by Paul Kidd
"And what of the girl? Does she find the match worthwhile?"
"If it keeps Ilego from the door, it's well worthwhile."
Prince Mannicci had given his daughter his own sharp wits, clear mind, and stubborn will. The only thing he had refused her was his time. Toporello cast a glance toward the princess's little tower and chewed a strand of his own mustache.
"I see a pattern forming. Unless this boy is a better specimen than the last, I fear he shall soon discover the special joys that earwigs can bring."
"Earwigs?"
"Merely a reflection, lord, that clever sparrows can have sharp beaks." Toporello gave a sigh and heaved himself erect. "In any case, my lord, 'tis time for bed. Tomorrow brings the festival-and the dance with Ilego can grow tiring for old bones."
"I intend to see that we both make old bones." Prince Mannicci tightened the fit of his gloves. "Goodnight, old friend. Guard your back well."
Toporello faded into the evening gloom, leaving his monarch standing alone inside the fountain yard. Tugging his gloves hard down across his wrists, the prince stood and stared in silence at his daughter's balcony before stalking back inside the palace halls.
6
In the last flickers of the evening light, when the horizon swam stark with streamers of eggplant purple and shimmering gold, a convoy of carriages made their way in through the gates of Sumbria. Creaking softly, their dray beasts plodding slowly with the fatigue of a long day's travel through the burning hills, the overdecorated coaches passed by the city gates, then moved down toward Sumbria's busy inns.
Lords and ladies alighted: Colletro's gentry come to do duty by the victors of this year's campaign. They were handed down from their carriages by Sumbrian footmen, then met by lines of heralds, torch-bearers and trumpeters. With stiffly formal manners, hosts and guests made bows; then the purely theoretical enemies went together into the great hollow squares of palaces to while away the nighttime hours.
Preparations for the Festival of Blades were gaining momentum day by day; jugglers and puppeteers were installed at every plaza, while children ran about the streets fighting ferocious mock battles with painted wooden swords. Watching the melee swirl past, Blade Captain Gilberto Ilego leaned idly against a tavern door, breathed in the nocturnal airs, and heaved a contented sigh.
The evenings of late summer always seemed to sizzle with the delicious scent of hot, scorched dust. Dressed in bonnet and plume, jerkin and tight hose, Blade Captain Ilego savored the night's bouquet as though it were a primrose bloom. He watched the carriages winding inward through the gates, watched the delicate ladies and swaggering gentlemen enter their palaces and towers, and let his face draw into a slow, cool smile.
The city brimmed with guests-creatures of a hundred different races. The festival drew them as moths gathered to a candle flame. Slim elves could be seen watching the puppet booths and games, bulb-nosed dwarves from the Great Rift came to trade for surveying instruments, and a gnome illusionist astonished children with clever magic tricks. Most astonishing of all, a nixie damsel-a sharply beautiful water maiden with scales of pink and rose-was borne down the street in a glass-sided sedan chair filled with lake water. As she slid past, the creature gave a smile and locked with Ilego's eyes.
A shadow fell across the streets; wing feathers beat up a storm of dust as a great black form settled down into the central plaza of Sumbria. Ilego tossed aside his musings as though casting a flower out into the road, and settled back to watch Colletro's senior Blade Captain scanning Sumbria in scorn.
The man wore the most elemental of costumes: a brigantine of black velvet lined with silver studs and a barbute helmet covered in wine-dark cloth. His hippogriff-a shrewish, violent mare with elongated claws and a wicked eye-luffed its eagle wings and searched the streets for handy prey. Finding nothing worth killing close at hand, the creature muttered softly to its rider, then sank onto its haunches to let the man slide to the ground.
The Colletran noble had an escort, four of Sumbria's air cavalry all armed with light crossbows. Their prim white mounts shook out their feathers in disapproval of their guest's surly beast, stepping pointedly aside as the creature hungrily eyed their haunches.
Ilego detached himself from the tavern door. The motion caught the Colletran's eye, who turned about to stand posing in the open shadows with one hand upon his blade. Ilego moved himself deliberately out into the open street, placed one foot behind the other and spread his arms open in his courtliest of bows.
"Honored Blade Captain Svarezi. How very good of you to come."
