A Handful of Men: The Complete Series

by Dave Duncan

  A matter of importance? He still had enough premonition to sense a major turning point. Something was about to happen.

  2

  In a few minutes. Rap and Toom arrived at the Raim place, a simple cottage in a grove of willows, close by a stream. Archon Raim himself came hurrying out to greet the visitors, buttoning up his shirt. Toom spoke the ritual greeting; Rap picked up his cue and followed suit.

  Raim was little older than Thaïle, a comely youngster, husky by the standards of the dainty pixies. He offered chairs under the trees, he laid chilled mead and a dish of sugared fruits on the plank table. With obvious pleasure he introduced his good-wife Sial, who was even younger than he was, and of course a mundane. Rap sensed that their relationship was a very recent innovation, for they glowed at each other like honeymooners. She blushed and stammered, departing as soon as she decently could, and Raim smiled after her with eyes of gold.

  Rap sat back, crossed his ankles, and waited to hear what a matter of some importance might be. His admittance to the Accursed Land was a violation of an ancient tradition; such things did not happen by chance in a society of sorcerers. If he could be of use to the College, then perhaps he would have some scope for bargaining. Of course these two could drag every thought out of his head if they chose, but the use of power seemed to be restricted by custom and good manners in the College. The Keeper would not likely put much stock in etiquette, though, and the Keeper might have instigated this meeting.

  The archons inquired after his welfare, and Kadie’s. They asked about his journey and means of travel. They frowned when he told them of the dragons and the elves’ intransigence. They revealed nothing.

  Surprisingly, it was the older, stolid Toom who first grew tired of trivia and came to the point. He flexed his thick peasant fingers, as if longing for the feel of an ax or spade.

  “I understand, Goodman Rap,” he said cautiously, “that it was you who cut off the supply of magic some years ago?”

  “It was. Many years ago.”

  The archons exchanged glances.

  Young Raim said, “There is no chance that whatever you did could be reversed?”

  “Why should you want to see it reversed?” Rap asked coldly.

  “Oh, I don’t!” Raim protested, fumbling with his crystal goblet. “It’s just that the dwarf Zinixo has assembled a worldwide monopoly of sorcery. In the past it was the wardens’ ability to draw on Faerie for additional words of power that prevented anyone ever doing that”

  “So in a sense I am responsible for what has happened,” Rap admitted. “But I have very few regrets. I should do the same again, I think. The farming of the fairies was an unthinkable atrocity.”

  The archons stumbled over each other’s words in their haste to agree.

  “I was merely inquiring,” Raim explained awkwardly, “because I should not like to think of the Almighty, as he calls himself, ever being able to draw on that prime source, also. I was just hoping for that reassurance.”

  Oh, he was, was he? Or did the archons — at least these two — not share the Keeper’s absolute reliance on Thume’s immemorability?

  “I do not believe that even the Covin can recover what I removed.” Rap reluctantly concluded that he must take them into his confidence if he hoped ever to be taken into theirs. “As I understand what you told me, Toom, when the Holy Keef established the College, she moved it to another Thume.”

  Toom nodded. Then he nodded again, seeing the connection. “That is so. We exist side by side with the real world. The two lands are similar in big things — rivers and mountains, and so on. When Keef made the duplicate, the two would have been exactly the same, down to individual leaves and flowers. Except for the people, of course. You see, the new Thume was uninhabited until she moved her followers here. Now, after a thousand years, they have grown apart. Trees and so on have changed in different ways. The copy is no longer exact, you see.”

  Rap saw. “I did the same with Faerie. I moved the fairy folk to a land of their own, where they would be left in peace, not slaughtered like animals. I believe I located all of them, both free and captive. Unlike Keef, I then severed the connection.”

  Toom smiled, apparently pleased. “And by now the two lands will have diverged so far that no sorcerer would be able to locate the replica? Not even Zinixo and his gang!”

  “That is my belief,” Rap agreed, “and my hope. Even if he catches me and forces me to explain what I did, I do not think the fairies can be recovered.” He eyed the two men thoughtfully. “You agree?”

