A Handful of Men: The Complete Series

by Dave Duncan

  She knew no one else in the College who clung to such mundane formalities. She knew no one who smiled so seldom without ever seeming surly.

  “I am Thaïle of the Thaïle Place and how are you planning to move the logs home?”

  “I’m not.” He unhooked his shirt from a twig and flipped it over one shoulder; he swung the ax up on the other. “You can have them all.”

  They began to walk.

  “Seems like a very foolish waste of effort.”

  He looked at her with eyes of somber amber. “I do it because I enjoy doing it. Why did you come?”

  “Thought we might eat supper together.”

  “You’ll cook?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  She laughed. “Because I enjoy doing it. You win.”

  He did not react. Winning had no importance to Woom, nor losing either. He took the College very seriously; he worked very hard. He was completely dedicated to his duty to the Keeper and the preservation of Thume. Nothing else had mattered to him since he walked the Defile.

  He was very ordinary-looking, was Woom. He could not have much growing to do now, if any. He was not tall, or burly, but he was neither short nor skinny, either. He was not handsome nor plain. He was just… well, ordinary. His powers were ordinary, too. He would never be an archon. She shivered.

  As they emerged from the trees, something flickered at the edge of the clearing—a goat? No, there was nothing there. Thaïle stopped and stared, and probed with magic.

  “What’s wrong?” Woom asked.

  “Thought I detected… Ah!” She had it. There was another Place in this clearing, another cottage close to Woom’s. The two were somehow offset, as if on opposite sides of a sheet of glass. That explained lots of things, like why such wonderful living sites had not been inhabited sooner and why no mundane ever blundered in unexpectedly. There must be another Place right beside hers, also. The whole College must be like that—in Thume and all over Thume, and yet not quite the same Thume. The Gates were just a pretense, obviously, nothing but admitting points for new recruits. The recorders would not need the Gates, they would just—

  “Excuse me,” she murmured, and stepped sideways. She transposed herself into the other clearing. There was the goat, and the cottage. Woom’s house had gone, of course. A small boy was washing a pot in the stream. He looked up in alarm. Even as his mouth opened, Thaïle stepped sideways back again.

  Woom’s eyes were a little wider than usual, but he said nothing.

  “I’m having a very strange day,” Thaïle said airily, and led the way to his door. There were two chairs there that he had made himself. They were heavy and solid compared to College furniture, but surprisingly comfortable. She had sewn a couple of cushions for them. She sat down with a sigh of pleasure.

  “I’ll clean up,” he said.

  “Sit and talk first. Care for a drink? Pineapple juice?” She made a pitcher and two beakers on the table.

  Woom stared at her thoughtfully, and then pulled on his shirt and sat down. She could not tell what he was thinking—

  Despair!

  She gasped. She had peeked at his emotions without meaning to. His impassive expression hid a horrible bottomless melancholy that she had never even suspected. She watched as he filled the beakers and passed one to her.

  “Woom! What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Very good juice.”

  He held her gaze, but now she could see how thin the shell was, how black the heart. Hopelessness.

  She had made cushions for his chairs. He had accepted them, knowing that her gift did not mean… How could she have been so cruel, so blind?

  “Oh, Woom! I never realized. I am sorry, very, very sorry!”

  “You’re a sorceress now?”

  “Just a mage. They gave me another word today.”

  He nodded. “You’re special, very special. We all know that. You know what they call you behind your back?”

  “I don’t think I want to. How long have you felt like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “About me.”

  He shrugged. “Since I first set eyes on you. Mist knew, of course. But it can’t be, can it? The rules won’t allow it.” He took a long drink of juice, as if rules settled everything.

  “You hid it very well. At first I thought you hated me.”

  “I expect I did. I hated everyone. You most of all, likely. The Defile showed me there were better things to hate.”

  She stared at her hands, but her powers could still see his impassive face and the desperate longing behind that mask, the longing to be wanted. Had that always been his trouble? Was that why he was so single-minded about serving the Keeper? Wanting to be wanted?

