flooded, slippery meadow, and in seconds she was soaked in icy water. She reached the Way and ran headlong, as fast as she could.
Two or three bends brought her to her cottage. She stumbled up the steps, burst through the door and slammed it. She leaned back against it to keep the rest of the world out.
Then, and only then, she let the tears flow, weeping for a lover she could not remember.
3
In her youth, Queen Inosolan of Krasnegar had made many strange journeys. She had crossed the continent of Zark on a camel. She had traveled from Hub to Kinvale in a single morning in an ensorceled carriage. She had ridden a mule over the Progiste Mountains into Thume, the Accursed Land, and miraculously survived to depart on a magic carpet. But nothing in her experience compared with her pursuit of the goblin king.
Although she had not visited the countryside around Kinvale in twenty years, she would have expected it to remain unchanged. For centuries, northwest Julgistro had been one of the Impire’s most prosperous provinces. It was famous for hillside orchards and vineyards, for picturesque little towns dozing under coverlets of elms in the valleys, for rich farmland and quaint old temples. Now it was a wasteland, a charnel land, smoking and dead. Even color had fled, leaving ashes and stones, gray branches against a blank white sky, black fields with white snow in the furrows. The only people to be seen were small patrols of goblins, and even those were rare.
Inos had read of war and the horrors of war. She had never visualized such devastation as this, and she thought the people who wrote the books never had, either. Buildings and haystacks and orchards had been torched, livestock slaughtered. Surely not everyone had perished? Surely there must be thousands of survivors hiding somewhere? Not for long, though-this was midwinter, they would be freezing to death. Moreover, fast as the goblins had come, the God of Famine would be treading on their heels.
The Imperial High Command had learned from bitter experience that it must hold Pondague Pass at all costs. Whenever raiding parties of goblins broke through, it was the Evil’s own job to corner them. Goblins traveled light, they traveled on foot, and they could outrun even light cavalry. Now the entire horde was moving over the landscape like a winter storm.
Fortunately, they appreciated that their captives could not run like that. Horses were provided, and for six days Inos hardly set foot to the ground between dawn and dusk. Only once in her life had she ever experienced such a mad whirlwind ride, when she and Azak had raced from IIrane to Hub to outrun a war. This time she was trying to join a war. She had been a lot younger in those days, too, and green men were worse than red. At least djinns treated horses with some respect. Goblins had no such scruples. They insisted that she and her children ride until their steeds fell beneath them. Then replacements would be produced and the awful chase would continue. Fortunately Kadie was a superb horsewoman. Gath preferred boats, but he managed.
Thus Inos viewed the ruins of Julgistro from within a troop of a dozen murderous savages, sweeping across the new desert like leaves in the wind. Hill followed valley followed hill. Life became a continuum of blowing snow, the thunder of hooves on the iron-hard ground; straining, foaming, dying horses, and acrid, ever-present smoke streaming eastward alongside.
The leader was a nightmarish chief named Eye Eater, whose mission was to return Death Bird’s son safely to his father’s loving arms. The three Krasnegarians were an insignificant addition. For them Blood Beak’s presence at Kinvale had been great good fortune, and Inos preferred not to speculate on what might have happened had circumstances been different.
The goblin horde had rolled over the landscape like a rock slide. Behind it nothing stood, almost nothing moved. Obviously it was meeting no resistance now. It had
been only a few hours ahead when she set out with Eye Eater’s troop, and yet after six days she had not caught up with it. No army should ever be able to travel at such a speed! Eye Eater had wasted no time, except on three occasions when small bands of survivors were sighted. In each case, the imps were run down and overcome without the loss of one goblin. The fighting was over in minutes; it was the ensuing barbarities that caused delay.
She had known that goblins were as savage as any race in Pandemia, but she had not understood the joy they found in wanton cruelty. Burned and mutilated corpses lined the road.
Men and boys had been rounded up and tortured at leisure, even the wounded, even the youngest. Soon picket fences seemed incomplete if they were not decorated with impaled babies.
