The queen, her eyes as cold as the airless crystal plain, watched Sharina from the room of alabaster. "Come to me, girl," she said. With dizzying suddenness Sharina stood in the white chamber with the game board separating her from her captor.
"I've been occupied with destroying the Royal Fleet, Sharina," the queen said. She smiled with catlike irony. "I let you see so that you could know how useless it is to try to defeat my purpose. Now it's time for you to help me."
Sharina said nothing. She was shivering uncontrollably. She kneaded her thighs with long, strong fingers, trying to work out a stiffness that she knew wasn't physical. Her body was no longer cold, but her soul held the memory of the icy chains which had held it so long.
The queen continued to smile, but her eyes were harder than the tourmaline counters on the game board. Her index finger hovered over one, then withdrew.
"Very well, girl," she said in a mellifluous voice. "I'd hoped you would help me without further demonstration, but I don't require you to be wise. Only obedient, as you will be."
"I'm not going to help you," Sharina said. She knew she sounded petulant in comparison with the queen's mannered sweetness. The contrast made Sharina angry, and the anger warmed her as physical release had not done.
The queen moved her right hand as though wiping the wall, though the alabaster was several paces distant. "Watch, Sharina," she said pleasantly.
"If you could force me against my will to do what you want," Sharina said, her voice rising, "you would've done that. You can't, and I won't help you."
"Watch, girl," the queen said. A section of fine-grained stone had opened into a window overlooking a starlit sea.
Two vessels, an oar-driven warship and a tubby merchantman, were underway on opposite courses. From her own travels Sharina knew that during the hours of darkness ships more often anchored on one of the tiny islands dotting the Inner Sea.
The warship's oars moved the way the feathers of a bird's wings do, forward and back together instead of rippling in bunches like a millipede's legs. The merchantman proceeded under a small sail from the slanting foremast and the close-reefed mainsail. The vessels were passing at a bowshot's distance.
Neither hailed the other. The Kingdom of the Isles had too many dangerous rivalries at present for any merchant to want dealings with an armed vessel, even if it wasn't an outright pirate, and the officers of this warship were too intent on their business to trouble themselves with passing strangers.
"Do you see who's aboard the Arbutus, girl?" the queen asked playfully. Sharina's viewpoint swooped toward the warship like a diving gull and the scene brightened.
The narrow catwalk serving the bireme as a deck was packed with men. For a horrid instant, Sharina remembered the captured ships she'd seen putting off filled with Hairy Men, but these were crewed by normal humans.
Most of them were normal humans. The queen raised her finger and the viewpoint focused even tighter. On the bireme's sternpost sat an ape. It gripped the curving timber with its hind legs while its fingers combed its belly fur for lice.
Sharina frowned. The ape reminded her of—
The queen's finger ticked down the way a choir director gestured with the rolled-up music. The viewpoint shifted slightly.
"Cashel!" Sharina cried.
Cashel sat on the railing, looking out to sea with his usual placid good humor. He was much the same as when Sharina had last seen him in the flesh, wrestling Zahag in the courtyard of King Folquin's palace. He held his familiar hickory quarterstaff upright between knees so that it wouldn't bump the ship's officers crowded close to him.
The queen's smile was as wide as a seawolf s. The viewpoint surged upward again. The ships were drawing apart. The merchantman's captain shouted a command; three sailors climbed the stays to let out another reef of the mainsail.
"What will you give to save your Cashel, girl?" the queen asked. "Will you guide me to the Throne of Malkar?"
Sharina looked at the perfect, evil woman. She didn't speak. There was nothing she could say that would make the situation better.
Again the silent anger flashed in the queen's eyes because she'd been balked of the cringing fear she wanted. Her finger pointed to the window onto the nighted sea. "Look," she said in a venomous whisper.
For a moment Sharina continued to watch the wizard instead. But ... to refuse to look was a child's trick, an attempt to hold back the reality outside by hiding her head under the covers. Sharina os-Reise wasn't a child—or a coward.
She turned her head. Lady, shelter Cashel in Your arms, her mind whispered while her lips remained still.
She was viewing the sailing vessel. The warship with Cashel aboard was in the far distance, visible only by the trails of its oarthresh. The sailors had shaken out more sail and dropped to the deck.
The ship shuddered to a halt. The steersman lurched forward against the tiller, and the lookout in the bow would have gone overboard had he not been able to grab the foot of the foresail.
Something thick as an anchor line crawled over the stern railing and wrapped the captain's ankle. He shouted and stamped his foot, trying to shake the touch from his leg. The steersman drew his belt knife and stepped toward the captain.
Two more tentacles gripped the steersman from behind.
Sharina had watched worse horrors from the windowed chamber where the queen had imprisoned her. This one, though, she not only saw with human eyes but understood with a human heart. A wave of dizzying horror gripped her.
Sailors flailed with bare hands or whatever weapons they could snatch up. There were dozens of tentacles, perhaps scores. Railings broke, the standing rigging snapped line by line, and men screaming helplessly vanished overboard.
The ship lurched, throwing its mainmast and sail into the sea to starboard. The deck was tilting under the grip of tentacles questing for prey that might have been missed thus far. They were unsuccessful: the vessel's whole crew had already been snatched into the sea.
