“I’m sorry,” Gresh said. “If I could have prevented that thought, I would have.”
“Of course. And if I could have avoided hearing it—well, actually, I could have and should have; I was careless.” She sighed. “I was trying to hurry the conversation, so... Ah! There they are!”
Gresh looked up to see Tobas leading a smiling Alorria down the stairs. Tobas was still in his robe and cap; Alorria wore a green-and-white dress elaborately embroidered in green, black, and gold. Where Karanissa’s white silk was unadorned and simple, clearly designed to draw attention to its wearer rather than itself, Alorria’s gown seemed intended as an exercise in ostentation, with fancywork at collar and cuffs, intricate lace ruffles across the bodice and around the hem, velvet puffs at the shoulders, and gold-edged slashes in either upper sleeve. Her hair had been brushed out and arranged so that the sides were swept back into two wings, then secured with the familiar golden coronet.
To Gresh, she looked old-fashioned and faintly ridiculous—no one would wear such a dress in present-day Ethshar—but he knew that this was the semi-formal attire of a princess in the Small Kingdoms. Whatever her garb, she was an attractive young woman, and judging by her expression very pleased with her appearance, so he tried to look appropriately admiring.
He wondered whether Karanissa was still listening to his thoughts and detecting his faint scorn for Alorria. He risked a glance at her and thought he saw a faint nod.
“Shall we go?” Alorria said, flouncing cheerfully off the bottom stair and snatching the baby from Karanissa’s arms.
Gresh made no comment as he was led through a veritable maze of corridors and stairwells; he was trying to take in as much of his surroundings as possible. He was also keeping an eye out for lurking spriggans. There ought to be some around here. Why didn’t he see any?
He accompanied the wizard’s family into a good-sized dining hall where a few dozen people were milling about; places were set at the long table, but no one had been seated yet.
His party was greeted with shouts of greeting and much shaking of hands and slapping of backs, but Gresh could not follow any of the happy conversation—it was all in an unfamiliar language he took to be Dwomoritic. Alorria was smiling and laughing, clearly in her element. Gresh thought he understood now what Tobas saw in her beyond a pretty face.
He heard his own name spoken a few times, and then suddenly he was shaking hands with a young man with silky white hair, red eyes, and unnaturally pale skin.
“A pleasure to meet you, Gresh,” he said, in perfect Ethsharitic. “I am Peren the White—Lord Peren the Dragonslayer, they call me here, but that’s just Small Kingdoms pomposity.”
“Dragon slayer?” Gresh said, as he eyed the man’s strange hair.
“I didn’t slay it, of course,” Peren said. “Tobas did. He blew its head off with a single spell. But I was there, trying to help, and before that I was the one who got him out of his castle when he was trapped there, so he’s always shared the credit with me, and I got a share of the reward.” He pulled forward a young woman who was unmistakably related to Alorria, and who wore a green dress that was also clearly akin to Alorria’s. “This is my wife, Her Highness Princess Tinira of Dwomor—she and her dowry were my share.”
“I am honored to meet you,” the princess said with a curtsey. Her Ethsharitic was heavily accented, but intelligible.
“The honor is mine,” Gresh said with a bow, thinking as he did how odd it was that princesses, nominally people of high rank, were treated as mere property, to be handed out as rewards for heroism. He knew the reasoning behind it—princesses were too good to marry mere ordinary men, but at the same time the Small Kingdoms produced a surplus that had to be dealt with somehow—but it still seemed slightly perverse.
“I know you have met my sister Alorria,” Tinira said. “Have you met any of my other siblings?”
Gresh turned up an empty palm. “I have only just arrived...”
“I will fetch them! Wait here!” She turned and bustled away, leaving Gresh and Peren together.
“A lovely young woman,” Gresh remarked.
“I’m a lucky man,” Peren agreed, watching his wife.
“You are an unusual man,” Gresh said. “If you will pardon my impertinence, might you be interested in selling some of your hair?”
