Lhind the Spy

by Sherwood Smith

  He said, “‘Web’ is the silent speech of servants, lest their noise disturb our reflections. You’ve only to speak. ‘Kal, I am lost.’ I presume you can manage that much?”

  I bit my lips against a retort of equal sarcasm. I’d been around enough bullies and villains to suspect that that would constitute insolence (though of course he could be as sarcastic as he liked), and I felt morally certain that even when I did learn how to use the fais, it wouldn’t come equipped with my own retaliatory torture spell.

  I backed away—I couldn’t get out of there fast enough—but before I reached the door, he said, “Elenderi.”

  I longed with every bone and feather to ignore him, to shout, “That is not my name!”

  But I did neither. I forced myself to stop and turn.

  “Before we meet again,” he said in that measured voice, “see to it that Kal instructs you in the basics of etiquette.”

  Was that supposed to sting? It didn’t. I didn’t care a whit for his etiquette unless he threatened that magical fire. I reached the door, which a silent servant opened. As soon as it shut behind me, I let out my breath in relief and ran until I was well out of sight of those sun doors.

  I found a stairway of pale mauve marble but as soon as I set my foot on the first step, the fais flared hot. Magical ward, same as the windows in my suite.

  I jumped back and ran, slowing when nothing more happened. So far I’d come along a single corridor with windows at my right. Though I was clearly confined to a single floor, it appeared to be vast. I did not want to get lost any more than I wanted to call for help. Were they listening to me at all times, was that how it worked? What a horrible idea!

  So I explored the way I had in the past when alone in a forest or city. I began with a small square, making only right turns, and looked at all the landmarks, but instead of a distinctive clump of trees, I marked a statue of a woman with a triple crown on her head, and a long, pointed fais. Empress Triple Crown was where I first turned right.

  I made my next right turn at an intersection of six arches, the floor tiled in marble pieces fitted around some stylized lettering. I could understand languages when I heard them, but I had to learn to read like anyone else. From one angle, the letters looked like the snap of a dragon’s tail and an outstretched claw; as I passed to the right for my next turn, the lettering changed to a river below a crowned mountain.

  Next turn, an age-softened statue of a man with a forked beard and a different kind of triple crown, sort of braided together. He wore what looked like it might have been a braided necklace, with some kind of stone at the end. Necklace or fais? I passed him and—I was not where I’d started.

  So I cautiously tried two more corners, and there I found my starting point. All right. So this part of the building was six sided.

  I ventured on, my attention snagging on jewel-toned hangings and stylized paintings in gold frames, mosaics, murals, statuary. All very different styles, but someone had placed them so that the eye moved naturally from one to the next.

  My eyes were not the only sense busy. I strained to hear anyone—for I did not want to stumble into him by accident. But I saw no one. No servants. No guards.

  The longer I walked alone the uneasier I became. The palace in Erev-li-Erval had been filled with people. This place felt like a gigantic tomb, especially under that heavy gray cloud cover. Magical glowglobes glimmered in corners where light from the windows or overhead domes did not reach, but somehow that increased the sense that I was alone in this silent world of stone and metal and carved wood.

  Alone, that is, except for the Evil Emperor.

  Having completed a circuit around all six sides, I cautiously poked my head into rooms, listening first, and if I heard no sounds, peering to make certain he was not there.

  I could not guess the purpose of most of those beautifully decorated rooms. I reached a very plain one with windows down one wall and spotted racks of various lengths of sticks arranged against the opposite wall. The sticks had been smoothed, with handsome handles at one end. Something for dancing? I reached toward one—and greenish magic crackled over it like lightning, flashing pain through my fingers right up my arm. I gasped and backed away rapidly.

  This was not a ballroom.

  I slunk out of there, not wanting to serve as target practice for anyone turning up looking for something to whack with those staves.

  I hastened on, stopping when I reached a room full of musical instruments. I paused on my tiptoes, ready to run, though I had not seen or heard anyone.

