The change in the weather astonished him, when he stopped to think about it.
Yes, it had been growing cooler for weeks, but this intense cold and heavy snow still seemed to have arrived suddenly.
He felt sorry for anyone trying to make their way down the cliff face in this weather.
But then, such storms were probably perfectly normal in the Uplands.
Not in Barokan, though—or at least, they hadn’t been. Under the previous few Wizard Lords a snowstorm like this would be permitted in Barokan only at night, if at all, and if one tried to spill over the cliffs, it would have been blown back to the east.
But Artil wanted to put an end to magic. With him holding the eight talismans—no, the nine talismans—and with several of the Chosen dead, so that some of the nine didn’t work, the snow was free to do as it pleased. If it was snowing this heavily here atop the cliffs, it must be snowing down in Winterhome, as well.
It probably wasn’t so cold down there, though.
Sword hadn’t expected his stay in the palace to start like this; he had assumed he would have a few days of mild weather while he was settling in. He had planned to look around the grounds, see whether there was anything useful to be gleaned from the gardens or the surrounding plains.
This year’s winter, though, had started with a bang. Snow and wind and bitter cold, so early in the season! It couldn’t last, could it?
For now, though, it seemed as if the best thing he could do was just hole up and wait for the storm to blow itself out. He adjusted his pack, hefted his spear, then returned to the salon, retrieved his candle, and headed back down to the kitchen.
Once there he set his candle in a sconce, lit a second candle as well, and decided it was time for breakfast—he had been awake and active for hours, but had put off eating. He needed to make his limited supplies last; he couldn’t simply eat whenever he chose. Now, though, seemed a reasonable time. He dug a strip of jerky from his pack, then found a mug in one of the cabinets, and tried one of the water taps above the big sink.
The stuff that emerged was fiercely cold and had a faint brownish tinge, but it was water. He couldn’t imagine a functioning well on the edge of a cliff like this, and there was no visible pump, so he assumed there was a cistern somewhere—probably on the roof, judging by the water’s temperature and the speed with which it flowed. He was relieved that the cistern hadn’t been drained.
At least, it hadn’t been completely drained; that off color and the slight metallic taste to the water might, he thought, indicate that the water was low. He would want to check on that at some point.
He took his first bite of jerky.
As he had discovered on the journey west, the stuff was tough, chewy, and dry, but it wasn’t bad. It was much drier than ordinary smoked ara, having been kept over the fires much longer, and it was a little spicier than any of the recipes for fresh ara he had encountered. He thought stewing it, as some of the Uplanders had for their meals on the trail west, rather than eating it dry, might be a good idea.
Of course, he didn’t have any vegetables for stew. He had jerky, cheese, and water, and there might be wine in some of the locked cabinets, but that was all. He was going to eat a very dull menu for the next three months.
But he had food, he had water, he had shelter—he thought he would get by well enough. All those stories about how impossible it was to survive the winters up here had begun to seem absurd; if one lived in a tent, winter anywhere would be difficult. If the Uplanders had bothered to build themselves clan houses up here, rather than using the guesthouses down in Winterhome, they could have managed, he was sure.
Of course, if they had built permanent structures, they couldn’t have followed the flocks of ara very well. Tents could be folded up and carried when a flock decided to relocate in search of better eating; houses could not.
Still, if they had built their own winter housing, instead of relying on the guesthouses in Winterhome . . .
Well, the world would have been very different. Theorizing about it could wait; he had his own survival and comfort to attend to.
His next need, he thought, was bedding, but he was not in any great hurry; it was still morning, so he had plenty of time. Instead of going back upstairs he unpacked his meager possessions; there was no reason to keep everything jammed into his pack. That done, he took an inventory of the candles, so that he could figure out how many he could use at a time.
The results were not particularly encouraging. What had looked like a generous supply for the kitchen in one of the cabinets had turned out to be only about forty candles. There were stubs in some of the sconces and chandeliers, but those were mostly quite short, and not all the various candle-holders were occupied.