“What?” His gaze whipped back to Gresh.
“Your hair. I believe it might be quite valuable in my business.”
Peren frowned. “Aren’t you... well, some sort of adventurer? How would my hair be of any value?”
“No, no,” Gresh said. “I’m not an adventurer; I’m a wizards’ supplier. I sell the wizards of Ethshar of the Rocks their dragon’s blood and virgin’s tears—and if I’m not mistaken, pure white hair such as yours is useful in certain obscure spells. I’ve never found a reliable source. Fortunately, demand has been so slight that I haven’t needed a source, but it’s best to be prepared.”
“You’re... a supplier? A merchant?”
“Yes, exactly. A merchant, like my father before me, save that he trades in more ordinary goods—exotic woods, perfumes, that sort of thing.” As he said that, it occurred to Gresh to wonder whether his father had ever done any business here; he mostly traded with Tintallion and the other northern lands, but there had been a few expeditions to the Small Kingdoms...
“And you have a market for albino hair?” Peren asked.
“I believe so, yes. Not a huge quantity of it, but I could certainly use a few locks.”
Peren stared at him for a moment, then said, “I have two questions, and I’m not sure which to ask first.”
“If one of them is ‘How much will you pay?,’ I’ll need to...”
“No,” Peren interrupted. “That’s later. The first one is, if you’re just a merchant, why has Tobas brought you halfway across the World?”
“Oh—has he told you why he’s here?”
Peren grimaced. “He has half a dozen reasons to be here, beginning with showing his daughter off to her grandparents, but I assume you mean that he’s running some mysterious errand for the Wizards’ Guild. He said you were helping him with it, but not the nature of it.”
“Then I shan’t say too much either, but I will say that I have a reputation back home as a man who can always find what his customers want, if the price is right. I have agreed to obtain a certain object for Tobas and the Guild, and I believe it to be somewhere in the mountains to the northeast of this castle. It’s not adventuring; it’s just a hunting expedition. Just business.”
“Not a dragon?”
“No.”
“Fair enough.”
“And your other question?”
“Simple enough. I’ve dealt with wizards’ suppliers before—I was the one who sold off the blood and scales and teeth and all the rest of it when we killed the dragon seven years ago. I’ve sold them a few other things since then—as I’m sure you know, there are certain spells that call for ingredients that are best obtained by someone with an intimate relationship with a royal family.”
“Yes, I know. Your question?”
“Why is it that in all these seven years, none of those suppliers ever asked about my hair?”
Gresh smiled and turned up a palm.
“Amateurs,” he said. “You were dealing with amateurs. I, Lord Peren, am a professional.”
Chapter Thirteen
By the time dinner was served Gresh had made the acquaintance of a significant portion of the royal family of Dwomor—King Derneth II, Queen Alris, the king’s brother Prince Debrel, the king’s unmarried sisters Princess Sadra and Princess Shasha, and half a dozen of the king’s nine children, the others having been married off to the royal families of other kingdoms. Three grandchildren were also present, counting little Alris—known here, understandably, as Alris the Younger. One prince had a wife, recently brought from Yorbethon, and still clearly not entirely adjusted to her new surroundings.
Two of the absent daughter
s also reportedly had children, but those children, like their mothers, were elsewhere.
If nothing else, it was clear that there was no danger that the current dynasty would run out of heirs any time soon.
Unfortunately, only about half the royal family and a handful of retainers spoke any Ethsharitic, and not all of them were anything close to fluent, leaving Gresh unable to communicate with most of the company. He still tried to make the best impression he could, especially when he was presented to the king and queen.
He had to explain repeatedly that he was not a wizard nor an adventurer, merely a businessman.
All in all, he did not consider the evening a great social success; his unfamiliarity with the language put a damper on any attempt to strike up an intimate acquaintance with one of the local women, since he was not stupid enough to attempt to seduce a princess or anyone with a husband in evidence, and his other conversations all seemed to follow the same route while going nowhere.