]The ship tilted further. From the water beside it rose a pearly mass: the shell of an ammonite, but an ammonite the size of an island. One of the mollusk's slitted eyes stared at Sharina while its beak swallowed the sailors its tentacles passed into it one after another.
The ship's hull flexed, then broke under the strain. Shattered timbers swam for a moment, then sank in a boil of foam and cargo.
The moon shone on the monster's opalescent shell. Tentacles groped over the flotsam which was all that remained of the vessel. Finding nothing more that was edible they withdrew. The whole creature sank slowly into the depths from which it had come.
"Which will it be, Sharina?" the queen asked. "Will you do as I ask you, or shall I feed Cashel to the Old Ones also?"
The wall had returned to smooth alabaster. Sharina looked at the monstrous, beautiful figure across the game board from her.
In a voice devoid of outward emotion, Sharina said, "What do you want me to do?"
The guards in front of Robilard's palace stood at attention when Lord Hosten got out of the carriage; their officer stepped from the anteroom and bowed low. Hosten was too preoccupied to acknowledge the honors being paid him.
"This late in the evening..." Hosten said. It was past midnight. "The drinking will have been going on for some hours. It—"
He paused, struggling with the question of how much to say to an outsider. He gave Ilna a twisted smile. "Baron Robilard is a fine young man, but sometimes he's a trifle erratic when he's in his cups. Are you sure you want to see him now?"
"To the degree that I ever wanted to see him," Ilna said. She shrugged. "I owe him a warning. He won't listen, but I owe him the warning."
Hosten nodded curtly. "I'll take you through to the banquet hall," he said. He turned to the palace.
"Sir?" said one of the soldiers. "Do we...? I mean, must we...?"
"Send them home," Ilna said before Hosten could answer. "There's no reason they should be involved in it. And I can announce myself to the baron."
"You're dismissed," Hosten said curtly to the escort. The driver took the order as applying to himself as well; the carriage rumbled down the curving drive. The four soldiers trotted quickly after it as though the Sister were on their heels.
Ilna's lips smiled. If she'd read the pattern correctly, that wasn't very far from the truth.
"I'll take you through," Hosten repeated. His smile became even more crooked. "I'm a bor-Horial, mistress. I have no more choice in the matter than you do."
Ilna laughed out loud for the first time in—well, in a long time, certainly. "Let's go, then," she said, falling into step with the proud, straight-backed noble.
Ilna had never understood how people could have pride in their birth instead of their accomplishments. On the other hand, she was clear-sighted enough to know that Ilna os-Kenset, whose father had drunk away his inheritance before he drank himself to death, and whose mother had never been seen by anyone in Barca's Hamlet except—she supposed—Kenset, wasn't an unbiased judge of the matter.
Ilna had never expected to hear a noble claim kinship of a sort with her. And she'd certainly never thought that she'd feel vaguely honored when it happened.
The room where she'd met Baron Robilard this morning was empty except for a scurrying servant and the shadows flung by the six lamps, barely enough to light so large a space. Ilna frowned. She'd thought the banquet would be here.
Hosten either saw her face or guessed her question in some other fashion. "The banquet chamber was added at the back of the palace," he said. "That was the baron's first expansion project on coming to the throne."
Ilna sniffed. She could easily understand Ascelei's bitterness at the young ruler's taxes—and the works he spent them on.
They went down a hallway between sets of smaller rooms. From the doorway at the end came music, laughter, and the light of many lamps. A servant carrying out a tall wine jar by one handle—it must have been empty—stepped close to the wall to let them pass.
Long tables were set as three sides of a square with the guests on cushioned seats on the outside. Servants offered food and wine from the inner face, entering from the open side. The only food still being brought out was slices from a salt chine of beef to make the drinkers thirstier.
The hall was so large that not even the present gathering filled it. The floor was covered with bracken rather than the rushes which the better houses in Barca's Hamlet spread to pick up mud and debris dropped at meals; poor folk were more likely to rebuild their huts when the floor rose high enough to make headroom a problem.
The iron cage had been set in the middle of the square of tables. Halphemos sat cross-legged within, waiting with the morose resignation of a hen being carried to market with its legs tied over a pole.
For a moment few of the guests noticed Hosten and Ilna. Some of the courtiers were so drunk that their eyes didn't focus anymore. Baron Robilard wasn't quite that far gone, though his cheeks were flushed and his eyes had a hectic glitter. He sat at the center of the cross-table, with Regowara to his right and his blond wife Cotolina to the left.
Cotolina watched Ilna enter with a gaze as cool as glacial ice. There was a double cradle behind her. A nurse was suckling one of the twins while the other slept.
To Ilna's mild surprise, Lady Tamana was at the banquet also. The surprise vanished when Ilna saw that Tamana was seated at the bottom of the table on Robilard's left, and that the man seated above her was clearly not a noble.
He was dressed with the flashy tastelessness of the clerk who oversaw the villagers' payments following the Tithe Procession in Barca's Hamlet. This man probably served Robilard in similar capacity. The only reason a tax gatherer would be present in this assembly was to make Tamana's disgrace explicit to the dullest intellect.
A harper stood in a back corner plucking an accompaniment. He declaimed, "As Turnus bore the war standard from the citadel of Meriem and the trumpets shrieked their harsh call—"
"My lord!" Hosten interrupted in a voice that everyone in the huge room could hear.