The stock in the cabinet was serious thick candles, not the elegant tapers that the Wizard Lord used at his table, but even so, Sword doubted that each would burn for more than two days; if he was going to live a subterranean life here, without the sun, he needed enough candles, or enough lamp oil, to last the entire winter.
He had yet to see any oil anywhere in the palace. There were more candles upstairs, where he had gotten the one he had carried down in the first place, but he didn’t know how many were there.
Still, even if his supply proved hopelessly inadequate, it wasn’t a crisis. It would just mean he needed to spend some of his time upstairs, taking advantage of natural light. Right now the idea was un-appealing, but surely when the weather moderated it would be no great hardship.
Any idea he might have had of setting out a dozen candles and lighting the kitchens properly was out of the question, though; he simply didn’t have enough candles.
He had not expected the Wizard Lord’s staff to have been so thorough in clearing away supplies at summer’s end. He had assumed that most of the unused goods would have been left here, to be used or discarded next summer, but apparently someone in charge had made sure that didn’t happen. The consumables had been consumed, or sold, or taken back down to Barokan, leaving many of the palace’s bins and cupboards bare.
That made his life more difficult. He sighed, and headed upstairs, past the ground floor to the next level, where the guest bedrooms were.
The cold air on this level seemed to stretch the skin tight across his face, and he could feel his breath condensing in his beard as he walked down the corridor—the Summer Palace was simply not designed to keep cold out. A glance out the window at the end of the passage showed him snow swirling down, and he knew it must be far colder outside, but still, the chill was startling.
He had not come to watch the snow, though; he had come to find himself some bedding. He chose a bedchamber door almost at random; fortunately, it wasn’t locked. He opened it and stepped in, to find the mattress bare in its frame.
He frowned, but looked further, and found sheets and blankets neatly folded away in a linen press.
At least, he told himself, no one had taken the linens, as they had the firewood and food.
Before continuing with his housekeeping tasks, he took a moment to look out the bedroom window to the south, a bit more closely than the cursory glance he had given the corridor window. The snow was lessening a little, he thought, though the glass was still cold to the touch and ice was beginning to form along the eastern edge; the wind still whistled around the palace, and a fierce chill seeped into the already-cold room around every edge of the casement.
Peering out through the whiteness, he discovered that he was high enough up to see over the garden wall now. In the distance he could make out figures moving into the triangular canyon that led to the cliff trail, but he could also see that there were still pitched tents nearby; presumably some people were waiting out the storm, while others pressed on.
He would not want to climb down that narrow trail in such weather, but the Uplanders presumably knew what they were doing. Surely, this wasn’t the first year the snows had caught them here—in fact, from what Whistler had said when he criticized Sword’s tradi
ng for jerky, Sword knew it wasn’t the first time.
He wished them all well—and some part of him wished he were with them, on his way back down to the familiar surroundings of Barokan.
But he couldn’t do that while the Wizard Lord still reigned. Here he was, and here he would remain, and he needed to make himself as comfortable as possible. He heaved the bare mattress off the bed, and hoisted it onto his shoulders.
Although it was a very generous mattress, thick and heavy, after carrying the two ara this was nothing.
He hauled the mattress down to the kitchen, stopping frequently along the way to adjust his hold. Maneuvering it down the dark stairs had been a challenge, as he had to set his candle in a wall-sconce halfway down to light the way, and then be very careful not to let the mattress get too close to the open flame as he manhandled it down the steps.
He reached the kitchen without incident, and when he was safely in the dim confines of his new home he set the mattress on the floor in a corner that seemed a bit warmer than most of the room.
That done, he yielded to hunger and thirst—he got another cup of water and ate another few bites of jerky, but resisted the temptation to start on the wheel of cheese. Then he went back upstairs for the bedclothes.
He didn’t want to waste daylight, so after delivering the sheets and blankets to his chosen corner of the kitchen he went back upstairs, searching for candles and wicks and lamp oil, and anything else that might be useful.
