A Handful of Men: The Complete Series

by Dave Duncan

  The dwarf Raspnex had admitted doing that, or at least the faun had said he admitted…

  “My wife and I escaped in time,” Shandie said, walking faster now. “You and a few others were not so fortunate. One of those who fell into their clutches was my poor cousin. Prince Emthoro. Do you understand? The dwarf sorcerer who stole you away cast an occult glamour on him so that he appeared to be the rightful imperor! He believed it himself, of course, and so did you, but neither of you is at fault. Whatever Warlock Raspnex may have told you, he sought only to uphold an ancient evil, whose time has now—thank the Gods!—has now passed. The man you thought to be me was actually Emthoro.” The burning eyes turned back to Umpily. “I do not blame you, old friend. You were deluded by a hideous evil.”

  Shandie? Umpily’s heart had started to pound. He could feel sweat trickling down his ribs. Which of the two was the real one? Had he been misled all this time? Had he betrayed his best friend, his liege lord?

  “Fortunately,” Shandie said, smiling grimly, “there is little harm done. Their mischief was of no avail, except to deceive you and a few who were with you. I reign, as you see. The Four are all still at large, but we shall run them down in time, and they will suffer for their own sins and the sins of all their uncounted predecessors, back for three thousand years. The Almighty is with us.”

  Umpily shot a quick glance at that blue chair. It was empty. When he looked back at Shandie again, it wasn’t.

  “But you did have an enthronement…”

  “You were there?” Shandie looked surprised, annoyed, and then amused, in fast succession. “My, you are a dedicated old snoop, aren’t you? Well, yes, we did. And yes, it was a total fake. It seemed wisest to follow the ancient practices until the people can be educated in the new ways. That’s all. Why not?”

  “S-s-sire?”

  Shandie’s smile broadened at the word. “After all, what they don’t know won’t worry them. Not everyone will understand the truth at first. People can be misled so easily… even yourself. What you thought you knew was not very probable, now was it?”

  “No, Sire!” Gods, what a fool he had been! What a witless, misguided, idiot!

  Shandie waved his fists overhead in triumph. “And we shall prevail! The Almighty is with us, and we are his chosen vessels! Can you see the glorious future that awaits us, Umpy? No more will the evil Four crouch in their webs and roll dice with human lives. We are blessed among all generations! We shall see the Impire spread out to the four oceans and all men shall know the benefits of universal peace and tranquility. Did you meet the faun?”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Did he…” Shandie was suddenly very intent. “Did he display his powers at all?”

  “Very little. He made some garments. He claims that he is only a very weak sorcerer now. Sire.”

  The imperor nodded, as if that were a satisfying piece of confirmation. “Mm? But do we believe him, eh? Well, no matter. Time will tell.”

  With difficulty, Umpily heaved himself to his feet. He had been cut almost in half by his belt and it was wonderful to breathe again.

  Shandie threw an arm around his shoulders. “I shall be the first imperor to rule all the world! And you are my first and truest friend!”

  Umpily was blinded by tears. He had never known Shandie to display such emotion—but justifiably, of course! No more wars? Universal justice and prosperity! It was a staggering, awe-inspiring concept.

  “Sire, Sire! I have been a fool!”

  “But no real harm done. You have missed a few good meals, I expect.”

  “Worse! I have been tattling all this time to the imposter!” Hurriedly he pulled the little roll from his pocket. “This is a magic scroll. Sire. The impostor has its companion—”

  Shandie snatched the parchment and opened it. His face darkened. “He limns a fair version of my hand, doesn’t he?”

  Umpily had often found his ability to read upside down to be a useful knack. In the brief moment before Shandie rolled up the scroll again, he had made out the message: I am grateful. The Good be with you.

  Insolence! That the evil charlatan should have the gall to invoke the Good! The scroll always managed a superb forgery of Shandie’s handwriting, of course.

  “I shall hang on to this,” Shandie said thoughtfully. “Have you any idea where we might find him?”

  “None, Sire. I left them all on the boat. I suspected that they were heading for the north shore.”