  I knew what caused my tension. All my life I’d struggled between adoration and loathing whenever I heard music. The loathing had followed the isolation and sadness I felt after the last notes of an entrancing melody faded into the air. Music was a lie, a false promise, a trick. And yet the yearning upwelling in my soul when I chanced upon great music—or heard echoes of it in dreams—never went away.

  Thianra, Hlanan’s sister, had devoted her life to music. She had tried to convince me that music inspired and united people.

  I wondered what she might think about me now that her mother had thrown me to the enemy. Probably nothing at all. One thing I had learned (in fact, I had counted on in my eternal quest to remain invisible and unnoticed) was that we were never as interesting to others as we were to ourselves.

  Unless, of course, we had the power to kill.

  Intensely ambivalent, I ventured into the room and walked a slow circuit, looking on ancient instruments whose sounds I could not imagine, and on familiar ones. Beautiful instruments with inlaid gold threading and woodwork, old ones smoothed over the years by the touch of unknown hands, they were all there: woodwinds, strings, drums and cymbals and bells.

  My circuit had begun in the direction away from the harp. But inexorably my feet brought me to the harp, a beautiful triple-coursed instrument with foot levers.

  The music in my dreams that hurt the most had always been the shimmering sound of metal strings. Thianra had coaxed me to try a tiranthe, and once I’d easily mastered the idea of chords she’d loaned me that single-course harp that Prince Geric had thrown over the waterfall.

  I hadn’t even been able to master a single-course harp. It would be a travesty to touch with my clumsy paw this beautiful instrument. I moved close enough to see the fine carving along the neck depicting tiny bird-shapes chasing in and out of interwoven leaves and roses.

  Birds? They looked like aidlars. Tir! My heart squeezed behind my ribs. Had Tir recovered from Prince Geric’s stone spell?

  The thought of Geric propelled me out of the room as if I could escape memory. I slunk back to my imperial prison cell, where Kal waited with his familiar gaze, which widened when I told him what the Evil Emperor had said.

  I’m leaving out ‘the Imperial Princess’ and the ‘if she will honor me’ and all the rest of the formal speechifying that kept me as a third person, as if my imperial self was outside the room instead of standing right there in front of him. The basics of etiquette turned out to mean how to enter and leave rooms, in specific how to bow to emperors, which must be done every time I saw or left him. And there was not one bow. There were degrees of bows. The most formal one meant going down on your knees, and even putting your head to the ground the way those thousands of people had done on the freezing stone of that vast parade ground.

  “Do I have to bang my head on the ground every time I lay my eyes on Emperor. . . .” Evil? I managed to choke off the word, sensing that they would react with the same horror as they had to my mention of torture. And what if he was listening and struck at us all? But I couldn’t help saying, “I’m afraid I’m going to laugh.”

  Kal’s eyelids flashed up even more, but he said in that careful voice, “Only if His Imperial Serenity speaks in the aorist imperative. Or if you desire to present a petition. The Imperial Princess in the normal course of events would bow this way.” He stood straight, head bent, straight arms at his sides, palms open and empty.

  That w
as easy enough, not a lot different from how Hlanan’s family had greeted one another, only they put their palms together in front of their hearts. It was the idea of bowing, of showing respect for someone I loathed with every breath, that made me squirm.

  “Then there are the imperial cousins,” Kal said.

  “Cousins!” I squeaked in horror.

  He bowed in the servants’ manner. And in his mild, soft voice gave me to understand that there were indeed cousins among the select company who had the honor of attending upon the emperor in Icecrest Palace.

  Imperial family of the first circle (Dhes-Andis and I) were all ‘Your Imperial Serenity’, the next layer of the Chosen were ‘Most Noble,’ and then mere ‘the Noble.’ And they all had specific bows, the latter a mere nod, hands inside one’s sleeves, and a slight bob for the former. However if I did not know anyone’s specific rank, politesse dictated the safest course was to address them all as Most Noble.