He found the servants’ quarters; those were on the top floor. Most were small bare rooms lit by small clerestory windows, furnished with simple beds and nightstands. Each nightstand held two or three candles; he gathered those up and shoved them into the pockets of his vest.
The top floor also provided access to the cistern, which was indeed on the roof. Sword opened what he had thought was a storage closet, and found a narrow ladder in a tiny empty room, leading up to a trapdoor; when he climbed it and pushed up through the trap, he found himself in a narrow walkway between a rough wooden wall and a long row of closed shutters. At one end the walkway was blocked by a huge brick column—a chimney, Sword thought. At the other end it turned a right angle. Grayish daylight leaked in through the slats of the shutters, and bitterly cold air whistled through as well. Several pipes emerged from the wooden wall next to that massive brick chimney, then turned right angles to head directly down through the floor—or really, looking at it, through the roof; Sword was standing on tarred tin.
Shivering, Sword peered into the cracks in the wall, and thought he could see metal—more tin, he guessed, lining what was surely the palace cistern. He rapped on the side of the tin-lined tank; the hollow sound this produced convinced him that it was indeed almost empty. He knelt, tapping his way down the wall, and did not ever find a level where he could be sure he was hearing water, rather than air, on the other side.
That was not good, but it made sense that the cistern would have been drained, as a commonsense precaution; the water in it would undoubtedly freeze, if it hadn’t already, and if there had been any significant amount, the expansion of the ice would have strained the entire structure.
A little water obviously still lingered in the pipes, and the warmth from that chimney might help keep some of the remaining water in the cistern from freezing, but all in all, Sword did not think he could rely on that water supply.
But then, he didn’t need to, if it kept snowing. He could just collect snow and melt it for his water.
He considered walking on to see what was around the corner, if anything, but thought better of it—the wind blowing through the shutters was vicious. Instead he climbed back down, lowering the trap carefully back into place, and went on with his hunt through the third-floor bedrooms.
When he had finished with the servants’ quarters he descended a level and started on the other bedrooms. Each of the elegant bed-chambers on the second floor provided a candle or two, and the dining hall drawer he had found earlier held thirty or so, but all of these were beeswax tapers, which gave a good clear light, but which would not last all that very long.
And those candles were all he found, as far as useful supplies went.
No oil.
No food.
No firewood.
No charcoal.
No water supply other than the huge, virtually empty rooftop cistern.
None of the bedrooms or other upstairs rooms had stoves or fireplaces—this was a summer palace. None of the windows had proper shutters, either, and the upper floors were uniformly cold.
Still, the palace was shelter.
He would manage, he was sure. He would wait out the winter here, and in the spring he would take shelter with an Uplander clan, so that the staff preparing the palace would not find him, and when summer came around and the Wizard Lord came up here to get away from the heat, Sword would meet him and kill him.
Of course, he would be unable to effectively hide the evidence that someone had been here. The staff would know, and they would tell Artil, and Artil would guess who it was. . . .
Or would he? He wouldn’t necessarily know who had been here, or when, or for how long. Things would be out of place, but perhaps Sword could try to make it appear that Uplanders had broken in and done some minor looting, rather than that someone had wintered here.
But the Wizard Lord would be suspicious. That was simply in his nature. He would assume that Sword, or perhaps one of the other surviving Chosen, had been here.
And what if he did? What would he do about it? The Wizard Lord had no magic here, outside Barokan’s borders. He would post guards, perhaps have the palace and the surrounding area searched, but what else could he do? He always kept himself guarded anyway; a suspicion that one of his enemies had been here over the winter wouldn’t change that.
Sword would need to find a way past the Wizard Lord’s guards at some point, but he thought he could manage that. He would find a way to get at the Wizard Lord, here where his magic didn’t work, and he would avenge Babble and Azir shi Azir, and all the lesser wizards the Wizard Lord had murdered, and he would free Barokan of the Dark Lord who now ruled.