All eyes turned to him. Halphemos grasped the bars, then shook his head in misery.
"—he lashed his fiery horses—" the harper continued.
"Be silent!" Robilard said, raising his hand. "I thought you'd deserted me, Hosten. I think perhaps I should get another military advisor, since you carry out your duties in such a lackadaisical fashion."
Hosten started to speak. Ilna stepped in front of him and crossed her arms.
"Lord Hosten carried out your orders, my lord," she said. Her voice rang like cymbals from the high marble walls. "It took longer than I'd expected, but I've carried out your orders too. The Elder Romi informed me that he would come to your dinner when the moon sets."
Robilard lurched upright and tried to stand. He fell back into his seat at the first attempt. He flung his silver cup to the table and stood with a nervous footman supporting him by either elbow.
Robilard pointed his finger at Ilna. "You're a fool!" he shouted. "And you're a liar!"
"I've often been a fool," Ilna said, each word a whipcrack. "I've never seen the point of lying, though. And I warn you, Baron, I very much doubt that the Elder Romi lies either."
"Put her in the cage with the other one!" Robilard said. "In the morning take them both out and dump them. Let them try their lies on the fish!"
"My lord?" Hosten said desperately. "I really think—"
"Be silent!" Robilard screamed. "Do you want to join them?"
The baron wavered and almost fell on his face. The footmen managed to catch him so that he flopped back on his chair instead.
Ilna turned to Hosten. "Yes, be quiet or I'll silence you myself," she said. She half-smiled. "Besides, I think it's time for you to go."
Hosten shook his head. "I pledged my honor," he said in a stony voice. He led Ilna to the cage and slid the bolt to open it. Ilna curtsied to him, then ducked to enter the tight confines. The door clanged shut behind her.
Conversation resumed but the harper stood uncertain. He played with the tuning pegs, glancing frequently at the back of Robilard's head. The baron's last command had been for silence. He might or might not want the declamation to continue, but the harper wasn't alone in thinking it wasn't a good time to call oneself to Robilard's attention in the absence of a specific command.
Lord Hosten sat in the chair left vacant beside Lady Cotolina. A servant offered a cup of wine. Hosten accepted it, but he didn't drink.
"You shouldn't have come back," Halphemos said in a wretched whisper.
"I don't expect to be here long," Ilna said. "The moon has probably set by now."
The atmosphere of the hall grew colder. Ilna puffed from her open mouth; she couldn't see her breath. "Not very long at all," she said.
The lamps were fading also. Talk stilled; everyone turned toward the doorway. Lady Regowara, able to see down the hall from her position near the center of the cross-table, suddenly screamed and tried to get up.
A figure of blue ice entered the banquet hall. It walked like a man, but it had only a featureless lump for a head. It proceeded around the side of the hall. Behind the first came a line of identical figures, each turning right or left like a parade of footmen taking their places behind the diners.
The harper flung down his instrument and stumbled toward the exit behind him. He snatched the curtain aside, then staggered back bawling in terror. Another of the ice men already stood in the doorway.
Robilard's servants stood transfixed. The intruders directed them toward the main door with deliberate gestures. The servants edged slowly toward the doorway, then broke into a stumbling stampede. Only when they reached the hallway did their terror break in cries of babbling relief.
The ice figure which had blocked the harper's escape stepped aside, then beckoned the man with his finger. The harper stood where he was, gasping like a freshly caught fish.
The ice man gestured again. The harper bolted past him. His screaming terror echoed up the service corridor.
Ilna thought of Garric reading out passages of epic whose majesty escaped her. All Ilna heard was a pattern of words—many of which she didn't know. Even a sniveling coward like the harper shared things with Garric that Ilna, who'd known him all her life, did not.
Ilna's hand touched the loose end of her sash, the pair of the one she'd woven for Liane. Threads go where the weaver places them; and Ilna's life wasn't a pattern of her own weaving.
Across the banquet table, Hosten noticed Ilna and tried to stand. The ice man standing behind him in place of a human servitor put his hand on Hosten's shoulder. The noble shouted, "Let go of me! I'm going to release her!"
For a moment they struggled, the man to rise and the not-man to hold him in his seat. Hosten, gasping and suddenly older than he had seemed before, gave up the attempt.
Halphemos' fingertip drew a circle on the rusty floor of the cage. Though freehand, it was as regular as another person could have managed with a compass. He began to sketch symbols around its margin.
"Cerix taught me to open doors," he whispered to Ilna. "This is iron, but there's so much power around us that I think I can..."
An ice figure walked to the cradle beside which the nurse cowered. The creature's limbs moved in fluid curves instead of bending at the joints like a human's. It gestured the nurse toward the doorway, then reached into the cradle.
Cotolina cried out and would have risen. Another ice figure held her in place. The first lifted out the twins. Their shrieks sounded thinner, more distant, than was right for such agony of soul.
The ice man, moving with the deliberation of a storm cloud, handed the infants to their mother. Cotolina hugged them to her flat bosom. She whispered words of empty comfort while her tears dripped on their crying faces.
Halphemos had stripped curling leaves from a bracken stem. Using it as a wand he began to tap the symbols he'd drawn from memory on the iron. With his eyes closed to bring Cerix's training closer in his mind, he said, "Aeo io ioaeoeu, eeouoai...."
