A Handful of Men: The Complete Series

by Dave Duncan

  He had wondered — in his periods of sanity — just how the deception was being worked. Did Emthoro really believe that he was Shandie and Ashia that she was her own sister? Or were the two of them merely puppets, willing or unwilling?

  Now he had the answer: They were puppets. They knew what was happening and could not prevent it, could not stop their lips and limbs from obeying orders that came from outside themselves. Their treason was not of their own choosing, but they were aware of it. They were to be pitied, not despised! They had looked sick, disgusted, terrified. Their mouths had spoken the words he had heard, but their expressions had been conveying totally different messages. The wildness in their faces suggested they might both be close to madness now, and that could hardly be surprising.

  Moreover, one of the coachmen had been a dwarf and another a jotunn. They had been imps at the same time. Two of the mounted guards closest to the carriage, although genuine imps, had displayed twin personas also. All four, in fact, must have been sorcerers, members of the Covin. That dwarf might even have been the Almighty himself.

  Umpily staggered away, trembling. Now he could see through the deceptions. That was Olybino’s doing! The warlock had given him defenses against delusion and told him to go away and record events as they truly were.

  Fine! From now on Umpily would see events as they really were. But when the fake imperor summoned him to a dinner party or a reception — as he still did sometimes and would probably do much more often in future, with the official mourning almost over — then Umpily was going to see both the Shandie illusion and the Emthoro reality inside it. How could he possibly conceal his own knowledge? There would always be sorcerers nearby, and he would not stand close inspection.

  He might even run into the Almighty himself in a corridor when the dwarf was being invisible. His reactions would give him away at once, wouldn’t they?

  Lord Umpily had spent most of his life at court. He had learned very well how to conceal his true feelings.

  But he wasn’t that good an actor!

  Was he?

  If he wasn’t, then he wasn’t going to last very long.

  Was he?

  4

  The ever-restless ocean had fallen strangely still; a sad wind sighed gently. Seaspawn lay hove to, hardly rolling, and even the inevitable creakings of a wooden ship were barely audible. The waning moon hung low in the night, painting a silver ladder on the Summer Seas. A single small lantern cast an orange glow over the priest’s breviary as he read the service. The hushed crew listened without a sound. Captain Ko-nu let his tears flow unashamed, knowing they would not be noticed in the darkness.

  Then the priest closed the book and doused the lamp. His black-draped form disappeared. After a moment’s silence, his voice continued.

  “Now we usually call for the eulogy.” He was speaking slowly and distinctly, so that his audience could follow his unfamiliar accent. “But you do not need anyone to tell you of your lost mate. Even I can testify to his quality, who only knew him for a few hours. I saw him bear his pain with courage beyond his years. I heard him freely forgive the hand that struck him, conceding that there was no sin to forgive.”

  Someone began to sob.

  “I tell you all,” the priest said, “that the Good has been increased because he lived, and that the Gods will scarce need to use Their balance to judge Wo-pu-Al. He goes to the last weighing as we shall all go there in our time; we shall do well indeed if our souls increase the Evil no more than his does, or prosper the Good as much.”

  Waves slapped gently at the hull. Ropes creaked.

  The priest spoke a soft cue. Gi-al’s sitar sounded a chord, and the crew began the final dirge. Ko-nu wiped his eyes to watch the muffled shapes of his two surviving sons lift the locker door on which their brother’s shrouded body lay, bearing it between them to the rail.

  “Farewell, brother,” Father Acopulo said loudly, in the last words of the Burial at Sea. “Go to the Gods; we shall follow in our time.”

  Mu-pu and Po-pu tilted the plank. The chant surged louder, hiding the splash as Wo-pu-Al departed on his last journey, one more victim of the merfolk’s ancient curse. The two pallbearers stood with heads bowed for a moment, then Mu-pu took the shutter and laid it on the deck.

  The priest moved over to them and laid his hands on their shoulders. Whatever he said was inaudible through the singing, but Ko-nu was confident that the words would be appropriate, and reassuring.

