Emperor and Clown

by Dave Duncan

  "Sultan Azak, you are welcome to our court — you, and your so-beautiful sultana, also."

  Azak seemed to touch his forehead to his shins as he bowed. Inos curtseyed, flashing Rap a glance of desperation. Miserably Rap pretended not to notice. He had removed the curse and night was at hand.

  "The peace proposals you brought are acceptable," the imperor added wryly. Marshal Ithy flinched, and so did a few others. Azak looked startled, then pleased, then suspicious, all in one fast blink. He bowed again. "Your Majesty is most gracious!"

  Rap thought of all those stalwart young legionaries he had seen marching boldly eastward. So he had prevented a bloody war that might have dragged on for a generation? That was good news, but it was most certainly a political use of sorcery, even if accidental.

  Where were the wardens?

  Emshandar's well-trained face was transparent enough to Rap. He thought he had won now. The Four had not stepped in to block him, and Ythbane had been discredited. Inos's problems were irrelevant, for Rap had survived and could look after his own wants.

  "That would seem to complete the evening's business!" The old man sighed gratefully. "Marshal, you will attend us in the morning."

  Ithy saluted, his face grim as he contemplated all those legions he had moved to Qoble and must now return.

  Emshandar laid the sword and buckler at his side and put both hands on the arms of his throne to rise.

  Shimmer!

  "There are a few matters left on the agenda, your Majesty," said the high, sweet voice of an elf.

  2

  Lith'rian sat on the Blue Throne under the candelabrum. To mundane view he was a golden-skinned adolescent, slumped back at his ease in a toga of shimmering moonlight blue, a garment that seemed more mirage than substance, although it was opaque enough. The sandals on his outstretched feet shone like pearl. His toenails had been silvered, although he was too far off for anyone but Rap to notice.

  In the ambience, he was bewilderingly different. True, the physical likeness was there, and where Kalkor had shown as a transparent wraith, the elf was far more solid. He seemed to be standing right in front of Rap, hands on hips, smiling a welcome and studying Rap as Rap was studying him. His slanted opalescent eyes twinkled with cheeky and tolerant amusement. His limbs were slim, his ribs visible above a juvenile flat belly; yet to occult vision the signs of age were obvious — the tiny traces another elf would look for, in earlobes and fingernails. Lith'rian must be older than the imperor, for he had been South since the year Emshandar's father succeeded.

  But the physical likeness was only a tiny part of his spectral presence. Rap reeled before a rainbow chorus of sights and sounds: sunlight singing along crystal forests, flowers schooling like fish, odors of roses and whirling stars, pattern and counterpoint and dance. This was a glimpse of the intricate mind of an elf, and its sheer complexity almost sickened him until he managed to suppress the images and quieten the music. Lith'rian detected the reaction, and his mirth burst up like foam from breaking surf.

  The imperor had struggled to his feet and was bowing.

  "We meet again, Master Rap!" a private thought from the elf said.

  "Yes." Rap braced himself for attack. Yet if attack was what the warlock planned, he could have caught Rap off guard in the first second after he arrived.

  Joyous elvish laughter, like birdsong: "You were only a few minutes late in reaching Arakkaran. I warned you the outcome was too close to call."

  Fury!

  Despite the gaiety and boyish charm, Rap knew this man to be an unscrupulous prankster. He had bound his daughter to a gnome. He and his fellow wardens played games with Inos as one of the pieces.

  To lose one's temper in any fight was a mistake. To lose one's temper when dealing with an elvish sorcerer would be rank insanity.

  Trouble was, Rap's temper had not yet cooled down from Gathmor's death. It simmered still.

  Evidently he had masked his feelings, though, for Lith'rian was chuckling. "I was very much afraid you might arrive in time to stop the wedding. No, do not jump to conclusions! Olybino had reported that Inos was dead, remember."

  Meanwhile events were creeping along snailishly in the mundane world. "You honor us with your presence, your Omnipotence," the imperor said. His haggard face was grim at the thought of dealing with the wardens in his present exhausted state.

  "Not exactly, your Majesty," Lith'rian said from his throne. "We do not come in answer to your summons. Do all your companions comprehend the significance of that distinction?"