Ugo Svarezi-armored, armed, and squat-glared at the intruder with eyes of watered steel.
"Why am I here?"
"Surely to enjoy the festival." Ilego stood, his dark eyes missing nothing as he drank in the foreigner at a glance. "I have come to meet you. To extend Sumbria's most gracious hospitality.
"Pray, let your beast be stabled, and we shall walk the streets a while."
Svarezi flicked a glance at the crowded streets, the rooftops and the shadows, then judged himself to be under little threat of assassination. Ilego, he dismissed as a lighter, less armored man with a blade fit only for tickling boys. With a side glance at his host, the Colletran bowed slightly forward in acknowledgment.
"Shaatra. Follow."
The black hippogriff answered with an evil-tempered hiss, gave up her attempts to snatch a piece out of passing pedestrians, and favored her master with a series of beak clicks and caws. The man answered in kind, the hippogriff regarded Ilego through seething ice-blue eyes, and then Svarezi took his place at Ilego's side. Followed by a lean and hungry monster, the two nobles moved down a street filled by puppet plays, sausage stalls and dust.
Gilberto Ilego-tall, smooth and suave-tried his level best to begin a conversation.
"Your beast, sir-the hippogriff. I cannot help but notice that it speaks."
"She does." Svarezi's armor clanked stiffly as he walked; no further explanation seemed forthcoming. "I have business in Colletro. I have no time for foolish festivals. Why was I invited here?"
"Why?" Ilego led the way into a long, deserted alleyway beside a quiet graveyard. "I suppose because your presence would be a diplomatic nicety. You were, after all, at the famous 'defeat'." Ilego twisted the words home like a nicely sugared knife. "I'm sure the surrender of the Sun Gem will be made all the sweeter by your cowed and conquered presence."
Svarezi growled, turning on Ilego like a rat baring its fangs. Ilego raised a questioning brow as though caught in innocent surprise.
"What? Were you not part of the defeat, brother? You do, of course, agree that it was a defeat?"
"It was a parlor game! Nothing more!" The Colletran shifted his weight as if preparing for battle-echoed by the venomous hiss of his hippogriff. "Not a soldier was man enough to risk meeting us blade-to-blade."
"Ah." Ilego paused, elegant and sly as he laid another sally neatly at his companion's feet. "Until now, perhaps? Surely you and I could be said to be meeting blade-to-blade." The Sumbrian nobleman came to a bare knoll overlooking the city cemetery. "Ah-and here we are at last! Do please keep your beast sitting nicely at the verge."
The open knoll formed an island in a sea of drab two-story houses, a place surrounded by walls of black and empty windowsills. The cobbled streets emptied out into the dirt like gaping mouths, spilling tongues of dust that glimmered pale against the grass.
It was a place of thistledown and rattling weeds, of hard-packed soil and serpent coils of shadow. A ring of torches lit the hillside with an ebb and flow of light, while silent watchers rimmed the clearing with sharp, unwinking eyes.
Two young men fenced at the center of the knoll, rapier and dagger against rapier and buckler. Blade Captain Ilego handed off his outer jacket, keeping a critical eye on the combatants as they strove blade against blade.
"What, colleague, is your opinion of the swordplay?"
"Swords should not be things for play." Ugo Svarezi watched the thin rapi
ers lunge and sweep with undisguised contempt. "Toy swords for toy soldiers."
"Lethal toys-although it hardly ever comes to death. One or the other usually capitulates before the final curtain can be drawn." Ilego draped his jacket casually across a broken tree. "Still, I find honor to be such a delicious tool, don't you?"
The fencers seemed to notice the two Blade Captains simultaneously. As one they went stock-still, staring rigidly at the Sumbrian nobleman, then parted and reluctantly opened out the space between them.
In the center of a field of grass, a young man waited-a lean, brooding figure clad in scarlet velvets that swirled like flowing blood. He put out his right hand to receive a long silver blade, then his left, taking a metal buckler the size of a dinner plate.
Gilberto Ilego virtually ignored the man. He drew two weapons from his belt: the first a wicked rapier with a long, whip-thin blade, and the second a short, thick swordbreaker notched all down its leading edge like a lethal comb. He passed them to a gray-bearded dignitary, who inspected the steel in the light, sniffing like a bloodhound at the blade. Satisfied, he passed back the weapons; Ilego saw that the old man's breath had clouded up the flawless steel and frowned, polishing the rapier against his shirttails until it shone.