  They didn’t seem to have dukes, barons, counts, archdukes, or any of the other titles I’d heard about in my travels. The fount of all glory, generosity, and grace (in one word, power) was the emperor; governorships were granted to those raised to Most Noble rank. Those only Noble weren’t in charge of anything; they got their status from their birth, and I guess their prospective promotion either by earning a governorship or by marriage.

  When both Kal and I were certain I had it all firmly in memory he asked the Imperial P. if she would desire a repast. I said that she never turned down free food and he departed noiselessly.

  I retreated to one of the windows, which I opened. By careful testing, I discovered that I could sit on the sill with my toes hanging over the edge and my chin on my knees. In this way I could feel the bracing air and look out and down, pretending to freedom, without triggering the pain of those invisible bars.

  For once the sky was at least partially clear, a long line of ragged clouds rolling away in the distance beyond one of the shark tooth islands.

  It hurt as much as ever to think about Hlanan, but I knew I couldn’t avoid it. I’d told him the very first day we were in Erev-li-Erval that I thought bowing and the rest of it was stupid. He’d replied that so was wearing clothing in summer and sitting at a table to eat—why didn’t we fling ourselves on the ground and gobble at vegetables pulled directly from the soil?

  “These manners are the outward markers of the social agreement we call society,” he’d said. “If we all agree to honor one another through these forms we have a better chance of rubbing along with a semblance of grace as well as order, respect, and above all, peace. That is one of the marks of a good life.”

  “Good lives,” I’d retorted, “would not require one to show respect toward evil princes like Geric. I would never bow to him. I don’t respect him. It would be a lie, and you told me once that civilization means not lying.”

  “What you respect is the rank, not the person, if you bow formally,” Thianra had said, gentle and patient as ever.

  “But I don’t respect rank either. Maybe I’d feel different if I’d been raised to it. But I think it’s all silly.”

  I winced, remembering that I was supposedly a princess now. But back then, I’d had no idea such a threat was coming for me, and so I’d gone on to ask, “Do the Hrethan have hierarchies?”

  “Yes,” Hlanan had said. “However, you will have to talk to them about how they choose their ranks.”

  I ground my chin into my knees. I hadn’t found that out because the Hrethan had been elusive.

  Now I knew why, thanks to Aranu Crown. In their eyes I was the next thing to an evil Djuran.

  And to be fair—though it made me itch inside with impatience—from a distance, those spells I’d cast during summer (one that caused thunderstorms for an entire season) might look pretty evil. If you didn’t know why I’d done it. Or that I hadn’t known that it was Dhes-Andis teaching it to me. And I certainly hadn’t had a clue about possible consequences.

  So here I was, where Aranu Crown and those elusive Hrethan obviously thought I belonged. Alone again. And I couldn’t even use magic to defend myself, so it would have to be my wits. Dhes-Andis’s pretence that I was an imperial princess seemed more sinister than being thrown into a dungeon and threatened with terrible things, because threats and dungeons would have given me a clear target to hate. The only thing I could figure was that the Emperor of Evil was using all this pretense of civilization to fog my intent, if not my distrust.

  I perched in the window stewing mentally until a pair of enormous, long-necked brown gryphs winged through the air outside maybe a hundred paces out over the water, an elaborate structure midway between a basket and a wheelless coach body suspended between them from fabulously carved harnesses glinting with gold. In it sat two females my age, who stared avidly at me under peaked hats as their basket swung gently. They were bundled up warmly so all I saw were the two round faces.

  Arcing high above them, the gryphs’ heads bobbed gently as they flapped. The nearest eagle-beaked bird twitched her head minutely and I caught the gaze of a huge round eye, and swayed on my feet at the compelling sense of an image not-quite-seen, a voice just-below-audible.

  I leaned dangerously out until my throat under the fais began to buzz and burn with magical warning as I watched the gryphs fly so beautifully in tandem, one’s wings high as the other’s swept low, weave and weave again.