  Truly, Father Acopulo was a fine priest! Like any imp, he was prone to seasickness, but he had ignored it. He had spent many hours with the dying boy, and with his guilt-laden slayer, also. He had greatly comforted Wo-pu’s passing and had already worked a vast improvement in Po-pu, restoring his faith, easing his load of guilt. The family would not lose a second son.

  And now the imp had conducted a wonderfully moving service also. Finding him had been great good fortune.

  The Gods had been kind.

  Merely players:

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players:

  They have their exits and their entrances;

  And each man in his time plays many parts.

  Shakespeare, As You Like It, II, vii

  FOUR

  Impossible loyalties

  1

  Again the sun was setting in Qoble.

  A solitary crow, homeward bound to its nest in Thume, thumped its way high over the Brundrik River — flying, of course, as the crow flies. The two girls standing on the western bank joined hands and disappeared.

  * * *

  Time stopped for Thaïle as she ran into the sorcerous barrier. She gathered power to force an entrance and was accosted by a man she knew, Archon Raim. They faced each other in the still nothingness of the ambience. He smiled. She glared angrily, prepared to wrest her way by him, and then was stayed by the color of his emotions.

  “Welcome home, Thaïle,” he said softly.

  He meant it, too. He was square-shouldered and solid, but the muscle was all genuine; so was the thick curly hair and the smile. He had bright gold eyes. There could be no deception in the ambience, no concealment of mind or body. Thaïle had not been a sorceress long enough to grow accustomed to unrestricted perception, and the last time they had met, she had slapped his face.

  “Thank you.” Knowing that she was displaying embarrassment, she glanced at her companion, but Kadie was frozen in timelessness — as was the crow, suspended over the midpoint of the stream.

  “You are a sight for worried eyes,” Raim said. He was amused by her reactions, but he was also flattered by them, and starting to respond himself. He could not have been a sorcerer long enough to have forgotten how it felt to a newcomer. Without a word, he passed an apology for his earlier offense and accepted hers for the slap; the incident was mutually discarded.

  “I thought my return would be prophesied?” Thaïle said.

  He nodded, surprised. “Of course it is. So is your nonreturn. You have not seen the Revelations?”

  He was an arrogant young man, but perhaps he had much to be arrogant about. He was very young to be an archon.

  “I saw it. I was not allowed to read it.”

  “I am sure that will be permitted now. You will find it confusing.”

  “It mentions me.”

  He nodded again and laughed. “And many other people, also, most of whom have not happened. It mentions you twice by name. Once it prophesies that Thaïle of the Gaib Place will save the College. Elsewhere it says that Thaïle of the Leéb Place will destroy it. That is fairly typical.”

  “Oh.” Thaïle had assumed that prophecies might be obscure or ambiguous, but she would not have expected them to be directly contradictory. “Then why is the book important?”

  “Because it spends much ink explaining how the Chosen One is to be recognized. Because you seemed to fit about as many of the clues as could be hoped for.” He shrugged those husky shoulders. “Because even such apparent non
sense may turn out to be accurate. Much of the Revelations is very, very old, you see.”

  They could stand here in nothing forever, without wearying or losing a moment of their lives. Kadie remained a statue.

  “Old is good?”

  “In prophecy it is,” he said. “Mountains are best seen from afar, yes? Close to they are obscured by foothills or even trees. For great events, the oldest prophecies are the most reliable.” He chuckled, pleased by his own metaphor.

  “And it prophesies my return now?”

  “It also said you might not return, which would be disaster.” Raim hesitated, then grinned and went on, because he could not conceal the rest. “And you have not been having romantic adventures.”

  “That is important?”

  “Apparently. Several verses warn of the coming of a woman with child, as harbinger of Cataclysm. That was why…”

  Why my baby was murdered!

  Raim flinched and nodded. “Er, partly. Certainly why you were not brought in sooner.” With less brashness than usual he turned his attention to the petrified Kadie. “And you bring a guest? Only one? The Revelations say the Chosen of the Chosen One are to be granted succor — ‘Chosen,’ plural.”

