by Glen Cook
How could these people be so arrogantly overconfident? So lacking in justifiable paranoia? Did they really think that they had nothing to fear? Were they that sure of the countenance of God?
Must be. But no sane man ever should be.
God had proven, time and again, that His favor was fickle.
Haroun bin Yousif was not made to trust anything outside himself.
He dithered half an hour trying to find hidden pitfalls. Rational people would have created some in case the invader returned.
Could it be that they never figured it out?
He could imagine Yasmid softening any effort to snare him—but did not believe that she would.
His innards knotted as he finally forced himself forward—not where he penetrated the tent before. This had to be done before there was light enough to show that something strange was happening.
Varthlokkur had convinced him—almost—that his part, successfully executed, would end the torments his kingdom had suffered for two generations. This would reshape everything. It would compel the birth of a new order because there would be no old order left. What shape that new order took would be in his hands, too, insofar as he cared to sculpt it.
Varthlokkur would build on what they did here, toward a new order for the rest of the world.
Haroun moved forward. He wanted to believe but could not. Not really. They were still trying to throw a bridle on the wind. Even so, he hoped. He had a goal again—though he did not quite understand it.
Once inside he produced a wane witch light. By its glow he proceeded to the area where once the foxes had denned. Ha! Here were sure signs that all was not as it had been. That whole wide space had been cleansed down to the bare earth. He would not have to climb over trash once he went to work.
He had brought equipment with him. He hoped the clatter he raised using it would not give him away.
He set out a triangle of witch lanterns for light, then assembled a pole fifteen feet long. He attached a spearhead so sharp that one ought not to look at it directly. He used that to make an eight-foot cut in the canvas overhead, made another cut at right angles to that, then a third parallel to the second, leaving a flap hanging down. Then he cut parallel cut to those to create a six-inch wide strip that might be climbable, making a last resort escape. Only…
Only that canvas was almost as old as he was. His weight ripped a longer strip out when he tested it.
Damn!
He was wasting time. He was behind schedule and falling further back. If he did not get a signal out soon Varthlokkur would abandon him to his fate.
He blew air into a sheep’s bladder, attached a mechanical device provided by the wizard, invested the bladder with a levitation spell, child’s-play simple but the possibility had not occurred to him till Varthlokkur showed it to him.
His time with the Empire Destroyer had been deflating. He now understood how limited his own talents and imagination were.
Once the sheep’s bladder rose a few hundred feet something tripped a mechanical device that sparked a flame. That lasted just seconds and was not showy. No one should notice at that hour. Anyone who did ought to think that it was some strange shooting star.
Too much to hope for, in Haroun’s estimation. Much too much.
He grew impatient. The risks were rising now. Others would be involved. He could not keep them from screwing up. Worse, his role now consisted entirely of waiting.
Varthlokkur and the Unborn dropped in so quietly that Haroun would have missed them if he had not been watching. The wizard had draped the Unborn in black gauze, rendering it invisible from outside while only slightly impairing the monster’s ability to perceive the world around it.
The Unborn deposited the sorcerer, rose against the stars. “There!” Haroun said. “I see a pink glow when I look straight up.”
“Aren’t you a bit long in the tooth and in the wrong religious tradition to be looking up someone’s skirt?”
Varthlokkur could not have stunned him more by whacking him with a hammer. “We’re late. We’ll have to push it if we’re still going to get this done quietly.”
Quietly was the ultimate hope. Full execution without ever being noticed. Come and gone undetected, leaving behind nothing but delayed confusion.
The hope.
Haroun considered it forlorn, insane, impossible.
Something would go wrong, if only because he was part of a team. Long experience left him confident that others never achieved his level of competence. They could not maintain the focus.
The wizard asked, “Is something wrong? Is there some reason you’re freezing up instead of trying to make up time?”