  They agreed. They did not seem disappointed, either, which was a relief.

  “More mead, your Majesty?” Raim said, offering the bottle. He was young enough to enjoy playing host to a king, even a very minor king in exile. “That is good news.”

  Perhaps it was, but it had not been the main business of the meeting.

  For a few minutes the three men sat under the dappled shade of the willows while only the brook disturbed the silence. Archons were the rulers of Thume, but they apparently lived very simply. The Raim Place and the Thaïle Place were humble abodes. Gold and jewels were irrelevant to sorcerers, multitudes of slaves unnecessary. Yet Thaïle washed clothes; Raim made his own furniture. As a king who detested pomp and liked to groom his own horse, Rap thought he approved.

  This time it was Raim who spoke up. “You are familiar with the occult protection around our land?”

  “In a general way,” Rap said. “I have never met its like, though.”

  “The barrier could only have been created by a demigod, for it requires powers beyond sorcery. It is a form of shielding, of course, concealing our use of power, yet more than that. Not quite an aversion spell, for that can be felt. Not a conventional inattention spell, because the existence of the land cannot be denied. The maps would not fit! No, it is mostly a matter of irrelevance. Everyone knows that Thume is here. No one cares. They know that it is empty, and they know it offers nothing of value.”

  Curious to discover what provoked this admission. Rap prompted: “And it works most strongly on those with the strongest power?”

  Raim frowned. “I never heard that!”

  “I do not think so,” Toom said. “Not directly. But those who have great power are accustomed to certainty. They tend to reject what they cannot sense for themselves. The ignorant will accept Thume more readily, you see.”

  Sagorn had been willing to believe in Thume!

  Rap felt as if he were playing a part in one of Kadie’s romantic dramas. His next line was obvious. “But sometimes people do enter. What then?”

  “Imps are notoriously nosy,” Toom agreed with a sigh, “and djinns rapacious. Mostly imps, though. We archons detect them — that is our function. If the matter is serious, the archon alerts the Keeper. He or she decides and usually… deals with them.” He paused uneasily. “Keepers, you see, have, er… take a long-term view.”

  What he meant was that they had few scruples. If every minute was a torment, a struggle against pain and magic overload, if life itself was a coat of fire, the foibles of mere humans would soon start to seem trivial.

  “Keepers tend to be ruthless?”

  “Er, well, yes.”

  Raim intervened. “We all do our duty. A few months ago, a party of djinns crossed into my sector, hunting goats. Her Holiness told me to evict them, so I sent them troubles with mountain lions. One was badly clawed, another broke a leg running across a rock slide. This is why Thume is known as the Accursed Land.” He grinned with boyish glee. He had enjoyed the sport.

  “Keepers are their own laws,” Toom said soberly. “Some have allowed whole armies to pass through Thume unmolested. Others have put shipwrecked mariners to death. The uncertainty is part of the mystery, you see.”

  “No one has ever been allowed to remain,” Raim added, “until now.” His gold eyes twinkled at Rap.

  And Rap was at a loss. He could not tell if this conversation was as innocent as it seemed, or if the two archons wer
e deliberately passing the stranger a message they dared not speak directly. Perhaps he was merely more worldly and cynical than they, jumping to unintended conclusions, or perhaps there was a scent of mutiny in the air. Delicate and childlike we may seem, they were telling him, but pixies have a strong sense of territory, which makes us ruthless toward trespassers. That observation let a man leap easily to a very interesting conclusion. The Keeper has refused to participate in your war against the Covin, but she will feel otherwise if our own borders are violated. Was Rap supposed to make that jump? Was he expected to go one jump farther There is a way you can provoke such an invasion? Surely not!

  “You trust this boundary spell to deflect the Covin?”

  Both archons nodded.

  “Even knowing that Zinixo will live for centuries? Even knowing that he may leave a successor as powerful as himself to rule for more centuries after him?”

