“And would you like to make provision for any of your staff, my lord?” Anrel asked. “Your man Hollem, perhaps?”
“Oh, they won’t honor anything I might write,” Allutar said, smiling wryly. “I am the monster who poisoned the Raish Valley with the blood of innocents; had you forgotten? No, even if by some miracle I survive, my property will go to the emperor’s moneylenders and mercenaries; that conclusion is foregone. I regret to say that poor Hollem must fend for himself in this valiant new empire you and your friends are building.”
Anrel could think of no useful way to respond to this—Allutar was obviously correct about what would become of his possessions, and arguing about Anrel’s role in events would go nowhere useful.
“You are coming with us, aren’t you?” Lady Saria asked.
Lord Allutar looked at Anrel, then back at Saria. “That may not be up to me to decide, my dear.”
“But you’re my fiancé!”
“I am also the man who condemned their daughter and sister to the gallows,” Allutar said with a gesture toward the three Lirs. “That would make for an uncomfortable ride, don’t you think? And there are certain issues lingering between your cousin and myself, as well.”
“But we’re to be married!” Saria wailed.
“My dear, I think you would be most unwise to wed me at this point,” the landgrave replied.
“But … but …” Saria looked desperately around the room.
Nivain looked from one to the other, then said, “For your sake, Lady Saria, we would tolerate this man’s presence.”
“Speak for yourself, Mother!” Perynis snapped.
Lord Allutar held up a hand. “Peace,” he said. “Let us wait and see what Lord Blackfield says before we commit ourselves. It may be he can accommodate no more than the four we have agreed upon.”
“Yes,” Anrel said. He might have said more, but just then Ollith returned with Lord Dorias’s writing desk, interrupting the conversation.
A moment later, while Lord Dorias was carefully composing a document transferring his worldly goods to Master Ollith Tuir, Perynis suddenly said, “I hear horses.”
Anrel had been whispering with Tazia in the corner, discussing irrelevancies and carefully avoiding the subject of their possible escape; now he turned and bent to peer out the window, and saw the familiar blue and black carriage rolling into Wizard’s Hill Court.
“It’s Lord Blackfield,” he said. “He’s here.”
“Then by all means, let us greet him,” Lord Allutar said, rising. The sword was still in his hand.
Lord Dorias looked up from his lap desk. He hastily scribbled a few more words, then signed his name with a flourish. “Everything in this house is now yours, Ollith,” he said. “I would give you the house itself if a commoner could own land, but I have granted you a lease in it, insofar as I may.”
Ollith bowed, and accepted the desk and document. “Thank you, my lord,” he said.
A moment later the party poured out the big front door—Anrel and Tazia, Nivain and Perynis, Lady Saria and Lord Dorias, and finally Lord Allutar—to find Harban holding the door of the coach, and Lord Blackfield stepping out.
“Ah, I see you are here,” the Quandishman said as his feet landed on the cobbles. “Excellent! And Lord Allutar! This is a surprise.”
“Barzal,” Allutar said, with a nod. “A pleasure to see you again.”
Lord Blackfield grimaced. “While I am pleased to see you as well, my lord, I regret to say that I cannot spare even a moment for casual conversation. I passed a large party comprised of watchmen, wardens, and deputies on the way here, and I believe their destination to be this very court. They cannot be more than five minutes behind me. I think it would be wise for all of you to board the coach immediately.”
Glances were exchanged, and Nivain and Perynis were herded aboard, followed by Lord Dorias. Lady Saria, though, paused with her foot on the step.
“Allutar,” she said, “you are coming?”
Lord Allutar looked at Lord Blackfield.
“I will need to ask that you put away that sword,” the Quandishman said.
Lord Allutar shook his head. “No, my lord,” he said. “I am not coming.”
“What?” Lady Saria stared at him. “But there’s room!” She gestured at the coach’s interior. “We can all fit!”