  I knew from my own flying that wings don’t actually flap up and down, though it looks like that when one watches from human eyes. Wings move in a sort of triangle, which enabled this pair to braid the inside wings, in effect. My shoulder blades twitched as I tried to imagine gliding the inner wing through the air and scooping with the outside wing in order to keep from colliding with the other bird.

  It wasn’t natural flight, but it looked spectacular, as one of the females cast a last look behind at me before the gryphs and their passengers rounded a far tower, and vanished.

  I swung my feet inside and said to Kal, who sat patiently on his bench awaiting my whim: “Who were those people in that thing in the air?”

  After the usual bow that came before and after every single exchange, he informed the Imperial P. that she had glimpsed her first Chosen.

  I retired not long after, and spent an uncomfortable night waking myself out of bad dreams about shattering walls and tunnels full of invaders. I’d jerk awake shivering and certain someone had attempted a magical attack.

  When I finally gave up trying to sleep I retreated to the bath, and when I came out, I resolved that Lhind the Thief was not going back to that tree room to face Dhes-Andis. Instead, Lhind the Spy would go, masked in her false identity as Her Imperial Serenity, Princess Elenderi.

  SEVENTEEN

  Next morning, sure enough, the summons of doom came.

  I picked out a pretty yellow outfit and I even essayed the silk slippers. The only thing I ignored was the headdress, a sort of tiara affair that dangled gems on the brow coming to a point over the nose, echoing the V of the fais. If my hair lifted suddenly, something I could control most of the time unless something shocked me, the headdress might go flying off somewhere. Wasn’t certain how disastrous that might be.

  Thus girded for the battle of wits I took myself to the Garden Chamber. When I saw Dhes-Andis I made the sort of bow Princess Elenderi would make, and I did it with a flourish. May as well begin my masquerade right, I thought to myself.

  Dhes-Andis sat in his wing chair that kind of resembled a stylized lily, two outward petals arching above the armrests, and the central one rising to an oval with that odd triple crown embroidered beneath. On a beautiful golden stand at the right-hand side of his chair sat a crystal, perfectly round, the size of a child’s head. Three cats had joined him, one on his lap, one on the armrest, and one lying along the chair back to the right of the oval.

  A wingchair had been set to face his, but on the floor below his dais. When he indicated with a nod in its direction that I was to sit down I thought this would
be easy, he was just going to talk at me. I had only to practice my Lhind the Spy mask and continue to seek an escape. Right?

  Wrong again.

  “An adequate first effort at civilized behavior,” he said as he slowly stroked the cat on the armrest. Its eyes slitted but otherwise it was silent.

  His other hand made a subtle gesture too quick to catch. “Now, let us explore your skills. I’ve lifted the wards against your magic—”

  It was instinct, really. Not my plan. But the moment I heard ‘lifted the wards’ I focused on him, braced, and hurled a voice cast, because by now I knew that voice. I’d heard it in endless nightmares after those mental encounters the previous summer.

  And he struck back without lifting a finger.

  The voice cast splashed away harmlessly. I struggled to breathe. When the white lightning eased enough for me to get my shuddering ribs to expand, he said, “And one for stupidity.”

  He burned me again.

  When I came out of that one I knew why he’d had the chair set, so I wouldn’t fall flat on the ground again. That was not civilized.

  “What have you just learned?” he said, still stroking the cat as if nothing had happened.

  My mouth opened but no sound came out. That’s because I had enough wits left to choke off the first three or four responses I really wanted to make, all of which were absolutely guaranteed to net me another dose of his “correction.”

  His voice didn’t lift in volume, but the consonants sharpened to precision. “What. Have. You. Learned, Elenderi?”

  An echo of pain throbbed from my throat to my skull, and I flinched, slapping my hand to the cursed fais but of course I couldn’t wrench the thing away from my neck. “That I can’t do voice cast at you,” I managed.

  “Fast as you are, I am faster. As well as far your superior in skill,” he said. “I expected you to challenge me, but I trust you have now learned the futility of that. Let us resume,” the even, inexorable voice rolled over me. “What other magical skills do you possess?”