  Again two nods, less vigorous.

  “I am delighted to hear it,” Rap said dryly. “What exactly was it that you wished to discuss?”

  Toom’s plain face registered uneasiness. He passed the question to Raim with a meaningful glance.

  “The caliph.”

  “The caliph? And what is my old friend Azak up to?”

  Astonishment! Dismay! Both men spoke at once.

  Rap threw up his hands, remembering that he was dealing with an alien culture, was speaking a language that he had been given by Thaïle’s sorcery, and was therefore liable to cause accidental misunderstandings. “I expressed myself loosely. My wife was married to him once. I have met him a couple of times. We are not on terms of affection, though. Frankly, I consider him a bloodthirsty barbarian.”

  The archons nodded their agreement vigorously.

  “Caliph Azak,” Raim said, “is presently set on invading the Impire. He is leading an army of about sixty thousand along the northern coast.”

  The population of Krasnegar was about five thousand. Rap whistled, trying to hide an amusement he knew he should be ashamed of. “Into Thume?”

  “Into Thume.”

  Thume had a problem! “And the Covin is watching?”

  Raim nodded glumly. “So the Keeper says.”

  Still Rap struggled against a smile. The outside world was a threat the pixies were warned against from infancy, and it had few worse horrors to offer than a djinn army. A djinn army would worry jotnar, let alone pixies. There was something oddly funny about so terrible a danger threatening so peaceful a people, like a lion squaring off against a rabbit. It would not be funny, of course, if Thume did not have the Keeper to defend it. The rabbit was armed.

  But this was the millennium, and perhaps the joke was over.

  “I comprehend your concern,” he said cautiously. “If you cause the army to disappear, then the Covin may wonder why and start to investigate? And if you just leave it alone —”

  “We cannot just leave it alone,” Toom growled. “The coast is inhabited. That is where the mundanes live, in the real-world Thume.”

  “You could — well, the Keeper could — transfer the entire army to this Thume, or some other plane altogether?”

  “The caliph’s own sorcerers would certainly notice, and likely the Covin, also.”

  “So you must turn it back,” Rap said. He thought that was obvious, but their reaction showed there was another possibility. “I have missed something?”

  The archons exchanged uneasy glances.

  “The Keeper…” Raim said. “I mean, we. We are considering the possibility of a, er, natural disaster.” He refilled the three goblets and then drained his.

  Toom cracked his big knuckles. “An artificial natural disaster, you see.”

  Rap maintained a skeptical silence. He had not yet fathomed the distribution of authority in the College. Possibly there was no fixed role, and it varied over the years. The archons seemed to do the day-to-day work of running the College and guarding the borders. The Keeper kept watch on the Outside — that much she had told him herself — but the Keeper must also have the last word in any disagreement Even eight sorcerers in unison could not stand up to a demigod, any more than a mage could resist a sorcerer, or a demigod defy the Gods. The Gods Themselves must obey the Powers.

  “There is a lake in the mountains,” Raim muttered. “A very large lake. There is a valley leading down to the coast”

  That made no sense to Rap. “I am sure Azak is too experienced with desert campaigning ever to pitch camp in a dry riverbed.” Even in Krasnegar flash floods were a hazard in the hills after summer storms.

  “A landslide,” Raim said. “A minor earth tremor could drop half a mountain into that lake.”

  Rap shuddered and took a drink.

  They were waiting for him to comment. “So the djinn army, or a fair chunk of it, would be washed away by a tidal wave? An inland tidal wave! Don’t you think the Covin might be just a teeny bit suspicious of this fortunate coincidence?”

  Neither archon replied. Neither was looking at him.

  He wondered if the Keeper was aware of this twitch of mutiny within her ranks. Or had she set this up? Somebody was having an attack of conscience — who? To wipe out an army with sorcery was a throwback to brutality not seen since the War of the Five Warlocks. And obviously it might alert the Covin.