  “What do they call me behind my back?”

  “The Little Keeper.”

  That, too. Wanting to be wanted.

  “I wish I had known sooner,” she said. “Perhaps I could have helped a little. It’s too late now.”

  “Helped how?” he demanded. “That rule is never broken.”

  A mage did not blush. “Nothing.”

  “Bed, you mean? That isn’t what I want.”

  He believed that, she saw. Oh, poor Woom! Mist had confused love with sex, as if one was the same as the other. Woom thought they were totally separate, unrelated. Both men were wrong. She was certain of that, although she did not know how she knew.

  “And what’s different now?” he said harshly. “Oh—five words? We know five words between us, is that it? You’re afraid we’d start whispering words of power in each other’s ears?”

  His face was shinier now than when he’d been chopping wood. Oh, poor Woom!

  “I thought it hurt to share words of power?” he said.

  She had never thought about it. She thought about sorcery in other ways now, somehow, knowing things she had never learned. “It does. Four’s the limit.”

  “So Teal told us. Why? What’s so special about four words? Why not five?”

  “Too much power?” she said uncertainly. Suddenly red-hot hammers were beating in her head. “It would tear you apart. That’s some of it, but… But not all of it. It’s love, Woom. Not just sex, but love.” Love and sorcery, an unholy mixture, or a holy mixture perhaps, and together… The world swayed nauseously and her eyes felt ready to boil. “I can’t talk anymore!” she gasped.

  She let the elusive thoughts slide away, and her pounding headache eased. What to do about poor Woom? Shreds of forgotten talk floated into her mind, hints and innuendos…

  “Speak to Teal,” she said suddenly. “He can arrange for you to, er, go visiting outside the College. Meet girls.” People from the College always married mundanes; that was the rule.

  Woom stared hard at her. “I don’t want to go visiting outside the College. I don’t want to meet girls. I have a job to do here and I’m glad of the chance, and I wish we hadn’t gotten on the subject. You going to feed a hungry man or just talk?” From him, that was a rib-splitting joke.

  “I’ll magic something,” she said irritably, staring at the darkening clearing. Memories kept nudging at her mind, man memories. That might be why she had pried into Woom’s thoughts, or even why she had come here at all. Not Mist. Not Woom. Who? The new word of power in her head was trying to tell her something. Man. Man. Man? Leéb?

  Oh, what a strange day.

  “Thaïle?”

  “Mm?”

  “Why did Keef kill her lover?”

  “Huh?” She looked hard at Woom’s steady amber eyes and the inquiry in them.

  “Teal won’t tell. It’s the heart of the legend, but he won’t say. Or can’t. Maybe he doesn’t even know. Keef slew the man she loved. Why?”

  Love and sorcery…

  “I don’t know.”

  He was right, though. Why had the first Keeper slain her lover? That was the heart of mystery, and no one ever said why it had happened, why it had to happen. How strange that Woom should have seen that and she h
ad not. And he had more—

  “What’s the Keeper, Thaïle? What is she? Why is she different?”

  Chill and horror…

  “I don’t know that, either.” The pain came rushing back.

  “I think you do,” he said solemnly.

  “No! No, I don’t!” She didn’t want to know that. She would know that soon enough. Woom never would.

  Poor Woom in his sweat-soaked shirt! Just an ordinary adept, barely more than a mundane, destined at best to be a very ordinary sorcerer all his days.

  Behind him, the image of the Keeper was beckoning, transparent and faceless.

  “Come to me, Thaïle. You don’t need directions now.”

  “Yes. No.”

  Thaïle stood up. “Sorry, Woom. I mustn’t talk about such things. I have to go.” She walked away without waiting for an answer. He did not call out to her, as most men would have. She came to the Way and told it to take her to the Keeper, and in a moment she was gone from the Woom Place.

  4

  She did not know where the Keeper lived, but she did not have to know. No longer need she be familiar with a place to make the Way take her there. Now she could control the Way.