  “And long since departed elsewhere! Well, no matter. They can cause little trouble… Can they? I wonder what they think they can accomplish. Did you hear any of their vile plotting?”

  “Oh, yes! They talk of setting up a new protocol.”

  “A what?” Shandie almost never showed his feelings, but now he turned quite pale with shock.

  “A new protocol, Sire! They hope to bribe all the, er, unattached sorcerers in the world to rally to their cause by promising a new order.”

  The imperor spun around and stared for a long moment at that ominous blue chair. He licked his lips. “New order? Was this the faun’s idea?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Of course! And what exactly is he promising?”

  Umpily tried to remember all the crazy ideas that had been tossed around on the ferryboat. “They will outlaw votarism. Sire. No sorcerer, even a warden, will be allowed to bind another to his will. They hope to establish sorcery as a force for good in the world…”

  Shandie laughed, rather shrilly. “Well, I wish them luck! The attempt should keep them out of any real mischief, and we shall catch them soon enough. I feel sorry for my poor cousin. When we catch him, he will be restored to his wits and given full pardon. The Four will meet their just deserts. And that faun…” He stared again at the blue chair. He did not complete the thought, but Umpily shivered.

  “It is good to have you back in our councils, old friend,” the imperor said. “I have convinced you? No qualms now?”

  “None, Sire! None at all.” Oh, what a fool he had been to trust a dwarf and a faun!

  “That’s good. And should you, in your dallying around the court, hear of any others voicing doubts, or criticism… of course you will inform us at once.” Again Shandie put an arm around Umpily, a most unusual gesture for him. The audience was over, they were heading for the door. “You will not speak of the Almighty One.” That sounded like a statement of fact. “And your old quarters at Oak House are still as they were. We must find somewhere for you in the palace itself—and I don’t mean a dungeon! Now I shall let you go. If I know you, a small repast will be uppermost in your thoughts after that unfortunate misunderstanding.”

  With Shandie’s familiar quiet chuckle, the imperor bade his old friend farewell.

  2

  Far to the north, near the eastern end of the Pondague Range, a galaxy of twinkling campfires nestled within the Kribur Valley. The winter dark was raucous with guttural male voices; the crackle of firewood blended with horses’ whinnies and the scream of dying captives.

  The goblin horde under Death Bird had met up with the dwarvish army led by General Karax. Now the leaders were planning a combined advance southward, into the heart of the Impire. Four legions had been slaughtered in the last two weeks and there were no more in the vicinity. The road to Hub was unguarded; the capital lay naked and vulnerable as it had not been in centuries.

  The dwarvish end of the combined camp was an untidy city of tents, but goblins would sleep under the sky, spurning this puny southern cold. The junction between the territories was an uneasy border, for the two races had never worked together before and their ways were different. Goblins sneered at the mailed dwarves and wondered aloud how fast those little legs could run. Dwarvish nerves were strained by the noise of the goblins’ barbarous amusement. The alliance was fragile.

  Near the frontier dividing the two forces, but within one of the dwarves’ tents, Queen Inosolan of Krasnegar was attending to her toilet with the aid of a bucket of icy water. As s
he had lived in the same clothes for a week and had no clean garments to replace them, she had little hope of doing much about her disgusting condition. She could do nothing about her crushing exhaustion, either. She ached as she had never ached in her life. At fourteen, Gath and Kadie were withstanding the rigors of fatigue better than their mother, but all three were close to the breaking point.

  The tent was shabby and well patched, typically dwarvish. It smelled bad, but it was roomy enough. The floor was muddy grass, and there was no bedding. At least it was shelter—there would be snow tonight, likely—and there was even a dreary little lantern, which qualified as a luxury by dwarvish standards.

  “Mom!” Kadie squealed, peering at something she held pinched between her finger and thumb. “What’s this?”

  “If it’s what I think it is, darling, it’s a louse.”

  Kadie screamed and hurled the offending parasite from her.

  Then she burst into tears.