  Thaïle glanced with relief at the petrified mundane, that piteous, ill-used princess. “She will not be harmed, then?”

  “No, I am sure.” He frowned, obviously intrigued. “Only a mundane? That sword is a cunning piece of work, but she has no power of her own. Pretty little thing… been through some hard times? How and why did you find her?”

  “It is a long tale, but she seems to be important, or her family does. Her father is the leader of the resistance to the Covin.”

  “They do not concern us!” Raim’s anger flared up in blue-white auroras. “What the Outsiders do to one another is no concern of Thume.”

  He was wrong — Thaïle was certain of that, although she did not know how. “That may not be true any longer. He was a demigod once. He knew five words.”

  The archon started nervously. Had he been standing in the real world and not the ambience, he would probably have glanced over his shoulder. In either case, there was no way to know whether the Keeper was listening. She almost certainly was. “Was a demigod? And now is not? How can this be?”

  “He told four of the words to the girl’s mother, the queen of Krasnegar, his beloved.”

  “Four? His beloved, and he stopped at four?” Perplexity writhed around him like purple flame. “That is contrary to all the lore of magic!”

  “Evidently. And the woman broadcast them to her assembled people, diluting them to background words.”

  Raim shook his head in bewilderment. “An incredible couple, then! It seems our wisdom is deficient. Such things should not be.”

  Thaïle could not resist the opportunity. “So perhaps these people do concern us?”

  He sighed. “Perhaps. I should not presume to instruct you, Archon Thaïle. Your power belittles us all. I am greatly comforted by it, and by your return.”

  His honesty reassured her. Raim was not jealous of her power, or frightened of it, as Teal and Shole had been.

  “Her Holiness is expecting me, I assume?”

  Raim laughed, and it was the equivalent of a warm hug. His pleasure at seeing her was completely genuine. “If I could keep your return a secret, I would. I shall humbly suggest that you be granted a few days to rest and relax. You know where to find each other when you are ready.”

  “And I am to be an archon?”

  “You are an archon! You overshadow us like an elm amid seven daisies. Of course you are an archon! But the daisies can cope without you for a while yet. The duties are not taxing, you know, or we should delegate them to someone else!”

  Whom do we serve? Yes, Thaïle would be an archon, because that was her duty. All pixies must serve the Keeper and the College, because the Keeper and the College preserved them all against the demons of the Outside. She had walked the Defile and seen the horrors of the War of the Five Warlocks. Now she had sensed the evil of the Covin and witnessed the Almighty’s atrocities. She was mighty, perhaps the mightiest since Thraine. With such a Gift, how could she refuse to serve?

  “Welcome home,” Raim said again.

  “It is good to be home,” Thaïle admitted.

  He nodded and lifted the occult veil to let her pass. Instantly sorceress and friend arrived at the Thaïle Place. Time lurched back to life.

  Kadie uttered a yelp of pleasure and approval at the sight of the trim cottage under the trees. She clapped her hands.

  Thaïle recoiled in dismay. Oh, it was the Thaïle Place, all right, a luxury version of the Gaib Place where she had been born, set amid much the same upland pines and scrubby vegetation, the same sort of rocky outcropping and taxing mountain air. No one had been near it since she left. To her eyes it was exactly right, to her heart all wrong. A pixie returning home should be overcome with joy, but this was not home. The Leéb Place, now — wattle walls on the banks of the great slow river, the heavy scents of the lowland, the hum of insects; heron and parrot and flamingo, and memories of Leéb… Her soul was rooted there, not here, but the Leéb Place was no more; she herself in grief and rage had blasted it to ashes. A pixie with no Place of her own was a flower with no stalk, a snail without a shell.

  A few moments later, far away at the Brundrik River, the crow settled contentedly onto its nest.

  2

  “The rascal is certainly mobile,” Tribune Hodwhine remarked cheerfully. “Wassailing down by the docks in Gaaze, getting married out in the fruit country, attending the races over in Forix — and that was all in the same afternoon! Must have wings.”