  The moon was rising. She could have managed as well in the dark, but she admired the beauty of the silver light angling down through gaps in the forest canopy. The trees became even larger, damp and monstrous. Soon the black jungle cut off the moonlight completely, but the Way went on. It was very narrow, very twisted, winding between the great trunks, a tunnel through foliage. There was no sound except the soft pad of dripping water.

  The Way ended at a mossy cliff, thick moss completely burying the stones beneath. There was a great building here, wrapped in jungle, but it was shielded. She left the white gravel and had to take several squelching steps over soggy humus to reach an alcove and an inconspicuous little door. The flap creaked open for her on corroded bronze hinges.

  Inside was brighter, and empty. The moon shone through vacant windows that still held a few remnants of stone tracery and stained glass to hint at their former glory. The ceiling was intact, though, preserved by sorcery, along with most of its ribs and carvings. The floor was a barren plain of uneven flags, but something had kept it clear of dust and leaves through all the silent centuries. The air was still, as if frozen.

  She knew what place this must be. In a far corner was power. It radiated up from the floor, but it was cold power, dark power. If this was the Chapel—and it must be the Chapel—then that was Keef’s grave. Thaïle resisted the urge to approach it, refusing the call.

  She had tried to go to the Keeper. Instead she had gone to the very heart of Thume, the resting place of the first Keeper. Did Keef rest? Remembering the wraith that had guided her in the Defile, Thaïle wondered. Her guess about that wraith might be wrong, of course—but she did not think it was.

  She looked around at the emptiness. At one end two doorways led out to a vestry and the main entrance. There was nothing else, no altar or holy balance, no lamps. The Gods had forsaken this place. The Good and Evil were not worshipped here.

  She had made no mistake. This was a test. Again she surveyed the curiously misshapen and asymmetric hall, although her mundane eyes could see only shreds of moonlight on stone. Two corners held doors; one held Keef’s grave. The fourth corner was empty.

  She recalled the duplicate cottage she had visited so briefly at the Woom Place. There had been two Places, set apart in the same Place. That was the answer, then. The Chapel was in the occult Thume. What occupied this space in the mundane Thume?

  She stepped sideways.

  The Chapel remained unchanged, and Keef’s grave, also, but now a cluster of furniture stood in that fourth corner a desk, a chair, a high shelf of books, a closet. A bed—why a bed? The Keeper never slept. Perhaps she sometimes rested. She was sitting at the desk now, waiting.

  Thaïle walked to her, half the length of the Chapel, thinking “What a horrible Place.” Not even a rug. As she drew near, she saw a thick book lying on the desk and recognized it. Beside it stood a slim silver vase holding a single white lily. That was sad.

  As always, the Keeper was shrouded in a dark robe; her cowled head was bent over her hands. Thaïle arrived and sank to her knees on the icy, greasy stone. The head lifted, but the face within was dark and shielded. Not even eyes showed.

  She felt strangely calm. “The Little Keeper” the novices called her, so Woom had said, and Woom never joked. She knew the book, although its voice was muffled now and its text concealed from her. Her name was in that book. She was important, she mattered! Perhaps now she would find out how, and why.

  “Your power is beyond belief,” the familiar rustling voice said. “Baze swears he told you only the one word.”

  “He did, ma’am.”

  “You have not learned a fourth elsewhere? No pillow whispers?”

  “No!”

  “Do not raise your voice to me, child! I can still apply discipline. You can suffer more and yet be useful. Mayhap another visit to the Defile is needful.”

  Thaïle shuddered. “Threats demean you,” she said with all the courage she could muster.

  “Insolence!” the Keeper said, but more gently. “You have yet much to learn, and time is short. Time is desperately short. Had you come to the College when you should…”

  Memories stirred.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” The hidden eyes were studying her. Doubtless the power she could sense was reading her thoughts. “So with three words you have been working sorceries. You clamored all over Thume like temple bells and some of what you did was true sorcery. And with only three words! There is no record of that since… for a long time.”