Ilego strode out toward his opponent, never even deigning to go on guard. He made a swat at the other man's sword, walked casually around his enemy and let his face droop in a sneer.
The aged umpire had never bothered to signal for the combat to begin. He watched with arms folded and black eyes glittering like beads as the two nobles circled one another with crossed blades.
The young man swept his blade at Ilego's calf and swirled forward hoping to punch his buckler into his enemy's face. Ilego, standing crouched and square with his blades held tight, simply shook his weapons and brought his opponent to a halt. Spitting with contempt, he straightened up and once again began his casual circling, letting his sword droop almost to the ground.
His enemy lunged. Ilego paid no attention to the blade; he whipped his sword across his opponent's forearm, raising the barest cut across the flesh. The blow minutely deflected his opponent's blade, causing the rapier to flicker past Ilego's ear. The young man leapt wildly back, fearing a brutal stab from Ilego's swordbreaker. Yet for his part, the Blade Captain scarcely seemed interested at all.
Gritting his teeth, the youth flickered into the attack. Finally he engaged Ilego's attention. The young man hammered at Ilego's sword with his tiny buckler, jabbed, lunged, and jerked his sword back from Ilego's reach. A second stab was met by a sharp flick of the swordbreaker; the comblike blade rasped against the rapier, nearly trapping it between the tines. Parrying wildly with his shield, the youth forced Ilego's rapier aside, staggered back from a slash of the swordbreaker, blocked a lunge at his bowels and stumbled free.
Ilego pursued him, and the young man could only meet attack after attack. The blades stabbed home time and time again, clashing against one another in a splash of sparks. Hissing evilly, Ilego rammed his opponent far aside, sending the dazed youth staggering back across the grass.
Fighting for breath and whipping sweat back from his eyes, Ilego's opponent drove himself lurching back into the fight. He stabbed low, skipped forward, stabbed and lunged again. With a cry of hate he stamped his foot, then tried to disengage and lunge, his blade moving clumsily aside. Ilego let the young man run clean onto his outstretched blade, ramming it unerringly through his opponent's heart. He whipped free his steel and turned aside to wipe his blade clean on a silken handkerchief, not even deigning to watch the body fall.
Seconds ran forward to the young man's corpse. Ilego walked casually away across the dead, dry grass, made a sardonic salute of his swordbreaker toward the old man in the shadows, and strolled to rejoin his guest. The Sumbrian sheathed his sword without a trace of triumph or satisfaction.
"The Riturba family is such a bore. I foreclose on their loan, and what do they do but cry me up as a cheat?"
The nobleman favored Svarezi with a smile.
"I do find honor to be a fascinating thing. If I had killed him with a dagger in the back, I should surely have hung. Instead, I run him through before two dozen witnesses, and am reckoned to be a gentleman." Ilego adjusted the set of one glove. "With luck, his brothers will raise challenge, and I can clean out the whole gutless brood within the week."
Ugo Svarezi laid a hand upon his hippogriff's feathery mane.
"Unless they stumble on to your treachery, Sumbrian."
"Stumble on it? Quite unlikely." Ilego gave a smile. "The poison, of course, was merely a soporific, something to slow his reactions and allow a killing blow. I do find it quite untraceable." The noble retrieved his jacket from its tree limb, still not even bothering to spare his dead opponent a glance. "Naturally enough, the venom was impregnated into the tails of my shirt."
There followed a pause-a time where both men gazed at each other in the shadows of the killing ground. A cool night wind came to stir Gilberto Ilego's hair.
"You have desires, colleague. Desires thwarted and choked by rules." Framed against the graveyard, Ilego fixed Svarezi with a snake's black, calculating eye. "I can show you how to fashion the rules into your tool, colleague. Our tool."
Ilego drew forth a parchment-the torn lower half of the same letter Svarezi carried against his heart. The torn pieces were a perfect match.
"You have asked, colleague, why you are here. The answer is simple. I have asked you to come in the interest of our mutual advancement. It is high time that we men of potential moved our sights beyond the bounds of a single city's walls."