“We can all squeeze into the carriage, yes,” Allutar said, “but then what? I am deemed a traitor to the empire, my dear—indeed, my name was first on their list. They will not rest until I am found, and I will be found, whether here in Lume today, or in Ondine a season hence. They have my true name, Saria; they can find me whenever they please. With the aid of any competent magician, be he sorcerer or merely a witch, they can compel me to obedience, and send me to the scaffold of my own volition—as I did to this woman’s sister, and to Master Murau’s friend Amanir tel-Kabanim. I cannot possibly escape, not for long. Better to die here and now, with a sword in my hand, than in a noose a few days from now.”
“But … but, Allutar!” Saria cried.
“Go, my dear,” Allutar said gently. “I free you from your betrothal.”
“I don’t want to be freed of it!”
“You will be free of it soon enough in any case, as death frees us all. Now, get aboard that carriage, lest you all perish.”
“But they know our true names, as well! If you can’t escape, how can we?”
“Your crimes are trivial in comparison to my own, my dear,” Allutar said. He smiled wryly. “Ask Master Murau, and he will be glad to recount to you the full extent of my wickedness. I doubt these revolutionaries will trouble themselves to hunt you down. Were Lord Blackfield to take me back to Quand, though, that might well provoke yet another war between our nations.”
Saria turned hopefully to Lord Blackfield, but before she could speak, he shook his head.
“I can shield you against your true names to some degree, but only somewhat,” the big Quandishman said. “I fear that Lord Allutar is correct about his own dire reputation, not merely here, but in Quand, as well. While we care nothing about his politics, he is a black magician, by his own admission, and that is not something my people tolerate.”
Allutar gestured theatrically. “There, you see? I have wrought my own destruction.”
“I won’t leave you!” Lady Saria wailed.
“Your father needs you,” Lord Allutar replied quietly. “Go with him, see him safe.”
“Get in, my lady,” Lord Blackfield said, giving Lady Saria a gentle push. Then he turned to Anrel. “And you, sir?”
Anrel looked at Tazia. “I will do as my beloved chooses,” he said. “If she stays, I will stay. If she goes, I will go.”
Tazia looked at the coach. “There is room for both of us?”
“I believe there is, yes.”
“Anrel? Shall we go?”
And now, at the final moment, Anrel hesitated. He glanced at Lord Allutar, with his bandaged head and bare blade. “I wish I could do more,” he said. “I wish there were some way to put everything back as it was.”
Lord Allutar laughed bitterly. “You are scarcely alone in that,” he said. “Everything I have done, I have done to maintain the old order and my place in it, and at every turn I have failed, and done more to harm my cause than to advance it. I sacrificed that baker’s son to feed my people, and starved them instead. I murdered your friend, Lord Valin—yes, my lady, I confess, your cousin was right, I deliberately murdered your father’s fosterling, and I did it so that his pernicious beliefs would not spread, and they spread all the more swiftly and effectively as a result. I hanged a witch in Beynos to maintain the dignity of my position, and instead you, Master Murau, convinced a thousand commoners that I was a coward and a bully. Had I truly believed completely in the rightness of my cause, had I been as utterly convinced of its inevitability as I claimed, I might not have striven so hard to defend it, and might not have damaged it so severely. The Father has seen fit to cast me down for
my pride, and while I very much wish it were not so, I do not close my eyes to the truth. You, Anrel Murau, have been the implement the Mother and Father wielded to destroy me, and you have finished the task they set you. Go on to Quand, then, and see what new task they may set for you there!”
Anrel met the landgrave’s gaze. “I pray, my lord,” he replied, “that if I have indeed been the tool of the divine pair, that they are now done with me entirely, and will cast me aside. I have had enough of unrest and anger.” He turned to his beloved. “Come, Tazia—let us both go to Quand.”