The tax gatherer squeezed his cup in both hands. Twice he tried to lift the wine to his lips, but his muscles trembled so badly that the contents spilled as soon as he lifted the base from the table.
An ice man tapped the tax gatherer on the shoulder. The man kept his eyes shut and pretended to be unaware.
The creature lifted him by the shoulder with one cold-fingered hand. The movement was as gently inexorable as that of a mother cat moving her kittens. The other hand plucked the chair away and set it to the side.
The tax gatherer still wouldn't open his eyes. With trembling lips he murmured the same prayer over and over. Everyone in the room but Halphemos was watching the tableau.
The ice figure released the tax gatherer and gave him a little push toward the door. The fellow stumbled, then at last looked around before breaking into a run. Twice his sandals skidded on the bracken; he caught himself on the doorpost, then vanished down the hallway bellowing hoarsely.
"Ouo ehe damnameneus," Halphemos said. Rosy tendrils quivered around the lock. A simple bolt closed the cage but the iron plate and narrow bars prevented a prisoner from reaching the fastener.
Everything else within the huge room glowed blue or was in darkness. The lighted wicks were mere points on the lobes of the lamps, but the ice figures themselves gave off a cold radiance.
Footsteps came up the hallway. They didn't appear heavy, but the echoes persisted as though in a long tunnel.
The Elder Romi, a tall man holding a staff of some pale wood in his right hand, entered the banquet hall.
His robe was black with gold embroidery around the neck, hem, and cuffs. His face was lean though not cadaverous, and his hair the purple-tinged black of a grackle's wing. If Ilna had met him as a stranger, she would have guessed his age at thirty or a trifle less.
Romi's eyes were ancient and ageless.
He glanced at Ilna, gave her a nod and a sardonic smile. He transferred his attention to Baron Robilard, sitting upright at the head of the table. Lady Regowara had stuffed the knuckles of both hands against her mouth. She was biting so hard that a drop of blood ran down the back of her white wrist.
Cotolina murmured to her infants. Apart from her voice and their wailing, the only one in the hall to speak was Halphemos. The youth was going on with his incantation as if unaware of the ancient wizard's presence.
"I've come at your invitation, Baron," Romi said. "Where shall I be seated?"
The voice was the one Ilna had heard in the cave. It still reverberated, though Ilna had noticed that the acoustics of this great square room were wretchedly bad.
Robilard opened his mouth. He made gagging sounds, then vomited onto the table and his own right arm.
Romi smiled. "I'll just take the empty seat, then," he said pleasantly. He walked over to where the tax gatherer had been. One of the ice men moved the chair into place. Romi sat, still holding the staff upright.
"Io churbureth," Halphemos muttered. "Beroch tiamos!"
Spikes of rosy light played across the lock plate the way ghost flames sometimes wrapped tree limbs and the eaves of houses in Barca's Hamlet during cold winter nights. The bolt rasped back. The three staples fixing it to the plate cracked one after the other. With the last, the bolt as well fell clanging to the stone floor.
Halphemos reached for the door. Weakness overcame him. He slumped forward, unable even to sit straight after the exertion of the spell he'd cast. Ilna held the youth, supporting his head with her shoulder. The cage was a good enough place to stay for now.
Ice men silently filled the banqueters' cups. Several of the courtiers drank great slurping drafts; others wept or sat as though nailed to their chairs. Lord Hosten deliberately turned and shook his head at the creature miming an offer to top off a cup already full.
Lady Tamana stared at the wizard beside her. One of her hands was on the table; the other touched the breast of her silken dining chemise. Only the rapid nutter of a vein in her throat proved that Tamana was alive and not a statue like those placed in niches around the hall.
An inhuman servitor mopped the vomit from Baron Robilard's hand and sleeve with a napkin from the neat pile on a serving table. Solicitously, the creature then dabbed the baron's lips and mustache with the cloth. Robilard trembled but did not otherwise move.
The cup at the Elder Romi's place was pewter and without ornamentation. To Ilna's taste it was more attractive than the jewels and florid chasing that decorated the cups the courtiers had been given. Romi lifted the vessel; the wine bubbled into vapor, sizzling more like bacon frying than liquid coming to a boil.
Romi turned the cup over so that all could see it was empty. He set it back on the table. "Is this your hospitality, cousin?" he said in his rolling, laughing voice. "We are cousins, didn't you say?"
"Please," Robilard said, his first words since the beginning of the visitation. "Please, I didn't know."
Romi stood with a terrible grace. An ice man removed the chair more smoothly than a human footman could have managed. All eyes were on the wizard.
"I've accepted your invitation, cousin," Romi said. "Now you and your guests will accept mine."
Around the table, creatures of glowing ice withdrew the chairs of Robilard and the others. Some of the courtiers would have fallen except for the ice men's inexorable support.
Romi pointed his staff to the doorway. His narrow mouth smiled with the detached interest of an adult watching the antics of a group of children. The banqueters walked toward the door like a procession of the dead. Their legs moved stiffly; a few were being carried by the ice men on either side. Lord Hosten kept his back straight, but his eyes stared at the neck of the woman ahead of him.
Lady Cotolina hugged the infants to her. She stumbled because she was blind with tears. Every time an ice man touched her to offer help, she shied away with a cry of despair.