In the darkness beside them, the black hippogriff gave a sharp hiss of desire. Behind her, the moon rose across the killing grounds and stained the dry grass with lifeless gray.
"Tekorii-kii-kii!
"Tekorii-kii-kii!"
Miliana looked up from her books and charts, smiling as she saw the great long neck dangling down from the hole in the bathroom ceiling. Tekoriikii's giddy, crested head announced itself with pride.
"Tekorii-kii-kii!"
"Well, hello!" Miliana closed her books and leaned upon her elbow to regard the bird. "Where have you been?"
"Glub glub!"
The bird jumped down through the broken ceiling in a swirl of feathers and landed on the blue-tiled floor. Thus far Miliana had kept the portal secret by ruthlessly chasing all maids and servants away from her room; a ruse that would only work until Lady Ulia freed herself from the distractions offered by the Festival of Blades.
Tekoriikii warbled happily and marched himself into Miliana's study room. The bird walked with a rolling seaman's gait, trailing a vast mass of gorgeous orange tail behind it. Silly plumes above his head bobbed and nodded as he walked, waggling like a gaudy helmet comb as he ducked his head about in avian curiosity. He sidled over to Miliana, cocked an eye at her books, and offered her a delighted smile.
Miliana unwrapped a rock-hard salted ship's biscuit, peering warmly at her guest.
"Did you eat? Here's something for dinner, if you want it. Just as a warning-don't eat any of the palace rats. They smell like cherries, but they're behaving very, very strangely…"
The bird extended a genteel foot and fastened it about the biscuit. Tekoriikii gnawed the tidbit with an air of concentration, keeping one golden yellow eye on Miliana's face.
Miliana ruffled her scrolls and settled the toadskin sheets back into order.
"You've been very quiet up there. Were you asleep, or did you go off for a flight?"
Aaaaah! Tekoriikii instantly launched into an attempt to relate his evening's adventures. The bird danced high, the bird danced low-he gaped his beak and wobbled his backside up and down as though it came equipped with springs. A slap on his chest and a proud puff of feathers ended his announcement, and the firebird clucked his tongue and let smug self-satisfaction shine like fire in his eyes.
Miliana adjusted her spectacles across her freckled nose.
"No… I didn't q
uite catch that. Actually, languages don't really seem to be my strong point." The girl scowled in concentration. "I will keep trying, though. See here? I think I've managed to assign sounds to the first three ideographs on page seventeen…"
The princess had been hard at work over her puzzling collection of toadskin scrolls. Tekoriikii helpfully came over to inspect the results of her day's labor, darting his head erratically this way and that as he examined the pages with their absurd calligraphy and diagrams. Miliana spread the pages open for him, pleased to at last have someone with whom to discuss her ideas.
"It's not orcish, and it's not elven. It looks like a southern language-sort of an early dialect of Akalan, maybe-but it isn't." The girl paused, then waved a finger over the cryptic texts. "I'm trying to turn them all into something I can understand. Some of them are magic chants, but others are mental images I have to frame in my mind if I'm going to cast the spell… maybe spell ingredients, or possibly phases of the moon…" Miliana flipped a clammy page of her collection and gave a frustrated sigh. "I just can't find the key! I have to stare and stare at a page for hours and hours. Sometimes I seem to understand, and sometimes I just can't."
"Glub glub?" The bird flipped a toadskin over with his beak, scanning the page beneath. "Onk honk?"
"No, I thought of that. If I hired someone to cast a spell which would allow me to understand the scrolls, he'd tell my father. There's nothing for it but to break the code myself."
Tekoriikii coiled his head back on his neck to look the girl in the face with his astonishing golden eyes.
"Krrrrrrrk?" Wings wagged, and a foot spread its toes into a complex little sign. "Grook awk?"
"Well, yes-if they find out I'm doing it, it's all over. They'll burn the books and toss me out to some finishing school somewhere; no more Miliana." The girl hissed a sharp sigh for the injustices of her world. She then brightened up, pulled out her pointiest of hats, and held it open to the bird.
"Aaaah-but see? Even in finishing school, I'd still bring my pointy hat! So what I'm doing is copying the scrolls in miniature and hiding them inside the hat lining. You see? Always anticipate disaster, birdie my friend. That's what makes a great thinker a great thinker!"