“No good reason,” Haroun admitted. “We can make up time fast if you expand your sleep spells. You were right. No one will notice and no alarms will be tripped. There is no magic here.” He used “magic” as a convenience, lacking something more precise.
Varthlokkur understood. “I’ll take advantage of that, then. I’ll deploy the spells as we go.”
Haroun appreciated the fact that Varthlokkur wasted no time on “I told you so.” He had argued for a more aggressive use of sorcery. He was less concerned about leaving evidence behind.
Haroun headed into the inhabited part of the tent. Changes were legion. The biggest was the reduction in clutter. Tons of trash had been carried off to be buried, burned, or laid out for anyone who wanted to pick over it.
Someone had done a masterful job. That someone was not yet finished. They passed through an untouched area where clutter was piled as high as a man could reach. Most seemed to be old records, moldy, water-stained, likely useless.
The Disciple’s quarters had to be accessed through a cloth-walled room featuring a Matayangan in a loincloth asleep on a pad on the earthen floor. This Matayangan did not like the dark. A tiny lamp wasted oil so the night could be held at bay.
The Matayangans all shared that failing. Lamps burned in the areas adjoining the four cloth walls of El Murid’s space. Night had been an evil time while Matayanga was at war with Shinsan.
Phogedatvitsu and his men slept surrounding the Disciple, which made sense because the man had that penchant for wandering off.
The Matayangans were under the sleep spell, but not deeply. Varthlokkur muttered irritably. Why were they not all snoring like the next to dead?
The Disciple was not asleep at all. They found him sitting up, drowsy, on a western-style camp stool, at a little table. He was trying to write by feeble mutton-tallow candle light. His space retained every bit of smell the candle produced. He evidenced no surprise when he saw Haroun. “You’re back.”
“I am. Come. It’s time to go.”
“I will not cooperate.”
“All right.”
Varthlokkur joined them. “I can’t push them into a deeper sleep. Don’t argue with him. Just get him moving.”
The Disciple gaped. He did not recognize the wizard. There was no reason he should. But he had not seen this demon with a companion before, nor could he imagine the Evil One having an accomplice who would tell him what to do.
Haroun moved closer, ready to gag and bind the Disciple.
Yasmid, yawning, sleepily confused, pushed in. “I keep hearing voices, Father… Oh! What…? You?” She froze.
Haroun stopped moving. How weak a sleep spell had the wizard cast? Varthlokkur grumbled, “Maybe it’s the geography. It happens where the ley lines are warped. Or they might be partially immune.”
Haroun was not listening. Even a blind shaghûn could smell this truth. “We have to take her, too.”
“What?” The wizard was at work on the Disciple because Haroun had lost focus.
“She’s pregnant. My responsibility. I can’t leave her…”
That stopped the wizard cold. He shivered, shook his head. “Fate takes some damned strange channels. All right, do what you have to, but do it now! Do it fast! We’re still slipping back on time.” He nudged El Murid, who was now grinding to the conclusion th
at his situation was worse than he had thought.
Haroun told Yasmid, “You have two minutes to get anything you can’t leave behind. Don’t argue. You know what will happen if you stay. Nothing will save you. Nothing will save our child. So move. Now. The wizard is in a hurry.”
“The wizard is in a hurry, indeed. But the wizard has family, too, and understands the compulsions. Will she run screaming if I relax the sleep spell?”
“No.” He hoped. He looked his wife, his love, the daughter of his lifelong enemy, in the eye. “Get what you can’t live without.”
Yasmid’s eyes closed as Varthlokkur did something. She bobbed her head. Now she had the emotional freedom to be embarrassed. She did not turn away immediately, though. Haroun grew as frustrated with her as the wizard was with him.
As he started to bark, she said, “Neither Father nor I can manage without the Matayangans.”
“What?”
“I don’t know why you came for him. Not to kill, obviously. He would be dead and you would be gone. So you have some use for him. But he won’t be useful if he doesn’t have the Matayangans to manage him and care for him.”
