by Doug Niles
And what did he ultimately expect from the Black Army and its captain? The force was capable and well trained, certainly, but how could it hope to stand against the four huge armies under the emperor’s command? It counted some three thousand men—less than the number Blayne had standing with him at Vingaard. And the emperor had brushed those troops aside with only two of his four armies! But for now, Blayne was willing to place his trust in the two leaders in their mountain valley. Truthfully, the young lord was glad simply to have been given a role in their rebellion.
Attracting little attention, he and his old horse ambled through the open gate, joining a small trickle of farmers, merchants, and laborers who were entering or leaving the city past the indifferent supervision of a small company of guards. The men-at-arms were swordsmen, Blayne noticed, whereas he was seeking an archer. He dismounted and led the nag toward the public watering trough just inside the gate and looked around for the garrison’s bowmen.
He spotted a stone blockhouse inside the wall. The top was flat and high enough to provide a view—and field of fire—over the wall. Several men were up there, and they were carrying bows and wore quivers bristling with arrows. Lashing his horse to a post, he walked over and spoke to the lone guard sitting outside the door.
“I’m looking for Archer Billings,” he said. “Is he here?”
The guard looked him up and down for a second before sniffling noisily and running the back of his hand under his nose. He tilted his head toward the open door.
“Look in the back room,” he said. “He’s off duty right now.”
Blayne walked into what was obviously a barracks, passing through a room with a number of unoccupied bunks. Passing through another door, he found a room with many tables and chairs, most likely the mess hall. A dozen men sat around in there, listlessly pursuing games of cards or knucklebones, sharpening arrowheads, or carving away on small scraps of wood or, in one case, the ash haft of a new bow.
“Is Archer Billings here?” he repeated.
“I’m Billings,” said one man, unusual in that his black hair and swarthy complexion was much darker than all the other men in the company—but a plausible match for the disguise Blayne wore. It would be easy for someone to believe they might be countrymen. Billings had been sitting alone in one corner of the room, whittling what looked like a curling pipe out of a small piece of wood.
The bowman put his work in his pocket and squinted at Blayne. “You bring me a letter from the homestead?” he asked.
Blayne hoped his relief didn’t show, but that was exactly what Hoarst had told him Billings would say. He went through the reply he had been rehearsing on the long ride to the city. “No letter, but I have news from some old friends.”
The archer rose to his feet and stretched easily. He was a tall man, lanky and thin, and moved with catlike grace. “I’m off duty until sunrise. Let’s go have a beer, and you can tell me all about it.”
The other bowmen didn’t so much as glance up at them as the two men left. Blayne collected his horse and followed the tall archer as Billings led him a few blocks down a city street. They reached the door to a nondescript tavern—the nobleman couldn’t even read the faded sign over the door—and after Blayne had tethered his horse, they went inside. The front room was mostly empty, with just a few dockworkers drinking cheap ale at the bar. The archer simply nodded to the innkeeper and led his guest through a door and into an even darker room in the back.
“Welcome to Palanthas,” Billings said, gesturing to a chair beside the lone table. Blayne took a seat with his companion, and the innkeeper bustled in with a foaming pitcher and a couple of glasses.
“Thanks, Wally,” Billings said, pressing a coin into the man’s hand. “We’ll be all right for the time being.”
“You got it, Hawkeye,” said the innkeeper, bowing and retreating.
Blayne looked at his companion curiously.
“A nickname,” Billings explained. “I’m a pretty good shot with my longbow,” he added, filling their glasses from the pitcher. When he was done, he set the beer down and looked at Blayne long and hard.
“Now,” he said. “Tell me what’s up.”
Selinda looked out the window of her room, watching the city as nightfall drew its curtain across Palanthas. Candles sparkled from countless windows. Lamplighters were busy igniting the wicks in the oil-fueled beacons that brightened all of the major intersections. Vendors and merchants wheeled their carts back home as the markets closed, while other sellers of different goods moved into the alleys, whispering invitations for darker and more secret commerce. People mingled, talking and laughing. They thronged on the main avenues, but even on the side streets there were many small parties finding their fun through the night.
What was the point of it all? Of any of it?
Her hands moved almost unconsciously to her belly. She could begin to make out the subtle roundness there, though the pregnancy still did not show through the contours of her clothing. It was still hard to believe she was carrying a human life within her—and harder to believe that that life had been kindled by the emperor, Jaymes Markham.
“What kind of child will you be?” she whispered to herself.
And what kind of world would that child grow up in? That was a question she didn’t give voice to at all.
Feeling the weight of approaching darkness, the princess sighed and turned away. But the shadowy confines of her room were no consolation. Even when she lit a lamp and a half dozen candles, she couldn’t banish her uneasiness, her despair. Her door was closed and there was no longer a guard posted there to block her exit; her husband had abandoned that tactic, tacitly acknowledging the freedom she had been granted by the magical ring.
Yet she had not used the device since that terrible trip to Vingaard, when she had recognized the hard and violent truth of the emperor’s reign. Since then she had remained in her room for most of each day, though she went to other parts of the palace when she knew her husband was not present. That night, he was working in his office several floors below her quarters, and since she would not take the chance of encountering him in the hallways, she would not leave her room.