  “Since Keef?”

  “Since Thraine. Oh, Thaïle, Thaïle, do not be stubborn and willful! The Evil is almost upon us. The atrocities have begun, and now the Usurper stirs. The dragons are rising!”

  The last words prickled goosebumps on Thaïle’s arms. “Dragons?” she whispered.

  Yesterday Analyst Teal had sent her off by herself to read a dismal, gruesome book about the Dragon Wars. It had brought back memories of the Defile and being slain in torment by the heat of a dragon. She knew about dragons. Her flesh crawled. She jumped as a something began to hiss overhead, then realized it was a burst of rain falling on the roof, wind lashing the trees.

  “He is raising the dragons!” the Keeper cried, her voice breaking with horror. “From Gralb nest and Kilberran nest, even the few still at Haggan, and of course the Wurth blaze, the greatest of them all now. The worms brighten the sky. May the Gods be merciful!”

  “Coming here?”

  “No, not yet, but he plans a fiendish mischief with them, and great slaughter, a needless evil such as your mind will not conceive. Shall I show you? Close your eyes.”

  “No, please! Please don’t! I believe!”

  The Keeper sighed. “I hope you do. I hope I am reading the prophecies correctly, else I am about to make a grievous error.”

  “Error, ma’am?” Thaïle trembled at the thought of the Keeper—the Keeper!—making an error.

  “Error. My instincts tell me I am, and the auguries are black, yet the prophecies say I must do what needs be done. We shall see before the night is out, I think. You must go now and keep a Death Watch.”

  “No! I just became a mage. I cannot yet control the power you have given me.”

  The Keeper sighed. “One learning is as easy as two. In the Outside, when a sorcerer dies, he usually bequeaths all his words at once. Men go from mundanes to sorcerers in an instant. Do you wonder that so many go mad?”

  Thaïle did not want to go mad. She was not supposed to answer the question, though.

  “Your Faculty will sustain you,” the old voice murmured. “Go back to the Way. Raim will call you on it”

  “Raim?”

  “An archon. He is keeping the old man alive until you get there.”

  Thaïle rose unwillingly, very shaky.r />
  “And child!”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Be very careful he tells you only one word!”

  Five words destroyed.

  Thaïle tried to speak, and failed. She went. The Chapel was empty, the Keeper and her furniture gone. She scurried off to the door, ignoring the lament from Keef’s grave.

  5

  Inos emerged from the front door of the inn and paused to look up and down the main street of Highscarp. It was a quaint little place, reminiscent of Krasnegar in some ways. The moon shone peacefully over rooftops; candlelight and firelight gleamed in the windows. The night air was wonderfully refreshing after the heat and stink of the tavern.

  A party of legionaries had come out ahead of her and was now making its way unsteadily along the road, but there was no one else in sight. She knew that gnomes tended to be nocturnal, and she had expected to see some of them around. This was gnome country, after all, even if it was also part of the Impire.

  Behind her, the raucous drunken singing rose to a crescendo in the chorus of “I Loved a Hot Little Gnome.” The chorus was obscene, but most of the verses were even worse. As a hostelry for gentlefolk, the Imperor’s Head left much to be desired. Just about everything, in fact.

  She had spent the whole day in a bumpy, smelly, grossly overcrowded stagecoach, listening to meaningless chatter from witless wives of Imperial officers and fending off their prying questions. Shandie and Raspnex had ridden on the roof, and suffered even more, no doubt. All the male passengers had been required to walk up the hills. Even the Impire could not build straight, flat roads across Guwush.

  Even the Impire could not guarantee the safety of its highways there, either. The stage traveled with a mounted escort.

  And after all that, the Imperor’s Head—four women to a room, and a thousand fleas apiece. The food could only have been cooked by gnomes—carrion soufflé, fricassee of offal. In retrospect, Dwanish had been a pleasant vacation.

  She would go uphill, she decided.

  The door flew open and a man almost cannoned into her.

  “Inos!” It was Shandie.

  Wearing a sword.