The line of figures, human and inhuman, passed out of the banquet hall. The Elder Romi nodded again to Ilna, then turned and followed the others.
Halphemos had recovered enough to raise his head. Ilna shook his hand out of hers and pushed the cage door open. "Stay here," she said, though it probably didn't matter what the boy did.
She stepped out and stretched her limbs. The cage had been tight, but the tension of what she must do next was worse than stiff muscles. Ilna had acted in anger when she carried out Robilard's bidding; a chasm loomed before her if she failed now to correct her actions.
The lamps in the banquet hall had begun to burn normally again. They illuminated the debris—tableware, spilled wine; bits of clothing dropped and forgotten in the exodus.
Ilna glanced behind her. Halphemos was trying to get out of the cage, though his eyes didn't seem to focus yet. She strode out of the hall and up the empty corridor, walking quickly because Romi and his prisoners had moved faster than she had expected.
The procession had already exited the palace. Romi was walking down the last step from the platform. Ilna, standing on the unfinished porch, called, "Elder Romi! I have a question for you."
The ice men stopped. The Elder Romi turned deliberately. "Ask your question, Ilna os-Kenset," he said.
"Sir," Ilna said. Her tone was clipped and assured. "What do you fear?"
Romi laughed, a rumbling sound that the sky gave back as thunder. "I feared nothing when I was alive," he said. "I fear nothing now!"
"Do you fear your own anger and the evil it allows you to do?" Ilna said.
She stepped down toward the wizard. Most of the halted courtiers watched her, though no few remained hunched over their private desperation.
Ilna waved toward the line. "They're not innocent," she said. "None but the babies, perhaps. But you know that they've done nothing to deserve this. Not even—"
Her eyes and the scorn in her voice identified Robilard.
"—that boy!"
The Elder Romi's face twisted in fury. He struck the butt of his staff on the stone-paved roadway. Lightning blasted upward.
The moonless sky had been clear. At the flash clouds boiled up from the four corners of the horizon. Further lightning stabbed between thunderheads, and a downpour like none Ilna had seen before slashed the ground.
None of the rain fell on the figures in front of Robilard's palace. Ilna crossed her arms and met the Elder Romi's hawk-fierce gaze.
Romi laughed and made an absent gesture with his staff. The clouds vanished. The rain stopped with the suddenness of a lightning stroke, though pools of water stood in every hollow except those among the figures.
The icy servitors dissolved like will-o'-the-wisps caught in a sea breeze. Lady Regowara, no longer supported by the figures at her sides, fell to the ground laughing hysterically.
The Elder Romi began to bow. His form thinned to mist, then empty air. His laughing voice, full and strong, boomed, "When I had flesh, Ilna os-Kenset. When I had flesh!"
The echoes lasted a hundred heartbeats. After that Ilna heard only the last of the rain spewing through the gargoyles on the palace roof, and the sobbing joy of courtiers now alone on the road that would have led them to a tomb before their times.
She staggered with relief. There was a sound behind her. She looked over her shoulder to see Halphemos coming down the steps. His face was drawn, but he seemed to have made an adequate recovery.
The eastern horizon was lighter. The sun would rise soon.
Lady Cotolina, still holding the infants, threw herself on the pavement before Ilna and tried to kiss her feet. Ilna stepped back in angry embarrassment. "Stop that!" she said.
Baron Robilard came forward with Hosten at his side. Robilard put a hand on his wife's shoulder. She cried out, then looked up and saw that the touch was human. Hosten helped her rise, though she refused to let him take one of the babies from her.
Halphemos tried to step between the baron and Ilna. Ilna gestured him back curtly. The youth hesitated, but her glare finally convinced him. Did he think she needed protection?
Baron Robilard knelt. "What do you want?" he said. He'd aged a decade in the past hour. "Anything, anything."
Before Ilna could speak—she hadn't thought beyond her confrontation with Romi—Robilard went on, "I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I swear by the Lady, I didn't know!"
"It never crossed my mind that you did know," Ilna said. She gave a sniff of amusement.
Ilna looked around while she gathered her thoughts. A few servants reappeared, one of them the nurse. She paused for a moment, then broke into a bovine gallop toward Cotolina and her charges.
"Stand up," Ilna said to the baron sharply. It was worse being knelt to than facing somebody who thought Ilna os-Kenset should kneel to them. "Do you think I like looking at the top of your head?"
The courtiers all watched her and the baron, though for the most part it was from a safe distance. They seemed as much afraid of Ilna as they'd been of the Elder Romi.
Her smile spread. And perhaps the courtiers had as much reason for fear.
Aloud Ilna said, "My companions and I want to go to Valles, Baron. If you can advance us passage money, I would appreciate it. You needn't worry about being repaid, at least—"
Ilna's smile returned.
"—if I survive."
Robilard stood up as she'd directed him to. Ilna noted with amusement that he winced as his knees came off the pavement; perhaps he'd learned a lesson more general than that he shouldn't invent famous ancestors for himself
"There's no question of you repaying me anything, mistress," he said. His voice strengthened with every word, and he gave no indication of having spent the night drinking. "I—"
He glanced behind himself to include his courtiers.