The food was excellent, though—plentiful servings of well-seasoned roast beef, cabbage soup, stewed apples, and cherry compote. The wine was astonishingly good; when he remarked on it he was informed that Dwomor prided itself on its vineyards, and the only reason they weren’t better known was that they didn’t produce enough of a surplus for significant exports.
He did manage to conduct some business, after a fashion; he added Peren to his permanent list of suppliers and talked to several people about spriggan sightings in the area. He was surprised how few people had ever seen the little pests; a few even professed not to believe in the creatures at all.
That seemed very odd, given that the mirror was in the area. Rather than being attracted by Tobas’s magic, the spriggans seemed to be deliberately avoiding Dwomor Keep. There was clearly something going on here that he didn’t understand, and he wondered whether it was related to whatever secrets Tobas was keeping. If there really was a powerful countercharm of some sort in Tobas’s possession, such as Gresh had previously theorized, perhaps the spriggans feared it.
He had no hard evidence, though, and no one he spoke to seemed to know anything about it, so at last he dropped the subject.
When the meal was over the Lord Chamberlain, who turned out to be the thin old man who had first knocked on the sitting room door, took him aside. “We have arranged accommodations for you, sir; if you would follow me, I will show you to your rooms.”
At that Gresh realized just how tired he was. He had started the day in Ethshar of the Sands, spent more than half the day on the flying carpet, visited Ethshar of the Spices, arrived in Dwomor, and survived a royal supper, all of it after a rather poor night’s sleep. He was happy to follow the chamberlain to a pleasant apartment on the second floor.
All his luggage was still in the bottomless bag in Tobas’s sitting room, though. He mentioned as much to the chamberlain.
“I will see to it, sir.”
Gresh settled into a chair, planning to just rest his feet for a moment; he was awakened by a knock at the door, where he found a footman holding his bag. He accepted it with a polite remark that the man obviously didn’t understand, but the two of them exchanged bows, and then the footman went about his business, leaving Gresh alone.
Gresh considered his situation for perhaps two or three minutes. Then he made his way into the bedchamber, dropped the bag, pulled off his boots, blew out the candle, and fell into bed.
No crying infants disturbed him; no woman’s lingering scent troubled his dreams. He slept well and awoke refreshed and was not surprised to see, upon looking out a window at the angle of the sun, that he had slept long. The morning was well advanced, the sun high in the east.
He was hungry, but not ravenous, and decided that he would prefer not to eat breakfast in the same clothes he had worn to bed. He began emptying his bag. He was unsure how long he would be staying in Dwomor Keep, but he thought he might as well unpack thoroughly.
He had pulled out perhaps half the contents when a knock sounded at the apartment door. He answered it and found Tobas.
“Good morning,” the wizard said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“Not at all; I was just unpacking a little,” Gresh said.
“I see. I was wondering what your plans are for today. Will you be heading out to look for the mirror?”
“Actually, I would very much like to get a look at where the mirror first entered the World, and I was hoping you could fly me there this afternoon. I assume it won’t take very long to reach the area?”
Tobas hesitated. “The carpet can’t take you all the way,” he said. “I can get you to the general area and point out a few things—it’s perhaps an hour’s flight—but it isn’t a safe place to fly.”
Gresh stared at him. “Why not?” he asked, baffled. He remembered now that Tobas had said the center of Ethshar of the Sands wasn’t a safe place to fly, either. That part of the city was where the usurper Tabaea died. And this place in the wilderness was where Derithon’s flying castle had crashed. The all-purpose countercharm, if that’s what it was, was presumably involved.
“I can’t tell you that.”
Gresh glared for a moment, then said, “Fine. Get me as close as you can. Shall we meet at midday?”
“I’ll come find you,” Tobas said.
“Fine.”
Tobas bowed, and turned away. Gresh watched him go, then closed the door of the apartment.