  Stripped to the waist, her twin brother Gath shivered over another bucket. He looked around briefly, before remembering that he was supposed to keep his back turned.

  “I’ve got fleas, as well,” he remarked wryly. “Want to trade?”

  Inos pulled her blouse closed, then enveloped her daughter in a tight hug. It made no difference. Kadie was working herself into hysterics. Not unexpected. Overdue, really.

  “Hush!” Inos said. “This isn’t going to help, dear.”

  “Lice! Oh, Mother! Lice! Ugggh!”

  “Hush! There are guards outside, remember. Lots of people have lice. There are lice in Krasnegar. And fleas.”

  “Bet mine are bigger than yours,” Gath said.

  “You keep out of this! Kadie, stop it! You’ve been very brave, dear, and I’m proud of you. And of Gath. But you’ve got to keep on being brave.”

  Kadie gulped stridently for breath, then resumed howling.

  Inos released the hug, took hold of her daughter’s shoulders, and shook her, hard. “Stop it!” she shouted.

  Shocked, Kadie fell into wide-eyed, shivering silence.

  “That’s better.” Hug again, tightly. “Now listen! We’re in great danger. You know that, and I won’t lie to you. All we can do is try to be as brave as we can. Think of your father and try to do what he would be proud of. Think of Eva and Holi, back home in Krasnegar. One day we’ll go home and tell them of all our adventures. But that isn’t likely to happen if you start behaving like a crybaby.” It wasn’t very likely if she didn’t, either, but one must not say such things. Innocent bystanders caught up in one of the worst wars in Pandemia’s bloody history had very poor prospects for survival.

  Kadie sniffled, dribbling tears on Inos’ shoulder. She was still shaking violently, and the cheek she pressed to her mother’s felt colder than the wash water.

  “That’s better,” Inos said. What else could she say? “I’m afraid real adventures are not as nice as adventures in storybooks. You’re not the Elven Queen of Giapen, dear! In real life people die or get hurt. They go hungry and they get lice. Now, look on the bright side.”

  “Is there a bright side?” Gath inquired from the background. It could have been Rap speaking. He sounded absurdly like his father when he managed to display his manly new tenor.

  Inos must remember to tell him so.

  “Yes, there is. First, Death Bird is our friend. He owes your father a lot, and he knows it.”

  “I killed his nephew,” Kadie whimpered.

  “Served him right! Don’t worry about that. I don’t think the goblins will hold that against you, dear.” They were more likely to take it as a challenge. Who would demand the next try at taming the killer virgin from Krasnegar? Don’t even think about that… “And second, we have magic. All three of us have magic. That’s very lucky.”

  “Three of us?” Kadie wiped her eyes and her nose with the back of her hand. “My sword? Gath’s prescience? You?”

  “I told you,” Inos said gently. She thought the fit was over. “Long ago, when your father helped me drive out the jotnar, he put an occult glamour on me. When I give royal orders, people have to obey me.”

  “Then why don’t you just order them to send us home?” Kadie sniveled.

  For one thing, goblins became so infuriated at being ordered around by a woman that they might easily react by killing her. Don’t say so.

  “I could, but how can they? I crossed the taiga in winter once with a band of impish soldiers. That was bad enough—I don’t want to try it with goblins. We’ll have to wait until summer and then go home by sea. Meanwhile, we have other problems, don’t we? Gath, what can you foresee now?”

  “They come for us soon,” Gath said. He was dressed again, his bony face pale in the gloom, and he was hovering nearby—longing to be included in the hugging and unwilling to admit such unmanly sentiments even to himself. He was a kid trying to be a man under conditions few men could have handled.

  In a sense, both Gath and Kadie were protected by their innocence. If they had any concept of how the world should be, they would not be withstanding this nightmare transformation of it nearly so well. All that two fourteen-year-olds really could understand was that this was not Krasnegar.

  Inos detached one arm from her daughter and pulled her son into the joint embrace. “But you’re sure about the imperor?”

  “Yes. Usually he recognizes me, too.”

  “What do you mean usually?”

  “Mean it’s fuzzy. Not certain. May not happen that way.”