With that, the two clambered aboard, Lord Blackfield close behind, while Harban hurried to the front of the coach and mounted the driver’s seat. A moment later the harness jingled, hooves clattered, and the carriage jerked into motion, turning tightly around the narrow confines of Wizard’s Hill Court and proceeding out under the watchmen’s arch onto the avenues of Old Heart.
They had scarcely made the turn when Anrel heard Harban shout a warning; then the horses broke into a trot, and the coach rattled forward at an alarming speed, bouncing wildly across the cobbles.
Anrel lowered a window and leaned out, peering through the dust and looking back the way they had come.
A mob was marching up the avenue toward Wizard’s Hill Court, but not a mob of mere citizens. Anrel saw a dozen men in the red and gold livery of the City Watch, and half as many more in the black coats and hats of wardens. Others wore ordinary clothes, but sported red armbands. Several of them were shouting, though Anrel could not make out over the rattle of the carriage what they were saying.
At the head of this forbidding company marched Garras Lir, brandishing his wooden club.
Then out from the shadows of the watchmen’s arch strode Lord Allutar, sword gleaming in the afternoon sun. He stopped in the center of the avenue and turned to face the advancing crowd.
The mob stopped, deterred for the moment by this one man, and again Anrel heard unintelligible shouts.
Then the carriage swung around a corner, and the entire scene was lost behind the stone facade of a candle-maker’s shop.
Anrel hoped that Lord Allutar would receive the clean and glorious death he had wanted, and in a moment of spite he also hoped that Allutar would take Garras Lir down with him.
Whatever was to happen, though, Anrel would not see it. He might never know how the confrontation ended.
There could be no doubt, though, that he had seen the last of Lord Allutar Hezir, landgrave of Aulix.
36
In Which Anrel Murau Departs the Capital
There was little conversation in the brief ride to the Morvanile Gate; Lord Blackfield was too occupied with preparing a seeming that would get the entire company safely past the guards, and the others were too stunned by the course of events.
The gates had indeed been closed, and the city sealed off; soldiers in red and gold stopped the coach and demanded Lord Blackfield identify himself before allowing Harban to approach the tunnel. No one inside dared say a word as the Quandishman presented his papers to the officers of the City Watch and attested to the entirely fictional identities of his passengers. Anrel was presented as a footman by the name of Lurdon Zuai, and names were likewise invented for the three housemaids, the cook, and the butler who had been Tazia, Perynis, Saria, Nivain, and Dorias. Lord Dorias stirred from his gloom briefly and seemed on the verge of protesting when Lord Blackfield called him a butler, but a glare from Anrel and a tug at his sleeve from Lady Saria silenced him.
Harban, of course, was presented in his true identity, though his duties were given as simply “driver,” with no mention of the various other services he had provided.
One of the guards seemed suspicious at the size of the household, particularly the number of females, but another told him, “I’ve heard of the Blackfields—they’re great lords in Quand, very wealthy. Powerful sorcerers, as well. They can afford to travel with all the servants they want.”
“But three housemaids for a few rented rooms?”
The guard shrugged. “Sorcerers have uses for women, even more than other men. Haven’t you heard about Lord Koril’s harem? If this Blackfield wants to call all his women housemaids, it’s no business of ours.”
Lady Saria flushed red at that, but said nothing.
In the end, the Quandishman’s papers and words and sorcery were sufficient, and the coach was allowed to pass. The company remained silent as they rolled through the tunnel and emerged into the late-afternoon sun beyond. Indeed, even when they had successfully passed through the city wall and were on the road west, no one felt any need to speak for some time.
It was Perynis who first broke the silence. “I hadn’t known—” she began. Then she stopped and cleared her throat.
“Known what?” Saria asked.
“That sorcerers—that they used …” Her voice trailed off.
“Sorcerers can draw power from sources other than earth and sky,” Lord Blackfield said. “Lord Allutar drew on blood and death, as you know—my people call that black magic. There are other sources, as well, and some magicians do indeed keep women available for that purpose.”