At first she worried about the effect these horrors would have on her children, but she soon realized that they were adapting better than she was.
“It’s the way they were brought up, Mama,” Kadie assured her. “Papa explained it to me once. They don’t know any better. “
“And they have their own rules,” Gath added. “They don’t kill women.” This was true. Women and girls were mainly spared anything beyond rape, and punching if they resisted. Even when they resorted to weapons, they would be disarmed if at all possible, or else cleanly slain. In their way, goblins had standards.
Inos had suggested that Kadie should find some boys’ clothing. Kadie had retorted that she was much safer as a girl. “There would be no danger,” Gath suggested cheerfully. “They would take your clothes off before they did anything to You.”
“Maybe you should dress as a girl!” Kadie snapped. “Same problem!” Gath said, but he spoiled his worldly grin with a blush.
They were adapting. Inos was both relieved and proud. Even Kadie had picked up goblin dialect much faster than she had. Gath seemed to use his freak prescience to foresee what understanding would eventually be reached and then just leapfrog over the preliminary confusion. It was paradoxical, but it worked.
The evenings were the worst-bonfires and feasts and the inevitable torture sessions. However blighted the countryside seemed, the goblins always turned up a few male prisoners to brighten their evenings. Cruel and destructive, they were like children, the evil part of children. If the countryside was strange to Inos, it was even more strange to them. Often they would demand explanations from her-what a cobbler’s last was for, or a butter churn. When she had explained whatever it was, they would smash it.
Eye Eater was a monster, as was to be expected of a chief. His capacity for rape was incredible, his cruelty unsurpassed. Even his own men seemed to go in fear of him, and Inos certainly did. Once or twice he asked her meaningfully if all Krasnegarian women were as hard to tame as Kadie, but the memory of Quiet Stalker’s mysterious death protected mother and daughter both. They were not molested, and Inos did not need to use her occult royal glamour. She assumed that it would be needed again eventually; she hoped that it would always be effective.
Young Blood Beak was disconcertingly unpredictable. At times he swaggered with the worst, relishing his newly won adult status and the resulting right to join in the raping and torturing. At times he tried to assert his royal status as the king’s son-Eye Eater would tolerate his antics for a while, and then deflate him with mockery. At other times, the youngster showed another side of himself, a keen intelligence and a desire to learn. He would trot for hours alongside one or other of the Krasnegarians, questioning shrewdly. He wanted to know how and why they had been at Kinvale, where Rap was, why Inos was going to visit his father, and a million other things. At first Inos pretended not to understand much of what he was saying, but as the days went by that excuse began to wear thin. She worried what dangerous information he was worming out of Kadie and Gath. She worried even more about the way he looked at her daughter. Several times he told Inos that in his opinion every chief should include at least one chief’s daughter among his wives.
For the first two days Gath sprawled on his horse like a tethered corpse. Then his head injury seemed to heal overnight, and he rapidly became his normal placid, contented self. Of course neither he nor Kadie had ever seen countryside like this. They did not know how it should be. The hills, the woods, the ruins were all equally new to them, and equally fascinating. They marveled that the weather should be so warm, although it was midwinter and the ditches were frozen solid. They were impressed by the comparative absence of snow and the dark furrowed fields. They were young and they were having an adventure. They hardly seemed to comprehend their mother’s abhorrence.
Welcome though it was, their lack of concern distressed and puzzled her at first. Eventually she decided that Kadie was armored by her romantic ideals, turning a blind eye to the atrocities just as she had ignored the bland tedium of Krasnegar. But Kadie had killed a man. Tentatively Inos inquired if that worried her.
“He was evil!” Kadie snapped. “Yes, he was.”
“Then he got what he deserved, didn’t he?”
End of conversation. Romantic heroines were within their rights in slaying villains. Indeed it was their duty. A discussion of real-world ethics would have to wait for better days.
As for Gath-a seer had no need to worry about the immediate future; by nature he did not worry about tomorrows either. Inos was grateful for her nestlings’ immunity, but she knew that every day was moving them farther from the sea that was their only road homeward. War rode ahead of them and Famine trod behind. She could not believe that any of them would ever see Krasnegar again. She steadfastly refused to think about the dread prophecy a God had given Rap.