Varthlokkur looked like a man who needed a good shriek and a chance to fling furniture. “Get moving!” Haroun’s voice was soft but adamant and intense. “Now!” He turned to the wizard. “What can you do?”
The Matayangans followed Haroun, Yasmid, and El Murid through the portal, single file, as fast as the device could transfer them. Varthlokkur watched and scowled, shuffled nervously, hearing noises develop as people elsewhere stirred. It was no longer possible to do this unnoticed. Radeachar could not remove the portal unseen. There was no longer any point to repairing the slashed tent roof so the mystery of the Disciple’s disappearance would deepen.
Worse, Old Meddler would have what he needed to assemble a portrait of the plot shaping up against him. He had all the tools available to his enemies, and more. He would be able to research this event, decipher its meaning, then would move because of the forces he saw ranged against him. He would strike soon because he was weak, now, and dared not delay seeing to his own protection.
Impatience moved the wizard again. He had to get back to Fangdred. There was much to be done yet to engineer even a chance of brushing away an assault by the Star Rider.
How much was the slight, secret advantage of having the Old Man and Ethrian worth? How much headway had Mist made getting into their minds and memories?
Varthlokkur did not feel optimistic as he placed a foot on Phogedatvitsu’s behind and shoved the bulky man into the portal, hoping all of him made it through.
He looked up at Radeachar. “Now you. We’ll leave the portal. They may not understand what it is.”
The Unborn soared up and away, refusing.
That needed consideration, Varthlokkur reflected. He had a prejudice against portals himself. An outright dread, really, but he would do what he had to do.
He could not recall the last time Radeachar had refused an instruction—if ever it had.
Did it know something? Or did it just share his fears, magnified?
Questions had to wait.
He stepped in, heart in throat, frightened child inside sure that he would not arrive at the other end.
As he did that, tent staff discovered that the Disciple was not in his quarters. The foreigners were missing, too. The Disciple must have gotten away and they were hunting him through the tent again.
There would be no distress till the portal was found. The mood, then, was baffled consternation. No one knew what it was, or what it meant.
Mist watched bin Yousif arrive, unhappy but apparently not emotionally crippled. A woman followed, badly frightened. She latched onto bin Yousif. Her movements were strained. She was in considerable discomfort. Damn! She was pregnant? Definitely not smart at her age.
The object of the operation followed, wearing a dimwit look like the one so often seen on Ethrian. He was thoroughly confused. He had no idea about transfer portals.
Brown men followed the Disciple at precise intervals.
Mist approached bin Yousif. “Is this an evacuation?”
“Something like. I could not go without Yasmid. She says she and her father will fall apart without the fakirs to keep them together. We had wasted too much time to argue. We can get rid of them here if they are actually useless.”
Mist turned to her garrison commander. “Kei Lin. Feed these people, get them into civilized clothing, and have them physically examined.” She turned back to bin Yousif. “How many more?”
“Just the wizard and the monster.”
“And the wizard has arrived,” Varthlokkur announced, having appeared in time to hear the question. “I’m the last. Radeachar won’t risk the transfer stream. Instead, it will go scouting in the northern desert.”
She asked, “Can you explain all this?” Making a sweeping gesture.
“Hasn’t the King done so already?”
“Why should I believe him?”
Haroun whispered a translation to his woman.
Mist smiled broadly. Fortune had dealt her a royal flush. She had the Disciple and his daughter. There would be no one to hold that movement together, now. And she had the only serious Royalist claimant to the Peacock Throne. His successor was now a scatter of cracked bones.
She said, “We need to move on quickly. We got a fix on our target at the scene of the murders…”
Varthlokkur had a finger in front of his lips. He whispered, “His mother hasn’t been told.”
“All right. Once we get to Fangdred?”
He nodded.
“I have Scalza, Eka, and Nepanthe trying to track the villain. He doesn’t seem concerned. Maybe he doesn’t care if we watch. More likely, though, he doesn’t know that we can watch.”