But the restlessness was growing intolerable, and she was thinking about the ring of teleportation, of the freedom it gave her—should she only choose to exercise its magic. And in that instant, impulsively, she decided to go.
Her destination wasn’t terribly important; it was simply that she wanted to be out of there, to go to a place of her own choosing. She took a few moments to don sturdy walking boots and a practical gown and cloak of quality that would mark her merely as someone of reasonable means, not suggest any tie to nobility or, more significantly, to the emperor’s household. When she had made her preparations, she went to the window again, pictured the place she longed to be, and twisted the magic ring on her finger.
The sensation was familiar by now, no longer dizzying or disorienting. She materialized on the street before the great Temple of Kiri-Jolith, the same building where she had gone to see the high priestess Melissa du Juliette. She hesitated, listening to the familiar, comforting chants of the vesperspeak. But she did not go inside the temple.
Instead, she turned and walked along the wide avenue, enjoying her freedom. She ambled along the wide street, smiled at a pair of soldiers who offered her greetings, and smelled the salty breeze coming from the great waterfront.
The maritime air seemed to call to her, and she turned along a cross street, heading north. It was not a wide roadway, but there were people about, and the sounds of flutes and lyres emerged from an inn at the corner. It was called the Goose and Gander, she noted from a brightly painted sign. Raucous laughter erupted from the inn, followed by a spontaneous song, and she envied the carefree people enjoying the simple pleasures of night life.
But she wasn’t tempted to enter the inn, because the lure of the docks drew her along. So she passed the noisy inn and moved along the narrowing street. It was a part of the city that
was unfamiliar to her, and she felt a tingle at the thought she was exploring new territory. Not terribly far away was the haunted wasteland of the Shoikan Grove, which gave her a thrill even as she turned a corner to give a wide berth to the ancient place of dark magic.
She noticed that there were fewer people about there, but there were still lively outposts. She passed one called the Boar’s Head and another very large establishment called the Fist and Glove. Each was the site of raucous revelry; in the latter she clearly heard the sounds of voice raised in drunken anger, followed by the crash of crockery then furniture. Quickly she hurried on, feeling just a little vulnerable as she noticed that the street before her grew dark and empty.
There were fewer inns and taverns there, and they tended to be darker, smaller, and seedier than those in the temple neighborhood. Even so, most had sounds of boisterous and good cheer as she passed. She heard laughter from one, loud and dissonant lyre music in another. From a third came the sound of a female’s scream—not screams of fear so much as playful and flirtatious, she decided quickly. Yet the screams, too, caused her to hurry along.
Selinda was startled by a movement in the shadows as she neared the last street before the docks. Pulling back with a gasp, she saw a short man leaning out of a dark doorway, gesturing to her. A strange, sweet smell lingered in the air, and she heard bizarre music, softer and more lyrical than the jigs and ballads that were the usual fare.
“This way, mistress, to some of the finest delights Krynn has to offer. Please, not even a small fee for such a beautiful lady. Come in, and you will be amazed.”
“What kind of delights?” she asked, intrigued in spite of her misgivings.
“Great wonders from the East, mistress. Spices, drinks … even herbs for smoking. This is the only place in Palanthas to find them.”
She hesitated, undecided. A pair of young women came along, giggling, and they gave her amused glances before they turned and passed the short man into his dark entry. He winked at them, and they laughed easily.
Why not? Selinda asked herself, and there was no good answer. She had come out to experience the life that was banished from her royal palace, and why shouldn’t she do just that?
“All right,” she said with more confidence than she felt.
“Right this way,” said the man, who walked with a pronounced limp. He turned back into the doorway, and she followed him into the shadows.
Jaymes put down the letter from General Dayr. His head hurt—that had been happening a lot lately—and he suddenly felt very tired. Leaving the parchment on his desk, he rose and went to the window, looking out over the city of Palanthas. It was night, but there was light everywhere, from the streetlamps, the windows of homes and inns, even silver moonlight reflecting on the bay.
But he didn’t see any of it.
It seemed even Dram had betrayed him. The dwarf refused—he outright refused—to build the bombards that Jaymes required. “The emperor can build them himself” had been the phrase in General Dayr’s letter, and Jaymes could almost hear the gruff old campaigner issuing the challenge in his gravelly voice.
But why? What could possibly have happened to cause the dwarf to turn against him like that, acting just like … like the foolish rulers of Vingaard! The person he trusted the most in the world, the one he knew he could count on in every extreme, the dwarf who had become very, very rich because of his service to Jaymes Markham—his old friend Dram had refused his duty to the emperor.
Had the treachery been perpetrated by anyone else, Jaymes would have been consumed by terrible rage, obsessed with the need for quick, severe retribution. Why, when it was Dram who betrayed him, did he feel only a consuming weariness, a darkness that even the sparkling illumination of his beautiful city could not dispel. He felt a tightening in his throat he didn’t recognize, so long had it been since he had given way to any such effeminate emotions.