  “What you are telling me, gentlemen,” he said — trying to omit any inferences about what they might not have said but had tried to imply — “is that your precious border spell may not be adequate protection if anything draws the Covin’s attention specifically to Thume? Zinixo himself is insanely suspicious, right? You are also saying that you cannot stop Azak’s army without using substantial sorcery, one way or another. Even if you just let him pass through, the Covin would lose track of him and wonder where he had gone. Have I summarized the situation accurately?”

  Toom nodded. “We are not practiced in such matters.”

  “Nor am I. I assume that you are about to ask me to wander over and kill the caliph for you?”

  Their shocked expressions were answer enough. Apparently the idea had not occurred to them.

  “We merely wished to pose the problem,” Toom protested, “and see if you had any suggestions to make. Your experience has been different from ours.”

  “I’ll not argue that,” Rap said. “Have you considered an assassination, though?”

  “He has sorcerers in his train to protect him.”

  “They may be as afraid of the Covin as you are.”

  Toom pulled a scowl that seemed oddly unsuited on his naive pixie face. “We are not afraid! The Covin does not know we exist and never will. The Keeper has assured us of this.”

  “Oh, of course,” Rap agreed. “Absolutely. Assassination?”

  The archons exchanged worried looks. If they conferred in the ambience, though, they managed to conceal their talk from Rap. They seemed almost more upset by the idea of a single cold-blooded murder than they had been at a massacre of an entire army. Murder was personal, massacre beyond comprehension.

  Raim said, “What good would assassination do? The army would just elect a new leader and continue its march.”

  Rap hesitated, but decided not to argue the point. He could try to explain to the pixies that djinns elected their leaders by elimination and that a new caliph would probably race back to Zark to stamp out a hundred rebellions. Even if the archons could understand that, though, Rap must then concede that the army might tear itself apart in the election. The losing half rampaging out of control into Thume would be even worse than the whole sixty thousand with Azak in charge. Cancel assassination.

  He ran his hands through his hair, pondering aloud. “That does suggest the right sort of answer — what you want is a purely mundane solution, using no sorcery at all, or very little. If Azak caught a fever, for example. But that isn’t too likely, is it? Not to order. How far away is he?”

  “Not very.”

  Rap took a sip of mead. What was his interest in this? The Covin was his foe �
� not Azak, not Thume. He wanted the College and the Keeper to throw their weight into the battle against Zinixo, and this situation might well trigger an attack on them that would force their hand. But the idea of a djinn army ravaging the pixies’ peaceful land was appalling. Djinns would be bad enough by themselves; if Zinixo fired them up to slaughter, they would destroy everything in their path. Rap could not just sit back and let such a disaster happen without trying to help somehow. He could not live with himself if he allowed that to happen. Why was he so cursed with scruples?

  Not that he could do very much, but perhaps he could try. The prospect of action was enticing. If he did achieve anything, then the Keeper would be in his debt. Whereas, if he refused to help… Could this be some sort of test?

  “You think Azak will camp within your death-trap valley tonight? I assume the lake is within the occult border and the irresistible campsite just outside?”

  Raim nodded — and grinned, looking very boyish again. “The Keeper warned me you might be smarter than you look.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Rap said. “Could the Keeper cloak me in a similar spell?”

  The youngster blinked gold eyes in astonishment. “Her Holiness can do anything she wants, I suppose.”

  “Then let me go and call on Azak tonight.”

  Both archons flinched.

  “And what can you say to him?” Toom demanded.

  Not much! “I could tell him to turn back, without saying why. He may heed my advice, because he knows me. If he won’t, then you can still drown him. I could try dropping a discreet hint to his tame sorcerers, also. What have you got to lose?”

  “Everything,” Toom said glumly. “What if his sorcerers have already been perverted by the Covin? I can’t see the Keeper taking such a risk.”

  Raim uttered a sinister laugh. “Unless she appointed him an appraiser.”

  “What does an appraiser do?” Rap demanded, not sure that he wanted to hear the answer.

  “Spies for the Keeper. But if he is discovered, then he bursts into flames.”