  "So East lied?" Rap snarled. "So what?"

  In the ambience, summer sky darkened to looming storm. "Can, you not see? He lied his way out of a pond and into the sea! He had sent her back to Zark once. Had she then set off for the Impire again, he might have taken drastic steps! That ceremony was a protection for her. You should be grateful to me. All is not lost yet, and it might very well have been. Had you succeeded, you would have failed!"

  Trickster! Trickster!

  Rap's fury had struck down Kalkor easily enough. This smirking yellow-bellied elf would not be so easy.

  It might feel good to try though . . .

  Emshandar was scowling, and explaining. "The Council may be summoned at any time by the imperor, or by the warden of the day, which today is his Omnipotence, Warlock Lith'rian."

  "And I have chosen to exercise that privilege," the elf added, as the spectators all bowed or curtseyed. "There are some serious matters to discuss, involving unauthorized use of sorcery."

  The threat barely penetrated Rap's spinning head as he tried to restrain his rising anger and also follow the writhing skein of images, the conversations proceeding on two levels. He was certain that the elf was about to make the confusion worse.

  "You don't trust met" Lith'rian wailed mockingly at Rap. On the throne, the boy waved a languid hand. "Our beloved brother of the west, his Omnipotence, Warlock Zinixo."

  "Watch this one, Master Rap," he added privately. "He is immensely powerful, and very dangerous."

  The dwarf materialized on the Red Throne and simultaneously in the pale nothingness of the ambience. He was scowling on both planes. On the throne, in a toga like the embers of a stormy sunset, he was too young and too short to be impressive, diminished by the scale of the throne itself, which made him look like a child.

  In the ambience, ironically, he did look physically dangerous, his thickness and heavy limbs more than making up for his lack of height. His wide chest glinted with hair like iron filings, and he seemed as indestructible as a granite pillar. Kalkor's image in the ambience had been transparent, while Lith'rian looked almost as solid there as he did in the mundane. If density of appearance was a measure of occult power, then Zinixo's adamantine mass was very ominous.

  His mind . . . Instantly Rap understood why elves and dwarves were so notoriously incompatible. Zinixo brought with him images of vast dark caverns, deep winding labyrinths where dangers lurked around every jagged corner. Paradoxically, these mingled with visions of barricades and beetling fortress walls built of gigantic rocks. How much was racial and how much the warlock's own Rap could not tell, but suspicion blew from those battlements like winter fog.

  "We meet again, your Omnipotence," he said, bowing.

  His insolence kindled images of enormous millstones grinding noisily. "I knew I should have killed you while I had the chance. The witch deceived me!"

  "I bear you no ill will," Rap insisted, knowing he would not be believed.

  A prickly hedge of lavender sparks had sprung up between elf and dwarf, seeming to originate about equally from both of them. It wavered as each tried to get Rap on his own side of it. He rejected it, staying neutral, and it withered away. He wondered what he looked like to the warlocks. He did not feel very solid, certainly, and he had no experience at concealing his thoughts.

  Imperor and courtiers had turned expectantly to the north.

  "Her Omnipotence, Witch Bright Water," the elf said.

  On th
e throne she was small and almost beautiful, clad in flowing draperies that shone like the dazzle of sunshine on fresh snow. Her arms were bare, and not as greenish as a goblin ought to be in this light. The dark hair coiled high on her head was surmounted by a tiara of twinkling diamonds. Little Chicken should be impressed by this vision of goblin maidenhood.

  Rap had seen her naked once before, as an ancient crone, and had been appalled. The scrawny little relic that appeared before him in the ambience was immeasurably older, and so little human that he felt no emotion except horror. Almost nothing there was original. He had known that she was centuries old, but now he could see that she must have been patching herself with sorcery all those years as organ after organ wore out. She was tiny as a child, and hideous.

  Hideous did not begin to describe the mental baggage that came with her. Boys writhing in torment, sailors drowning, brutal gang rapes . . . death! Galaxies of dying faces, multitudes of rotting corpses. Three centuries of death — plague and rout, bloodshed and sickness and lonely old age. Bright Water was obsessed by the fate she had evaded so long. This was the secret of her madness. How much death could one witness in three hundred years?