  He tossed the whole wad of reports into a basket beside his chair and took a long draft from a misted goblet. Even on a day so hot that the air was hard to breathe, a tribune lived very well in the XIIth’s permanent barracks at Gaaze. Officer quarters included private courtyards, like this one, with flowers and cool willows for shade and a small stream running through it. The ranks were convinced that their betters passed off-duty hours sailing paper boats to one another. That did not seem too incredible in the case of Tribune Hodwhine.

  Centurion Hardgraa paced from outer gate to trellis. The trouble was, in Qoble he had no real authority whatsoever. He would have more standing back in Hub — at least he would have until he was noticed by the Covin or the imposter imperor. Then he would be turned into a mindless tool, he supposed. He shivered. Still, that was probably no worse a fate than being a legionary grunt, and his duty would probably lead him to it, once he had recovered the rightful impress. He must return the child to court, no matter what sacrifice was required of him personally.

  He turned about and headed back to the gate. He could influence events only secondhand, through this aristocratic ninny. He had persuaded Legate Ethemene of the urgency of the case — lying like a camel trader, of course. Sensing scandal and political quagmires, the legate had quickly distanced himself, assigning Tribune Hodwhine of the IIIrd Cohort to “assist Centurion Hardgraa in making certain discreet inquiries in accordance with the imperor’s personal wishes.” On that slender scaffolding rested all of Hardgraa’s hopes and perhaps the future of the Impire until the end of time.

  “Do stop trudging up and down, old man,” the tribune said petulantly. “You’re wearing a rut in my lawn. Sit down, fergossake! Have another drink.”

  Very likely Legate Ethemene had selected Hodwhine to handle the Ylo affair because he was a Hathino and the Hathinos had been mortal enemies of the Yllipos for centuries. Hodwhine appeared to be completely unaware of that, or else he considered the feud obsolete. In a sense it was, since the old imperor had wiped out the Yllipos. Ylo was the only one left, and there was no effective way to carry on a feud with one man when that one man was — or seemed to be — the new imperor’s most trusted confidant. Now Hodwhine ought to be grabbing the chance to spike Signifer Ylo, but so far he had shown a lamentable lack of motivation.

  Hard
graa eased himself grudgingly into the other chair. He preferred hard stools, if he had to sit at all. As a matter of course he wore full uniform, chain mail and all, and he was sweating like an eel. He disapproved of Hodwhine’s nudity. The tribune had stripped down to a towel.

  “Now, old man,” Hodwhine said, prodding the document basket with an elegant aristocratic toe, “we have at least two dozen sightings, from all over the place —”

  “Thirty-one sightings, sir, of which eight were in Gaaze itself. The rest were almost all scattered at random, one to a site.”

  “Well, then! So weight of numbers suggests the rascal’s holed up here in Gaaze?”

  No, it didn’t. If Ylo were in Gaaze he would have been seen more often than that, but centurions did not contradict tribunes, or at least not directly.

  Hodwhine smirked inanely. “Better start interviewing all the pretty girls in town, eh? The lads’ll enjoy that!”

  Gods, the influence his family must have boggled the mind. Very few could have palmed off this dunce on the army as a tribune. Obviously he was not taking the Ylo affair seriously enough. Obviously he had some sort of sneaky admiration for the young lecher. Obviously Hardgraa must clear both of those obstacles out of the way promptly.

  “Start with the married ones, sir.”

  Hodwhine sniggered. “Finds those safer, does he? Someone else signs the nine-month report, what?”

  “That’s it, sir.” Hardgraa smiled.

  It was a calculated smile, because he very rarely smiled, and he had no real inclination to smile at this limp parody of an officer. But it was technically a smile and after a moment Hodwhine frowned at it.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Oh… Nothing, sir. Just thinking of something Ylo said once about… Well, no matter.”

  Hodwhine’s asinine face was already pink from the heat; now it turned slowly scarlet. “Are you suggesting…”