"—all of us will be in your debt for as long as we live. I can't offer you passage on a merchant vessel, because none will sail to Valles since the troubles there, but—"
"What troubles?" Ilna said, interrupting before she could catch herself. Sudden fear for Cashel—for Cashel and others—drew the question. She knew she should have waited for the baron to finish what he was saying.
"There've been riots," Hosten explained. He'd remained at the baron's side. Cotolina and the nurse sat on a step where they were still trying to quiet the infants. "There's been wizardry and worse. We have agents on all the islands where we do major business, and those on Ornifal have warned us not to risk cargoes until things settle down."
"But of course that won't matter for you," Robilard resumed briskly. "We'll go aboard one of my warships."
He looked at the man beside him. "The Erne, I believe, Hosten?"
The courtier nodded. "Her or the Cormorant," he said. "We don't have crews available for both at the moment, though in a few days I can gather something."
"I'll accompany you, of course," Robilard said nonchalantly. "Now, when would you like to leave?"
Ilna started to protest, then realized she had no cause to. She had wanted to get to Valles as soon as possible. News of the troubles confirmed her intention—and if Robilard thought he owed her his life ... well, he was right about that.
"The sooner the better," Ilna said. She looked at Halphemos. "When can you be ready?"
"Cerix and I have nothing to ready, mistress," he said. "You're the only reason we have even our lives."
"We'll leave in an hour, then," the baron said crisply. "That is—can we have the crew ready by then, Hosten?"
"The crew will be ready," Hosten said with a grim smile. "Or else I'll find a better use for the cage than the one you made of it, Baron. And we'll be in Valles before sunset."
He trotted toward the back of the palace, shouting for grooms and a horse.
Garric bumped the jamb as he tried to follow Royhas through the doorway into the king's private apartments. Liane steadied him. Royhas turned with a look of concern and said, "Are you all right?" in a sharper tone than perhaps he intended.
"When this is over," Garric said, "I'm going to sleep for a week."
He chuckled and added, "That's assuming we aren't sleeping for all eternity, the lot of us."
Liane winced. She'd come to recognize Garric's new sense of humor. She didn't fully appreciate it, though.
"The only humor there is on a battlefield, lad, is gallows humor," Carus' voice whispered. "Or on a gibbet, I shouldn't wonder, though there I haven't been."
The four Blood Eagles in the anteroom remained in front of the inner door when Royhas entered; when Garric appeared behind the chancellor they stepped to either side. The watch commander clenched his fist in salute and said, "He's in with the priests again, sir. He said not to let anyone through."
He nodded Garric toward the door in implicit rejection of the king's orders.
Garric knew the Blood Eagles would without hesitation die to protect Valence. Protecting the king no longer meant obeying him when his orders conflicted with the wishes of the real ruler of Valles. He tapped on the burl panel, then pushed down the latch bar before one of those inside tried to wedge it shut.
Garric smiled. He was indeed ruler of Valles and most of Ornifal; and he had a start on ruling the whole Kingdom of the Isles, at least if he survived the next few days. It made herding sheep—stupid, contrary sheep that kept you out in all weather—seem an idyllic existence.
Valence bleated petulantly, "I said no one—" He fell silent when he realized that Garric was responsible for the intrusion. Instead of court robes or the thin silks a nobleman might wear in private apartments, he wore a horsehair tunic that must be almost as uncomfortable as rolling naked in a bed of nettles.
Garric had already dealt with the two religious figures who were closeted with the king. The Arch Hierophant of Ornifal was a seventy-year-old priestess with skin like ivory and eyes of chilled steel. Before her elevation she had founded a healing order which now maintained nearly a hundred hospices across the island. Her companion was director of the temple of the Shepherd Who Maintains Valles. He was a fat man with a mind that let nothing go—and hands similarly able to keep any wealth that they grasped.
"Your Majesty," Garric said, "we have business to discuss with you."
The priests were already leaving the room. The first time Garric had come for an interview with the king, the priests had expected to stay. They'd learned they were wrong.
Valence shook his head despairingly. "Must you?" he said. "You don't understand how important it is that the Lady forgives me!"
Garric felt his lip twitch, but he suppressed the sneer. In the literal sense, Valence was correct: Garric didn't think it was important whether the king received forgiveness from the Great Gods. But what Valence really meant was "You don't understand how much evil I've done." That wasn't true at all.
"The restoration of your government is going as well as we could have hoped, sir," Garric said, ignoring the king's whine. "In the west of the island we're receiving more of the queen's councillors under our warrants than I'd like to, but in most cases these are families who've led their vestries for generations. They'll have to be watched, but there isn't a great deal of choice."
Though Valles had accepted the new government, the rest of the island was a more difficult matter. The fact that Waldron and his fellow northern landowners supported Prince Garric was reason enough for the smallholders of the island's south and east to hang back and even threaten to secede from Valles' authority under their own county councils. Valence's signature on the orders Royhas and Tadai drafted did at least as much to keep Ornifal united as the threat of Waldron's army could.
Liane unfolded the legs of the portable desk in which she transported the latest set of documents. It was an intricate piece of cypress cabinetry with bronze fittings, originally the property of her far-traveling father.
Royhas was present to answer questions about details of the documents, not that in the past days Valence had seemed to care about anything beyond his own afterlife. Royhas was the king's longtime friend, but that didn't matter anymore to Valence either.