“That would be a benefit of the Winterstorm. The magic is different. He doesn’t understand it.”
Mist saw him shiver with a sudden suspicion that he might be deluding himself. That old villain had seen the Winterstorm up close. He had every reason for an abiding interest.
She said, “Kei Lin, one more thing. I want these people free of lice, nits, mites, and fleas before we move. Understand?”
He did not, but, “As you wish, Illustrious, so shall it be.”
Scalza, with Ekaterina’s assistance, had gotten a scryer locked onto the Star Rider’s horse. “I started out trying to fix it on him… Ouch! Eka!”
“That’s for taking credit for something you didn’t do, Worm.”
“Yeah? All right. Eka did the brain work. And she’s the first one I’m gonna boil in lead after I take over the world.”
Which jest ignited an uncomfortable silence. One did not joke about such things amongst the mightiest faces of the Dread Empire. That reeked too much of possible wickedness.
Eka said, “He’d trip over his own mutant feet and fall in the cauldron himself if I wasn’t there to look out for him.”
That helped, but only a little.
Red-faced, Scalza focused on his task. “Well, anyway, we couldn’t lock it on him. He has some kind of protection that keeps that from happening. So we tried to lock onto the Horn thing because he’s always got that with him. Same thing, so we tried his horse and that worked.”
Varthlokkur said, “It’s an insoluble problem with no satisfactory answer. Knowing where the horse is doesn’t tell us why the rider went there and it doesn’t tell us what he’s doing.”
Mist asked, “Can the Unborn keep an eye on him?”
“It could. But he would notice. That would cost me my best tool.”
“Is he really that powerful?”
“We don’t know, do we? And that’s the point. There’s no telling what powers and resources he has. We do have someone who can tell us, though. Don’t we?”
Among the mob jammed in there were Mist’s mind specialists. The senior of the two stuck to the Old Man, talking softly, studying every move he made on the shogi board. His associate focused on Ethrian
and Nepanthe, often involving the boy in a puzzle that required him to manipulate wooden blocks in different shapes and colors. After hassling her brother some more Ekaterina went to watch Ethrian fiddle with those. She had trouble not helping but Ethrian was getting lazy, counting on her to make things easier for him.
The specialist let her do nothing but offer encouragement.
She had it bad for someone just getting into the high drama phase of a girl’s life. Were Ethrian normal her imagination would not have pushed her into such strong fantasies. His obsession with Sahmaman would have sucked the life out of that.
Ekaterina was brighter than the quietly smart, shy child she pretended. She was more introspective than most girls her age. Further, her little brother was the only child she knew. She owned an unusually adult outlook. That included an appreciation of her own emotional landscape. It headed off nothing before it happened but did make it possible for her to analyze and understand after the fact.
She was scared that the real, secret Ekaterina could become one truly frightening adult.
Meantime, she had her crush on her cousin and it was all she could do to keep that hidden and manageable.
Manageable she managed, but, hidden, not so much. Everyone with eyes and a brain sniffed that out.
The puppy love amused everyone. Folks were kind enough not to torment her, Scalza being the exception. Little brothers have obligations.
The specialist who focused on the Old Man said, “We can now touch the level we needed to reach to get the information you want, Illustrious. If I put him into a deep trance he’ll do the rest.” He had been preparing the Old Man for hypnosis since he had arrived. The Old Man’s memory problems were not the result of physical damage. The emotional scarring, though, was serious.
Mist said, “I’m counting on you, Academician Sue.”
“I understand. We need to talk about the desert people, too.”
“Desert people?”
“The ones the wizard brought. Neither Lum nor I speak their language. The only available translators are bin Yousif and the sorcerer. The former is marginally capable because he spent time in one of our prisons—unfortunately Lioantung. Those people have an accent so thick they practically speak their own dialect, which he then butchers with an accent of his own.”