  Fortunately Rap was rapidly gaining some control over his susceptibility, and he could fade out the nauseating images almost completely.

  And even as her youthful public image nodded to acknowledge the homage of the assembly, a shrill goblin cackle rang out for Rap in the ambience. "And we also meet again, faun! The first time I saw you, I foretold your great destiny, did I not?"

  "Huh? No, you didn't! You said you couldn't foresee me!"

  The mummified green monkey in the ambience waved arms that seemed too long for her, while the air overhead whirled a blizzard of corpses. "But we knew why I couldn't, didn't we, eh? Not knowing means knowing if you know why you don't know! Leaves only one explanation, eh?" She peered closer, so that he recoiled, although there was no real movement or closeness involved. "And you have retained your tattoos! That surprises me!"

  It also pleased her, and her favor might be much safer than her disapproval in whatever was about to happen. He bowed. "Goblinhood is no small honor," he said, hoping that sounded gracious. "I am several times in your debt, ma'am."

  The tiny form sank down and genuflected to him in mockery. "You certainly are! And you will remember that when the time comes?" Then she jerked up her head, a shriveled brown coconut. "And my dear brother of the west, also?"

  If that was intended as a joke, it failed to amuse Zinixo, who scowled even harder, eyes flickering everywhere. His battlements were just as high on Bright Water's side as anywhere else. Claws scratched on rock in the underworld.

  "And his Omnipotence, Warlock Olybino," Lith'rian proclaimed to the mundane audience.

  The imp who appeared on the eastern throne wore a sumptuous uniform decorated with gold and jewels. Even his cloak and the horsehair crest on his helmet shone like spun gold. He looked young, and handsome, and virile.

  His image in the ambience was elderly, bald, and paunchy; and also fainter than any of the others. He was short, even for an imp. Olybino was the only one who had never met Rap, and he pouted disagreeably up at him as if he had never wanted to. Oothiana had called him the weakest of the Four, and Lith'rian despised him — although the elf probably despised a great many people.

  He certainly did not look impressive. He might even be pathetic, were he not so dangerous — for the flabby little man stood within scenes of bugles and floating pennants, of godlike warriors clashing swords in noble combat and shining armies locked in battle. This was idealized war, war as a sport for warlocks, with none of the mud and stink and pain of real war. In a way it was even worse than Bright Water's obsession with death, because the people in it were completely unreal. At least the goblin's visions were capable of suffering.

  So here were the wardens, revealed at last — four handsome young people on their thrones in Emine's Rotunda and four ogreish nightmares crowding in around Rap in the ambience. He had a strange illusion that they all wanted something from him, although he could not imagine what. He felt as if skeletal fingers were pawing at his arms and digging in his pockets. Remembering the palsied, putrefying beggars of Finrain, he decided he would prefer to be beset by them, or by starving anthropophagi.

  "Do sit down, old friend," Lith'rian remarked to the imperor. His kindly tone might be genuine, but it shocked the courtiers. Emshandar sank down stiffly onto his throne.

  "Death Bird!" the witch of the north shrieked, springing to her feet and stretching out arms in invitation. The spectators jumped, and Little Chicken actually fell back a pace. Then he squared his thick shoulders and advanced toward the White Throne.

  Under an ominous night sky, the giant fortifications to the west had crept much closer to Rap, and now a great boulder came hurtling down from above, aimed to crush him. He stepped aside and let it sweep on past, twirling downward forever through the ambience. He dug fingernails into his palms to restrain his temper. That odious gray runt had sold Rap to the galleys. There were some other scores to settle there, also. Evil take the lot of them!

  "West, behave yourself!" Olybino snapped petulantly. "He's just testing," he told Rap. "He isn't using anything like his full strength."

  Another boulder came bouncing down a hill, straight for East. A thick-limbed warrior stepped forward and smashed it to a shower of gravel with one stroke of his shining sword. Olybino laughed hoarsely. "You are being childish, West!"

  But some false note in the voice left Rap wondering how much of his resources that pompous imp had needed to parry the dwarf's playful blow.