Garric had to attend the sessions because the Blood Eagles wouldn't admit anyone else against the king's orders, and because Valence would by and large listen to Garric as to no one else.
Garric heard laughter in his mind. "It doesn't matter which of us gets the credit so long as the job's done," his ancestor murmured down the ages.
"If you'll sign—" Liane said, putting the first of the documents on top of the desk.
Valence brought up the leather quirt he'd been concealing behind him and lashed himself across the back. The thongs popped against the stiffblack horsehair. "The Beast will eat us all!" he cried.
Garric grabbed the king's wrist with one hand and the quirt with the other. Valence struggled feebly. "The Beast will take me!" he said.
"Stop that!" Garric shouted, flinging the quirt against the wall. He shook Valence without meaning to; when he realized, he let the king go and stepped back.
"Sir!" Garric said in gasping anger. "You need to be a man. Men have died for you!"
Valence shrank to the floor and began sobbing. The three others looked at one another with a mixture of disgust and discomfort.
Royhas shrugged. "There's nothing that can't wait a day," he said quietly. "I'll have a word with the guards so that they inform me when, ah, the time might be more propitious."
Garric turned the desk over and refolded its legs. "I told Tenoctris that I'd find time to take her to the queen's mansion," he said as his mind wrestled with other things.
Valence had been King of the Isles in name and ruler of Ornifal in all truth. Now...
Because Garric was dealing with the portable desk, Liane walked to the corner and picked up the quirt. Valence could get another one, of course. Or he could hang himself with the belt of his horsehair tunic if he wanted to, and then where would they be?
Garric followed his companions into the anteroom, closing the beautiful door softly behind him. Will the same thing happen to me when the strain gets to be too much? he thought.
"Not until the sun goes black and all the seas dry up!" thundered the voice in his mind. "And not even then!"
"Oh!" Cashel said, tossing his quarterstaff vertically and balancing it for a moment on his upright index finger. When it tilted farther than he could allow for, he let it drop and caught it at the balance in his right hand. "Doesn't it feel good to have some room again, Zahag?"
The ape squatted, scratching his ribs with his right hand while his head rotated farther to either side than a human could have managed. The Pandah bireme that had landed them at Valles' outer harbor was already on its way home.
"Room is fine," Zahag said without enthusiasm. "I don't like the feel of this city, though. I think we ought to go someplace else. Fast."
"Oh, it's all right," Cashel said; though the truth was, he felt a sort of overhanging pressure himself when he let himself think about it. Also, his skin prickled. "Anyway, I'm going to have to find work before we can eat. I thought it'd be easy to get a job loading ships till we learn what's where, but..."
Compared to the bustle of Erdin and Divers on Pandah, the harbor of Valles was dead though not quite deserted. Less than half the many slips were occupied, and most of the vessels which were present looked unserviceable even to the eyes of a landsman like Cashel. There was no cargo on the quays, and the taverns and stalls which sold rough clothing and the trinkets dear to a sailor's heart were mostly shuttered. The business of the evening should have been just getting under way.
"Well, where are we going, then?" the ape asked in a peevish tone. "We didn't have enough to eat on shipboard to keep my ribs apart, and I'm not going to miss another meal."
"Then get it for yourself," Cashel growled. He set off up the nearest street because he figured it was as good a direction as any. He was hungry, too. Now that the first joy of returning to land had passed, he felt the cramps and stiffness from a day's confinement aboard a ship where there wasn't room to turn around.
A trio of middle-aged women came in the opposite direction, each carrying beer in a leather pail. They'd been talking, but they fell silent and slanted to the other side of the street when they saw Cashel and Zahag approaching. Cashel would have asked them about where he could get meals and a place to sleep—to be paid for in the morning—but their suspicious behavior made him bite his tongue.
Things like that made him wonder if he should've left Barca's Hamlet. Of course he'd had to, because Sharina was leaving; but sometimes he wished she hadn't had to go. Cashel had been hungry often enough in Barca's Hamlet, and cold, and tired, and he'd been laughed at for being slow. But he'd never wondered where home was until the day he left it.
"Aria would have given you money," Zahag said bitterly.
"Why should she do that?" Cashel said in surprise. "Anyway, Aria didn't have any money. She was Folquin's guest just like we were."
"Right," the ape said, "and he'd have given you his whole treasury if you'd said you'd stay if he didn't. You're about—"
"Zahag," Cashel said in a hoarse rumble.
"Right, chief," the ape said quickly. "Right, I don't know what I was thinking about to talk that way."
A man wearing two tunics layered to show the gilt embroidery—tatty by now—on the inner one had been standing in a door alcove. He stepped forward and said, "Say, buddy. Did I hear that monkey talk?"
"You may have heard the ape speaking, my good man," Zahag said in a tone he didn't use often in Cashel's hearing. "If you did, you noticed his diction was much better than that of a pimp from the docks district."
"Hey!" the man said in delight. "Say, would you like to sell him?"
Zahag bristled, then looked up at Cashel in frightened surmise. Cashel put a hand on the ape's hairy shoulder. "No," he said, "but I'd like if you could tell me where I could find work, bed, and a meal, sir."
