A half dozen long, narrow boats, once gaily painted but now chipped and weathered to bare, gray wood, were tied to the downstream side of a crumbling stone pier jutting out from the riverbank. Nets had been stretched to dry across rows of broken-off columns.
Everything seemed to have lost color to the sun, turned white as old bones. There was an air of desolation and depression about the whole huge, ruined place.
“Summer Palace,” murmured Marbleheart. He pointed to a low rise on the distant horizon where there stood a gaunt pile, glinting in the leveling sunlight, a tangle of tumbled but once-ornate stonework. “They tell me that was once a magnificent burrow with golden roofs and a hundred crystal gables and tall arched doorways. You can still see some of the arches, I think.”
“You’ve been in the city?” asked Douglas, studying the ruins.
“Oh, yes, any number of times. The people are pretty pathetic, for my taste. No sense of play at all. They’ll watch you steal their fish stew right off their tables and then sit around and argue about it for hours instead of giving proper chase. Not much fun! I found my breaking stone here, however, and thus my name, so I’m sort of fond of the place.”
He led the Journeyman down into the dilapidated city, through streets littered with blocks of stone fallen from buildings and dried sea-grape leaves and faded flowers blown from weed-choked gardens.
The broad avenues had originally been carefully paved with pink and gray granite cobbles set in swirling patterns, Douglas noted. The sides of the streets were choked with blown sand and debris, overgrown with thorny wild rose bushes and drooping bunches of roughly serrated yellow dune grass. The only sound he could hear was of the grass rustling mournfully in the evening breeze.
The Otter took Douglas to a side street just a bit less cluttered than the others, where the houses were, at least, roofed with musty reed thatching. Gray smoke made smudges in the air as it escaped through chinks and cracks where once there had been elaborate decorations and fenestrations. Coughing and low, monotonous murmuring came from behind each door, draped with weathered, ancient tapestries, but no one was abroad at this twilight hour.
“Here’s the house of the one they call Majordomo,” announced Marbleheart. “I’ll leave you here. I find Majordomo a fool leading fools, quite hard to suffer—and besides, I want to catch the ebbtide. Good-bye!”
He scampered off without another word, not waiting for Douglas to say thank you for his guidance.
Douglas knocked politely on the rickety doorframe of the Majordomo’s house. It was opened after a long pause by a tall, dry-looking individual in a ratty, once-white periwig and a rusty red long-tailed coat over stained white breeches so patched and mended that it was hard to tell what was repair and what original cloth.
“Ah, sir!” the man said in a polite but haughtily affected drawl. “How may I serve you?”
“You must be the Majordomo,” said Douglas. “I’m Douglas Brightglade, Journeyman Fire Wizard, pupil of Flarman Flowerstalk, also called Firemaster...”
“Welcome to Summer Palace, Master Journeyman Wizard!” interrupted the man. “Please to come in out of the night’s airs.”
He held the door curtain wide and allowed Douglas to precede him into a lofty, dim, and dusty entryway. Through arched doorways on either hand were two outsized, bare rooms that took up most of the ground level of the building. A winding stair led up to a boarded-up second-story landing.
“I am familiar with the rank, reputation, and accomplishments of the Great Wizard Flarman,” said the Majordomo when Douglas turned from his inspection of the interior. “As his colleague, you are most welcome at Summer Palace. Unfortunately,” he added with exaggerated sadness, “His Majesty King Grummist is not in residence just now. But you are undoubtedly most weary from your travels. May I suggest dinner, at once, while I have a suitable room prepared for your rest?”
He led the way through the left-hand archway to a scarred, most ancient table almost as long and wide as the kitchen table at Wizards’ High. A small, smoking fire of damp driftwood in a vastly ornate fireplace provided some warmth. Douglas was puzzled by the servant’s extreme and cold formality but he let it go unnoticed as the functionary seated him at the top of the table and clapped his hands imperiously for dinner to be served. He had something much more important to worry about.
King Gnimmist, who had been the lord of Summer Palace, had perished over two hundred years earlier in the terrible carnage of Last Battle of Kingdom!
Chapter Five
The Waiters
Douglas found that evening most strange, to say the least.
The Majordomo was scrupulously polite, but overly subservient. The dinner, served on fine old porcelain with gold service, was adequate but extremely bland, without salt or spices at all. Douglas asked for salt to go with the roast fish put before him by a timid and entirely silent serving maid who obeyed Majordomo’s summons. It was produced at once—without comment or apology.
The Journeyman dined alone in the huge, dim room. The Majordomo hovered behind his chair, filling his glass with a watery, too-sweet wine when it was only a third empty and silently removing the empty dishes as each new course was brought from a kitchen somewhere outside the house.