Six days’ riding … five nights huddled with her children under hedges or in stinking burned-out ruins, which did no more than keep the wind off. The goblins were indifferent to the cold. Some of them would sleep on the frozen ground without as much as a shirt. They existed on a diet of scorched meat. Inos was terrified that she might sicken and die, leaving her two fledglings alone in this hell of war.
At the sixth sunset, though, Eye Eater led his troop over a hill and into a valley that twinkled with campfires from side to side like a starry sky. Inos caught a glimpse of a spectacular row of arches against the darkling sky and guessed that it must be the famous Kribur aqueduct. At least she knew where she was, then, although the information was not very helpful. Kribur had always been regarded as being about three weeks’ journey east of Kinvale.
As the weary horses stumbled down the slope, a heavy rumble of noise arose to meet them-deep male voices, frightened cattle, and already the screams of victims. Inos was astounded by the size of the army. She knew roughly how much space a legion needed for its camp, and she thought these savages were packed in much more tightly than imps would be. Even so, the valley would have held six or seven legions, and a legion was five thousand men.
Lights flickered on the road ahead; the newcomers were about to be challenged.
“Tents!” Kadie shouted joyfully. “Mom, they have tents!”
“That’s certainly a welcome sight!” Inos called back. “I didn’t expect goblins to have tents, somehow.”
“They don’t,” said Gath, at her side.
She turned to him with a pang of apprehension-she knew the voice he used when he was about to hurl a lightning bolt. “Then who do? “
“Dwarves, Mom. They’ve joined up with their allies.”
“Gods!” Inos said. Gods save the Impire now.
4
Inos had met Death Bird a couple of times at Timber Moot, but those encounters had been brief, and he had been anonymous inside his winter buckskins, showing little more than two angular, suspicious eyes. She remembered him best from a faroff night at Kinvale, when she had spied on his farewell to Rap. The goblin had gone off from there to meet his destiny, and that same evening she had departed for Krasnegar to claim her throne. Then he had been a youth, callow and unsure of himself. Now she was a refugee, and he was a conqueror.
He was holding court in a burned-out barn. The stone walls
remained; the roof had gone. In the darkness outside, a multitude patiently awaited his pleasure. Inside, a bonfire blazed, casting strange shadows on the sooty walls, showering sparks upward to the stars. He sat cross-legged on the ground, wearing only a leather loincloth. His huge chest and massive limbs shone wetly green in the flickering light. He had an unusually dense mustache and beard for a goblin, and tattoos obscured the upper half of his face-even now only the menacing glitter of his eyes was readable. The thick black braid of his hair hung over his left shoulder and down to his crotch.
Flanking him, forming a semicircle beyond the fire, were four goblins and five dwarves. Gray-skinned, glowering, graybearded, the dwarves wore chain mail and conical helmets. Dwarves were mostly shorter than goblins, but they seemed taller when sitting. They also tended to be broader, but none of these would match Death Bird in sheer bulk.
Inos stood in the doorway within a huddle of other waiting supplicants, and tried to work up a royal anger. She was a queen! She should be granted precedence over everybody else. This was no Imperial court, though, and she did not think outrage would gain her anything at all. She was exhausted, trembling with weariness, barely able to stand; she was also unbearably filthy and unkempt and very close to her physical limits. The stench of the greased goblins around her was nauseating. Only the presence of Gath and Kadie sustained her. She was needed!
This was the first meeting of the allies in the field, and the joint command had many matters to settle. Two chancellors held the door, one goblin and one dwarf, and they argued continuously in whispers-one harsh and guttural, the other dissonant, a couple of octaves lower. When the leaders heard two dwarvish petitioners in succession, the goblin won agreement that it was Blood Beak’s turn.
He stalked forward arrogantly, skirting the fire. He knelt before his father and touched his face to the filth of the floor. He sat back on his heels and waited.