“Some witches use that,” Perynis said. “I didn’t know sorcerers did.”
That led to a discussion of the technicalities of magic. Until then, it had not entirely registered with Anrel that everyone in the coach was a magician of some sort, but of the seven, three were witches, three were sorcerers, and he himself was … whatever he was.
They slept that night at an inn in the village of Varth, scarcely out of sight of the capital’s towers, but made better time on subsequent days. Rumors of chaos and horror in the capital followed them, and sometimes ran ahead of them, so that whenever they were not traveling they spent much of their time professing to curious locals their honest ignorance of what had actually happened in Lume.
It seemed that the initial round of arrests had missed several of its intended targets—rumor had it that about half a dozen of those named in the Grand Council had not been apprehended. Orders to watch for fleeing traitors reached the watchmen of every town along their route. Only Lord Blackfield’s sorcery and Anrel’s quick tongue saw them safely through four encounters with sentries and authorities of various sorts.
By the time the coach reached Kallai the empire was ablaze with open rebellion; the Joint Committee had assumed full control of the entire country. The margrave of Kallai had closed his city’s gates, accepting no authority but his own until matters were more settled, but Lord Blackfield was able to talk his way past the walls by asserting his status as a Quandish Gatherman, and, Anrel suspected, by the judicious use of both sorcerous persuasion and mundane bribery.
The homunculus-driven coaches that normally carried passengers across the Dragonlands from Kallai to Quand were not available, at the Margrave’s direction, but that was of no matter; Harban knew the route, and Lord Blackfield’s sorcery was able to keep the dragons at a safe distance. Guarding the coach against the great beasts required Lord Blackfield to ride atop the vehicle and left him exhausted, but another day saw them safely across the wasteland in Redcliff, on the Quandish border.
Lord Dorias and Lady Saria seemed utterly miserable to be outside the empire, but the rest of the party studied the foreign landscape with interest. For the most part, Anrel found it disappointingly similar to the terrain in Walasia; there was no sign of the infamous Quandish mists.
On the other hand, for the first time in his life he heard ordinary people speaking Quandish outside a classroom. He and Lord Blackfield began tutoring the others in the basics of the language, even while Anrel learned to correct his own pronunciation to match the tongue as it was actually spoken.
Two more days from Redcliff brought them to Ondine, the Quandish capital, and to Lord Blackfield’s town house there.
It was there that Anrel found himself introduced to assorted Quandish dignitaries, all of them eager for news of the Walasian capital. He was also startled to also encounter other Walasi
an refugees; apparently his own adventures had not been as unique as he thought.
“What will you do now?” one young Quandish noblewoman asked him. “Now that you’re safe.”
The question caught Anrel off guard; he had not given the matter much thought. Since receiving Delegate Gluth’s warning in the Aldian Baths he had been too busy at first with simply staying alive, and then he had been caught up in the miniature society of the crowded coach, discussing the different varieties of magic and the intricacies of the Quandish language. That had left him no time or energy to make long-term plans.
He started to say he did not know what he intended; then he stopped. He looked across the room at Tazia, who was similarly beset, yet remained calm, polite, and to Anrel’s eyes, radiantly beautiful.
“I am going to marry the woman I love,” he said. He smiled. “And after that, we shall see.”
Tor Books by Lawrence Watt-Evans
THE OBSIDIAN CHRONICLES
Dragon Weather
The Dragon Society
Dragon Venom
LEGENDS OF ETHSHAR
Night of Madness
Ithanalin’s Restoration
Touched by the Gods
Split Heirs (with Esther Friesner)
THE ANNALS OF THE CHOSEN
The Wizard Lord
The Ninth Talisman
The Summer Palace
THE FALL OF THE SORCERERS
A Young Man Without Magic
Above His Proper Station
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ABOVE HIS PROPER STATION
Copyright © 2010 by Lawrence Watt-Evans
All rights reserved.
Map by Rhys Davies
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
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