  Little Chicken had reached the witch, and she was embracing and kissing him fondly. In the ambience Rap himself lay screaming on the floor of Raven Lodge. He closed out the image easily now, his control increasing with practice. On a parallel plane, the tiny relic of a goblin woman leered up at him. "You die good, faun!"

  "And now he has my promise!"

  She cackled like a startled barnyard. "So he has! Your Majesty," said the young woman by the White Throne, "this man is most dear to us. We charge you to make him welcome in your house and to see he is returned unharmed to his people. You will not deny him his destiny!" the hag told Rap with a friendly leer. "And you will remember that I helped?"

  She was mad, totally mad. She did not seem to realize that Rap could detect the writhing horrors of her mind. It seemed strange, in fact, that the warlocks should also be revealing themselves so blatantly. Was it possible that they were not viewing the ambience in the same way he was, as a Jostling confusion of ideas and emotions projected by themselves? It was certainly unfair that he must undergo this contest when he had had so little time to learn the sorcery business.

  Little Chicken was heading back toward Krushjor, dazed and aroused by the youthful witch's caresses, while being assured by the puzzled imperor that he was an honored guest of the palace.

  "Yesterday," Lith'rian proclaimed, "his Impermanent Highness, Regent Ythbane, tried to summon us here to consider the case of Sultan Azak. He also planned to inquire if Thane Kalkor had used power on him — which he had, of course. My colleagues and I, aware that another sorcerer was in the vicinity, decided that events might best be allowed to continue for another day."

  A giant stone pillar toppled . . . Rap stepped back and let it shatter at his feet. That one had been closer. The young dwarf glared resentfully at him under his craggy brows. Rap frowned back warningly.

  Lith'rian piped on: "Now it may be that that same sorcerer has solved the Kalkor problem permanently for us — perhaps occultly, although the thane was a Nordland emissary — and has also cured a grave sickness inside the crowned head of the imperor. Furthermore, he possibly laid a truth trance upon the regent and thereafter smote the poor fellow from the throne. We must consider, Sister and Brothers: first if any of these alleged acts was real; and second, if so, whether it constituted political use of occult power; and third, if so, then what punishment is fitting. Are th
ere any other charges?"

  The Rotunda fell silent. Rap had not moved on that plane at all, but the nearer spectators had been edging away from him, leaving him even more isolated than before. Emshandar stared miserably at him, eyes bleary with weakness, face crumpled like old paper. On his stool out in the darkness, Shandie was hugging himself and jiggling his feet in an agony of apprehension for his new friend Rap. Inos and Kade were holding hands and biting their lips in mirror image.

  "Very well," the elf said. "The defendant known as Rap is present — such a demotic, nondescript name! Our dear brother of the west? How say you? Did the alleged acts occur? Speak to the nice people, Shorty. In sentences if you can."

  But the dwarf answered occultly, and even that was a growl. "Who gets his words?"

  "That's irrelevant just now, Stone Head. What say you to the evidence, Brother?"

  The youth on the Red Throne was chewing a fingernail. Then he spoke mundanely for the first time, in a voice like falling rocks. "I reserve judgment."

  Wasps buzzed in the ambience, but the other seeming youth, the elf, just shrugged. He looked across at Bright Water. "Our sister of the north, what say you?"

  "There is no truth in the allegations," the young woman said promptly. The mundane witnesses gasped with surprise. Inos beamed, and Shandie pulled his feet up on his stool so he could hug his knees — but Rap saw the ancient crone simpering mawkishly at him and heard the shrieks of his own dying corpse.

  Olybino did not wait to be asked. "Of course he's guilty!" he snapped. On dusty plains in the ambience, legion after legion was marching onward to battle. The warlock of the east wanted Ythbane restored, and the Zaridan war, also.

  "Brother West, do you wish to judge now?" Lith'rian trilled. "Last chance, Ugly!"

  "Yes, he did all those things," the dwarf admitted grumpily.

  "And I concur," Lith'rian said, with an occult sound of retching. "Defendant, by vote of three to one, we find that you committed certain suspicious acts. Now we must consider whether any one of those constituted an illicit use of occult power — that is to say, for political ends."