  “Thank you, dear. And I tell Death Bird that his prisoner is Shandie?”

  “That’s solid enough.”

  Who needed a seer to know that much? How could Inos ever just stand by and watch the imperor being tortured to death without even trying to save him?

  “Then what happens?”

  “Then they argue.” Gath sounded grumpy. Either he disliked being questioned about his prescience or he was unsure of the fall of events.

  But again, who needed a seer? Death Bird and his green horrors might choose to torment a royal victim, but dwarves would never squander a valuable hostage. Argument was almost certain. How durable was the coalition? Suppose the argument became a quarrel?

  Gath could not foresee the outcome yet, apparently, or at least Inos found she could coax nothing more out of him. She wished his range was days or weeks, instead of only an hour or two.

  “How could the goblins have captured the imperor?” Kadie sniffed. “And how can they not know it?”

  “I don’t know, dear. Perhaps he was leading one of the legions they ambushed.” Inos did not want to speculate, even to herself. She did not think the imperor would ever lead a single legion, or even two. It was only three months since the old Emshandar had died, and Shandie ought to be in Hub, tending his inheritance. Why should he be here, in northwest Julgistro, hundreds of leagues from his capital? Could he have been on his way to Krasnegar? Gath had seen him in a vision; Rap had speculated that Shandie might similarly have seen Gath. She hoped the imperor had not been coming to consult his old sorcerer-friend Rap. That would mean that Rap, when he headed off to Hub, had failed to meet up with Shandie. Sorcerers did not make mistakes like that. The implications would not bear thinking about.

  Then she heard the guttural jabber of goblins outside, mingled with the subterranean rumble of dwarves. She was summoned to the feast.

  * * *

  The leaders of the coalition were still holding court within a burned-out shell of a barn, but there had been changes in the last couple of hours. The central bonfire roared even larger, and there were more chiefs in attendance. They were sitting in a ragged circle on boxes and barrels instead of the littered floor, which meant that dwarvish customs had prevailed over the goblins’. They alternated—mailed gray men and half-naked greenish men.

  Inos sensed a new antagonism. Weapons had disappeared, no one was smiling. The negotiations had not gone well, then.

  She was led to an unoccupied nail keg between Death Bird and Ka
rax. Possibly that was intended to be the place of honor. More likely, both wanted to know why she was there and neither trusted the other alone with her. Gath was given a patch of dirty floor on the opposite side of the fire, the smoky side. Kadie had not been included in the invitation. After some grumbling, she was allowed to remain, sitting in a corner by herself. Fair enough!

  Inos thought Death Bird looked tired, although the heavy tattooing on his face made it hard to read. His bulky torso and limbs shone greasily, and every now and again she would catch a stomach-turning whiff of rancid goblin unguent. He gnawed on a meat bone in ominous silence.

  The dwarvish general was older than she had realized. There was silver in the natural gray of his beard, and his rough-hewn face bore many tiny wrinkles, like cracks in weathered sandstone. Even for a dwarf, he was surly. His table manners were no better than Death Bird’s.

  Nor were hers, of course. She bit listlessly at her own hunk of meat, wiping her mouth with her hand and her hands on her robe. The fire crackled and sprayed sparks up into the night sky. There was very little talk anywhere in the company, and where there was, goblins were conversing across dwarves and vice versa, not to one another. Language was part of the problem, but distrust was playing a part, also. Again she wondered how long this unlikely coalition could survive.

  Gods, but she was tired! Every bone ached. Six days in the saddle!

  Eventually the diners began tossing their discards into the embers. She copied them with relief. Then she licked and wiped her fingers as best she could and waited for the greater ordeal to begin.

  She wished she could see Gath more clearly. Being an hour or two ahead of her, he could give her hints, were the fire not between them. Sometime soon she was going to be asked what her mission was. To confess that she had blundered into this disaster by sheer accident would leave her very little status to bargain with.

  At last Death Bird belched and threw away his bone. He shot an unfriendly glance past her at Karax. “Start entertainment?”