Whatever the secret was Tobas was hiding—well, first off, he wasn’t hiding it very well. Second—it appeared that whatever had been done in the mountains and in the overlord’s palace had after-effects. That was interesting—and did it have anything to do with the spriggans’ mirror?
He would probably find out that afternoon. He returned to unpacking his bag.
A few hours later he had sorted out his belongings, changed his clothes, stuffed a few carefully selected items in a small shoulder-pack, stuffed several others back in the bottomless bag, and had gotten lost wandering the castle corridors looking for a bite to eat. The servants he encountered did not include anyone who could make sense of his Ethsharitic or his gestures, but he eventually found himself directed to the Lord Chamberlain, who sent him back to his apartments with assurances that a tray would be sent up forthwith.
The tray did arrive—bread, cheese, wine, figs, and dried apricots—and he was licking the last of the sticky residue of the figs from his fingers when Tobas knocked on the door again.
After admitting the wizard, Gresh finished his glass of wine and re-corked the bottle, then grabbed his little pack. He took a moment to reassure himself that the bottomless bag was tucked out of sight; then he followed Tobas upstairs.
Ten minutes later the carpet rose from the platform outside Tobas’s apartments with the two men on it—and no women or children, nor any luggage but Gresh’s pack.
It seemed much roomier that way.
About forty minutes later they came swooping down over a forested valley, and Tobas said, “There it is.” He pointed at an impressive cliff ahead.
Gresh followed the pointing finger and saw the ruins at the foot of the cliff, barely visible among the trees. He blinked, and said, “Fly level, please.”
“We are flying level,” Tobas replied. “It’s the castle that’s crooked.” Then the carpet veered off, swooping up to the right.
Gresh turned his head to keep the castle in sight.
It was still some distance away, so he could not make out all the details, but he could see the tops of five towers and one gable end protruding above the treetops. As Tobas had said, the castle was crooked; the trees made that obvious, now that he was paying attention. The entire structure was tilted at a ridiculous angle; it was a wonder that any of the towers still stood.
The roofs were red tile, though streaked dark with dirt and moss; the walls were smooth stone, either off-white or a very pale yellow. Gresh was not sure which. It appeared to be a very simple structure, with no ornamentation or elaboration.
The
carpet came around in a full circle, and Gresh realized they were descending into a clearing in the forest. “Are we landing?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Can’t we get closer than this?”
“Not safely, no.”
“Wait a minute, then,” Gresh said. He unslung the pack from his shoulder and loosened the drawstring, then began rummaging in it.
The carpet slowed and descended further, making another loop. The trees now hid the castle completely.
Gresh pulled Chira’s talisman from the pack and gestured over it, setting it to detect anything between a foot and half a foot in height, and taller than it was long. That, he thought, should limit it to spriggans. Squirrels and other such creatures should be longer than they were tall, at least when moving. He spoke the command that activated the device.
Nothing happened; the surface did not glow, and no markings appeared.
He reset it for all small creatures, as a test, and promptly located what appeared to be several mice, squirrels, chipmunks, and other animals. He switched the settings back, and it went dead again.
“What is that?” Tobas asked, staring.
Gresh looked up, startled. He had been so involved in working the talisman that he had not consciously noticed that the carpet was now on the ground, and Tobas was standing on it and looking down at him.
“Sorcery,” he said.
“You’re a sorcerer?”
“I know a sorcerer.”
Tobas did not seem entirely satisfied by that response, but before he could say anything more, Gresh said, “Can we get any closer to the castle?”
“On foot, certainly—we can walk right up to it. But it’s not safe to fly the carpet any closer.”
Gresh considered that for a moment, staring into the forest toward the castle, then shook his head. “Get us airborne again and move us around to the...” He glanced up at the sun, then at the disk in his hand. “...the east,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because the mirror isn’t in this area.”
Tobas started to ask another question, then stopped. He sat down and waved a hand, and the carpet rose. “You know, it’s only an hour’s walk to the castle from here,” he said. “We could visit it, if you want.”
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