As he carried a bundle of beeswax candles down to his subterranean lair, though, for the first time Sword found himself thinking seriously about what he would do after that.
Up until now he had always put that aside for later, but now he gave it some thought.
When the Wizard Lord, the Dark Lord of Winterhome, was dead, what would happen?
Ordinarily when a Wizard Lord died, the Council of Immortals gathered and chose a successor. That was how it had worked for centuries. This Wizard Lord, though, had killed most of the Council, and virtually all his potential successors—and who knew what dying outside Barokan might do to the magic of the Great Talismans?
It seemed likely that there would be no successor, no new Wizard Lord. Artil im Salthir would be the last of the Wizard Lords—and what would replace them?
Did anything have to replace them? Couldn’t the towns and villages govern themselves? There were no more rogue wizards to contend with, after all—not unless the half-dozen survivors of the Council of Immortals turned rogue.
And after all, how much harm could half a dozen wizards, most of them well on in years, do?
Well, quite a bit, really, but was there any reason to think they would? And the remaining Chosen would be around to deal with them. The Chosen, or Artil’s soldiers . . .
But that might be a problem in its own right—those soldiers. What if they didn’t want to disband and go home?
Sword shook his head. If they were a problem, it wouldn’t be his problem. The priests and their ler could deal with soldiers; the soldiers wouldn’t have any magic.
An end to the Wizard Lords would presumably mean an end to the Chosen, an end to the Council of Immortals, an end to the entire system that had united and protected Barokan for the last seven centuries—but Sword thought it was a system that had outlived its usefulness. He would be the last Swordsm
an; the last Seer and Speaker had probably already been butchered on the streets of Winterhome.
The system had been in place so long, though, that it was hard to imagine Barokan without it.
But then he stopped and thought for a moment. It was easy enough to imagine his home town of Mad Oak without any wizards or Chosen or Wizard Lord; none of those had really impinged upon his awareness for the first nineteen years of his life, except as stories of ancient times and distant places. Mad Oak had gone about its business untroubled by the outside world, and could probably return to that state easily.
Would it really be any different anywhere? He had always had to take the Wizard Lord and the Chosen into account in his travels because he was the Swordsman, one of the Chosen, but were ordinary people concerned with such matters?
The roads might make a difference, but he could not see how it would be a very great one, really. There would be traders, yes, but what of it?
Let the system die, then.
Artil im Salthir had wanted to replace it with a non-magical system of centralized rule, but there was no need for that. Let it all just wither away, and the towns could take care of themselves. There might be an unsettled period for a time, but surely it wouldn’t last long, or be too disruptive.
So there would be no more Wizard Lord, no more Chosen—and what would he, Erren Zal Tuyo of Mad Oak, do?
Go home and grow barley, most likely. He might be able to find a wife, once there was no more risk that he’d go off adventuring and get himself killed. Raise children, perhaps.
That would be lovely.
All he had to do was survive the winter, and then find a way to kill the Wizard Lord, and do it without the help of the other Chosen, who were dead or imprisoned or scattered.
That was all.
He snorted at his own folly, then lit a fresh candle and once again set about arranging his new home.
[ 11 ]
That night Sword slept naked, wrapped in blankets taken from several of the rooms upstairs, on a mattress covered in fine linen sheets, on a corner of the kitchen floor. He had stripped off his clothes and unpacked the others he had brought, then rinsed them all lightly in the brownish tap water, and hung them on various hooks and sconces to dry, well away from the smoke of his candles. He didn’t expect to actually get them clean until he found a better water source, but he hoped to at least remove the worst of the sweat and grime. He had been unable to wash them at all on the way west, as the limited water supplies available on the march were too precious to be wasted on cleaning, and eleven days of travel had left all three outfits—his new Uplander garb and his battered Hostman attire—in desperate need of attention.
The Summer Palace Page 13