As he had been doing more and more, he admitted to himself that he missed—really missed—Selinda. Her appeal for him had been born in her beauty, and in the unattainability of her position as the daughter of the Lord Regent of Palanthas. Later he had been drawn to the power she represented, which he knew would augment his own power, and the nearly inexhaustible funds that would become his to share by right of empire and marriage.
Yet in the too few years of their marriage, he had come to appreciate her for her intelligence, her wit, and her wisdom even more than for those surface traits that had first drawn his attention and his interest. Her fierce independence, he remembered wryly, had also been attractive once: she had confronted him alone, in a ruined basement, all the while suspecting that he was a desperate assassin. And she had fooled him with her girlish enthusiasm, leading him into a trap so her father’s knights could capture him with ease.
How ironic, then, that those knights served him now, but the woman who had lured him into chains was lost to him … lost at least as a partner, as a helper, as an ally. She would bear his child, true, and that meant something. But he was enough of a realist to know there would be no more children, that he would never again take her to bed. Even that, which he desired, was beside the point in his moment of darkness. He simply wanted to talk to her.
Making up his mind, he left the office and quickly climbed the two flights of stairs to the floor where she lived in her suite of rooms. Surprisingly, he found himself taking the steps two at a time and forcing himself to slow to a natural walking pace as he approached her chambers. Stopping outside her door, he breathed deeply a few times before knocking. There came no answer. He hesitated a moment then knocked again, listening carefully.
The silence beyond the door was complete, utterly undisturbed. He tried the knob and found it locked. His hand tightened on the latch, knuckles whitening, and for a moment he was possessed by an almost irresistible urge to smash the barrier down, to splinter it into a hundred pieces.
But immediately that urge passed. He released the doorknob almost gently, turned, and walked back to the stairs. He descended them slowly, deliberately, going back into his office, seeing the letter on his desk. Contemptuously he swept the parchment onto the floor and stepped onto it with the heel of his boot. Forcing thoughts of his wife into a corner of his mind, he thought back to Dram.
So the dwarf, too, would dare defy and betray him? Well, there was only one way to treat such a betrayal. He sat down at the desk again, thinking furiously. The Palanthian Legion was still in camp at Vingaard. The emperor could ride there with the Freemen and put that fast, mobile force on the march. He could cross the plains and reach New Compound with five thousand men within another week. If he needed to, he could draw reinforcements from the Crown Army for as he marched, he would pass Thelgaard Keep.
He knew Dram had not fortified his mountain town. Would he do so since he had thumbed his nose at Jaymes? It didn’t matter: once the emperor and his troops got there …
Once he got there … what?
Jaymes leaned back in his chair, pressing a hand to his eyes. The missive from General Dayr, the letter that respectfully reported the dwarf’s refusal to work on any more bombards, lay on the floor, a dark heel print smudged onto the back.
And the thought kept hissing like a snake in his ear: Where was Selinda? Where was his wife?
Too many questions and, for the moment, too few answers.
Jaymes rose and paced around the spacious room. It was his usual way of thinking and planning, but just then it seemed aimless, leading him nowhere, offering nothing in the way of insight or decision. He was almost relieved to be interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Come!” he snapped.
It was General Weaver, and one look at the ashen face of the veteran Knight of the Rose drove all other concerns from the emperor’s mind. “What is it?” Jaymes demanded.
“My lord, grave news,” replied Weaver, coming into the room. By all the gods, was the man trembling?
“What?” repeated Jaymes.
“Word from the Lemish front
ier. The message was sent magically from our Kingfishers in Solanthus. It … it seems that Ankhar has attacked again. He’s come from the forest with a new horde—thousands upon thousands of ogres. They wiped out our border defenses in a single attack. Now he’s on the march into the plains.”
“Come with me, my dear,” Hoarst said to Sirene. With a sly glance at the other women, all of them seated around the breakfast table, the albino rose and followed her wizard out of the kitchen.
“Yes, my lord,” she whispered at the door, allowing her long fingers to trail down the back of his smooth cloak.
“Alas, I need you for serious work,” he said, giving her a playful squeeze as he opened the door to his small laboratory. Barely more than a poorly furnished closet—a very poor cousin to the vast installation Hoarst had created in the great hall of his own castle—the gray wizard used the place as his workshop while he remained there with the Black Army.
“I need to make a potion,” he explained. Dutifully she held out one of those slender fingers as he picked up a sharp lancet. His hands caressed hers, and he smiled kindly as he shifted a small glass vial on the table. He pricked her finger lightly, and she smiled at the gentleness of his ministrations even as several drops of crimson blood dripped from her finger into the vial.
“That is all,” he said, releasing her. “You go rest, now. I’ll have the other girls bring you some broth or tea.”
He was already busy as she departed, crushing herbs with a mortar and pestle and magically igniting the burner on a small stove. Within half an hour, he had a small vial of potion, chilled from boiling to moderate temperature by the quick murmur of a cooling cantrip. With the vial in his hand, he went to find Captain Blackgaard.
With the potion tucked into a pocket of his robe, Hoarst mounted a spirited gelding beside the Black Army commander on his stallion. The two men cantered across the valley and up the road that was being chiseled through the jagged crest of the mountain ridge. At the top they halted, and Hoarst handed the vial to the captain.