No one came to see the visitor. The street outside remained empty, although occasionally Douglas could hear distant voices, a door closing, or slow footsteps echoing in a bare passage somewhere.
He ate dessert, a particularly tasteless egg custard, and was offered coffee and brandy; he accepted the first, refused the second. Hardly more than four sentences had been spoken during the entire meal.
“You will wish to retire,” said the man, drawing back Douglas’s chair smoothly and at precisely the proper time. “If you will be pleased to have a seat in the drawing room across the hall, I will see that your quarters are properly prepared. It will take just a moment or two, Sir Wizard. May I recommend a book from our extensive library? His Majesty has eclectic tastes in literature or you may find the technical books of greatest interest.”
“Do you have an atlas of Kingdom?” Douglas asked, and a thick, musty old volume was brought to him by the silent maid in the cold drawing room. He spent the next quarter hour studying the shape, names, and extent of ancient Kingdom, alone and in complete silence except for the dry rustle of turning pages.
At least I can find out something about where I’m headed, he thought, and soon located Pfantas, mentioned by Captain Mallet back in Westongue. The town lay two hundred miles upstream of Summer Palace on what the atlas identified as the Ferngreen River. Douglas remembered it had been renamed Bloody Brook because of the infamous Last Battle, fought on its banks. The book must have been compiled long before the Fall of Kingdom.
He calculated distances and estimated the length of the journey ahead.
At best, if I can average, say, twenty miles a day, that’s a hundred and twenty miles in a week, saving one day for rest and washing clothes and such things. I expect it’ll take almost a fortnight to reach Pfantas, and find this man Cribblon.
The Majordomo appeared silently at his elbow. Douglas put his finger on the spot marked Pfantas and looked up at him.
“I intend to go here, Majordomo. Can you tell me how long it will take me to get there?”
The other seemed taken aback.
“I am not at all sure, Sir Wizard. I have never traveled to Pfantas myself. I recall someone saying that on horseback it takes five days, with relays every fifty miles along the River Road. That was some years ago.”
“Yes, something like two hundred years ago,” said Douglas dryly. “You have no idea how things have changed over the intervening years?”
“No, I am afraid not, Sir Wizard. We are very isolated here on this coast. We don’t get many visitors or much news.”
“When was the last time you heard from the ... His Majesty, the King?” Douglas was almost afraid to ask.
“I cannot tell you exactly,” said the servant, uneasy at the quest
ion, “but it has been quite some time...”
“Well, then, I’ll just have to start out tomorrow and find out for myself, Majordomo. By the way, do you have a name?”
“Er, yes, Sir Wizard. I am called Delond.”
“Delond, my name is Douglas Brightglade and as I am neither ennobled nor even knighted, I prefer to be called that name, especially by a gentleman who is undoubtedly three centuries older than am I.”
The words made Majordomo even less comfortable and he changed the subject, avoiding the use of either Douglas’s title or his name.
“Your bedchamber is prepared, sir. May I show you the way?”
“Oh, good,” sighed Douglas, unenthusiastically. “I might as well get a good night’s sleep.”
But sleep was difficult to come by.
The storm and the shipwreck had exhausted him physically, but not mentally. The apartment to which Delond showed him was spacious, fairly clean, but rather damp and musty, with windows open to Sea breezes, now rather warmer than the night before. The young Wizard paced restlessly for some time before sliding between patched sheets.
“What’s wrong here, I wonder,” Douglas asked himself as he hovered just short of the edge of sleep. “I smell enchantment; that’s it! These people don’t know or want to know what World has done outside of Summer Palace for two centuries. I wonder...?”
He fell asleep and dreamed of Flarman, Bronze Owl, and Myrn Manstar. His friends, in the dream, talked of Douglas as if he were nearby and would soon arrive at Wizards’ High when they should have known he was two hundred leagues away to the west.
Over breakfast he realized that he had to do something about the enchantment he knew surrounded the ruined city and its inhabitants. Perhaps these people were happy the way they were, but he doubted it. It was unhealthy, to say the least. They were doing barely enough to keep alive, no more.
“Delond?”
“Sir, er...Douglas?”
“Better! Come around in front of me, Delond, and let me look at your face for a change.”
“It is hardly fitting,” the other objected, but he obeyed a direct order and stood at stiff attention before Douglas across the long table, his eyes unfocused, staring straight ahead.
“No, that’s not good enough!” cried Douglas, thumping the table for emphasis. He kicked the nearest chair, spinning it about to face his.
“Sit down!” he commanded sharply.