"Say, for your trained monkey I can find you a bed and somebody to warm you in it!" the local said. "I can find a couple somebodies for a gentleman of your discernment and I'll pay you cash to boot. What sort of price were you—"
"No," Cashel said. He didn't raise his voice, but he tapped his staff on the pavement so that the ferrule struck sparks. He'd taken "pimp" as just an example of the ape's usual bad temper, but apparently Zahag knew more about these things than Cashel did—or wanted to. "All I want is a place who'll hire me for work. Honest work."
The pimp grimaced and turned away. "Go to the palace," he threw over his shoulder. "They're hiring strong backs to haul rocks."
"Sir?" said Cashel. He didn't know where the palace was. The pimp kept walking away.
"Sir!" Cashel repeated at a level that rattled shutters. The pimp stumbled, then faced around again.
"How do I find the palace, please?" Cashel said in his normal voice. At his feet, Zahag slapped his thighs and cackled enthusiastically.
The pimp managed a professionally bright smile. He pointed in the direction Cashel was already going. "Three blocks up there's a boulevard with a median and statues on it," he said. "That's Monument Avenue. You turn left and keep going till you hit the palace."
Cashel looked at his hands, frowning in concentration. Zahag plucked the hem of Cashel's tunic. "I know which way left is," the ape said. "Let's get going. In Pandah, they feed the king's table scraps to beggars at the gate. Maybe they're civilized here too."
"It wouldn't kill us to miss a meal," Cashel muttered. Still, the idea of food sounded better and better, maybe because Zahag kept on about it. The sun was getting low, so he lengthened his stride to arrive before the king barred his house for the night.
Zahag fell into a four-legged lope. If his knuckles minded the cobblestones, at least it didn't slow him down.
Cashel chuckled. The ape looked up and said, "What do you find so funny?" His voice was sour; likely the hard pavement did hurt.
"I was thinking the only time I've moved like this," Cashel explained, "was following an ox team to the water after an afternoon's plowing. Anybody who thinks oxen can't move hasn't seen them when the yoke comes off."
"Don't you know any smart animals?" Zahag grumbled.
Traffic increased as Cashel and the ape got away from the harbor. The problems in Valles seemed to have affected sea trade more than they had ordinary life. Though—they passed a number of buildings on Monument Avenue that had been burned out recently. Smoke, and not just clean woodsmoke, tinged the air around them.
"Umm," Zahag said. "People have been dying here. Can't you smell it?"
"Yeah," Cashel said. "I can."
"I told you we ought to go someplace else," the ape muttered. He was so close to Cashel now that his shoulder brushed the youth's calf at every stride.
A large body of troops filled the half of the avenue Cashel was following. They walked faster than the same number of sheep would have, but...
When a narrow cross street joined the avenue at the right angle for a sighting, Cashel cocked an eye at the sun. Unless the palace was closer than he had any reason to believe, the troops weren't moving fast enough for his purposes.
"Let's go over," he said to Zahag. The other side of the avenue was crowded with traffic mostly moving in the opposite direction, but maybe he and the ape could cross back when they'd gotten around the troops. The median itself was choked with peddlers' stalls where there weren't bronze statues on squared stone bases.
Zahag slid beneath a produce cart while Cashel squeezed between it and a flimsy stall from which a shrill-voiced woman sold fried fish on bamboo skewers. As he and the ape pushed into the crowd on the other pavement, Zahag turned his head to view the troops they'd just skirted.
"Hey, look at their livery," the ape said. "They're not from here. Blue and sea-green are the colors of Third Atara. We worked there a week when I was with the kid and the cripple, but the collections barely amounted to our rations. The baron didn't leave any money loose for other people."
Zahag walked on three limbs while he fed himself a banana with the remaining hand. He ate it skin and all, and Cashel guessed it was too late to ask where the fruit had come from.
"I've never been there," Cashel said, because politeness required a response. He'd never heard of the place until this moment. Between the two divisions of soldiers there was a pair of hired litters. A number of men and women on foot walked beside the rich folk being carried. "Looks like it's some nobles, don't you think?"
"Look!" Zahag shrieked. "Look!"
He stopped in the street and began to jump up and down, gabbling in his own language. Anyway, it wasn't any language Cashel had learned.
"What's the matter?" Cashel said in exasperation. It was bad enough fighting traffic that wanted to go the other way. Having folks bump him because he was standing like a post in the roadway was even worse. Maybe the ape had gotten the last of the banana down the wrong pipe and was choking. He sure hadn't been wasting any time eating it.
"The kid and the cripple!" Zahag shouted. "The kid and the cripple!"
Everyone around Cashel and Zahag was now staring either at the talking monkey or the soldiers on the other side of the median. The soldiers and the civilians in the midst of them turned their heads to see what was causing the commotion on the other side of the street.
A legless man rode in one of the litters. Cashel didn't recognize him, but he was pretty sure the youth in a red robe walking alongside was the wizard from Folquin's court when he and Sharina arrived there originally.
The fellow on the other litter was a nobleman, sure enough. He wore a gilded breastplate which must have been uncomfortable, leaning on the cushion like he had to do, and his matching helmet sat on the litter at his feet. The slim woman walking beside him turned her head.
Cashel hadn't recognized her because it hadn't crossed his mind that she was anywhere within a month's journey. He gaped.
"Good evening, brother," Ilna called across the median in a tone of cheerful satisfaction. "I was hoping I'd find you here."