Delond moved as if sleepwalking, around the long table to the chair. Douglas waited until he had perched stiffly on its edge, still looking straight ahead over the Journeyman’s shoulder.
“I suppose that’s as good as I’ll get for the moment,” Douglas sighed. “Look at me when I talk to you, Delond!”
The servant turned his head as if it were on gimbals and stared directly at and through Douglas. The scene made the young Wizard chuckle, and his soft laugh disturbed the man servant so that he dropped his eyes to the tabletop for a brief moment. Douglas gestured slowly with both his hands.
“Do you have something you wish to tell me?”
Delond looked suddenly pale and frightened, opened his mouth, closed it, dropped his eyes again, then looked for the first time directly at the young Wizard.
“What do you want to tell me?” encouraged the Journeyman, as though the man had answered his first question.
“The ... the ...”
“Yes, Delond? Come, you can tell me. I am a friend and pupil of a powerful Wizard, and a Wizard in my own right. I can help you.”
“The King ...,” began Delond, and Douglas was almost surprised, but not quite, to see drops of perspiration forming on the Man’s pale brow.
“We are...Waiters,” Delond ground out, at last. He had an expression of miserable pleading in his eyes. Douglas saw the maidservant enter the room with his breakfast, but halt uncertainly when she saw the Majordomo actually seated at the table.
“Come here, miss,” ordered Douglas. “Be seated here, on my other side. Put the tray down, please.”
The girl, for she seemed hardly older than Douglas, obeyed, as silently as ever.
“You are Waiters?” prompted Douglas, turning to Delond again. “Waiting for what? No, waiting ... ah, I see! ... For King Grummist to return?”
“Yes, that’s it,” gasped Delond, sighing raggedly in relief. “We were ... ordered ... to await the return of His Majesty the King.”
“The King has not come in a long time, but you are loyal servants, so you wait, eh?”
“Exactly, sir!” Delond said.
The maid nodded, solemnly, her eyes huge in her ashen face.
Douglas thought about this for the time it took to eat his dry toast and tasteless jam and sip half his coffee (heavy with slightly sour cream, over sweetened and weak). He turned to the maid.
“Your name is?”
“Antia, sir, if it pleases you, sir.”
“And if it did not, you’d change it?” chided Douglas, gently.
“Of course, Sir Wizard!”
“Great Greasy Goblins!” swore Douglas. “This is the sort of nonsense that went on at Frigeon’s court! Not even under Eunicet was it known in Dukedom!”
The two servants looked extremely ill at ease and, moreover, baffled.
“Now, Delond, who told you to wait for the King?”
There was another long, queasy silence. Douglas calmly finished his breakfast. He thought, Two hundred years will have weakened the third-class spell I sense, which makes these people behave so utterly irrational.
At last, when Douglas glanced up at the Majordomo again, Delond cleared his throat and gulped.
“’Twas the Magister, really, who spoke for the King,” spoke up Antia, suddenly. “I wasn’t there, but I heard of it.”
“Yes,” blurted Delond, leaning forward. “I was there. The Magister...”
“Did this Magister have a name?”
“His name is ... was ... Farlance,” recalled Delond, and the maid Antia nodded.
“Farlance? Seems to me I’ve heard of him,” said Douglas, and indeed he had. The Wizard Farlance had once been a member of the Fellowship of Wizards, a colleague of Flarman’s and Augurian’s, long ago. “I believe Farlance perished in Last Battle,” Douglas mused aloud.
“Perished!” shrieked the girl, biting her knuckles, eyes wide in horror.
“Someone will have to tell you this eventually or you will live and die with no choices of your own,” Douglas said firmly. “Delond, do you want to know why King Grummist has not returned?”
“No, Sir Wizard, I mean ... Douglas.”
“Listen to my words and watch my hands...” He made a flowing, convoluted gesture where neither could avoid seeing it clearly.
“The King will never return!” he said loudly, for he sensed others were listening. The air took on a sulfurous and lightning-like smell, moving fitfully about them and stirring the drapes that closed the windows to the morning light.
Delond screamed softly, like a sorely wounded bird. The maid Antia began to weep great wracking sobs, burying her face in her apron. From beyond the curtained door of Delond’s house came cries and shrieks of grief and disbelief and then the sounds of many feet rushing toward the house.
The Waiters were learning they need no longer wait.
It took several hours to calm them down and tell them, as best Douglas knew, the truth about Grummist’s tragic end and the story of the Last Battle of Kingdom. He kindly avoided dwelling on the King’s foolish, last-minute attempts to bargain with the Dark Powers for his own life. It had led only to greater disaster and a more agonized death ... and the breakup of Flarman’s beloved Fellowship as well, despite a hard-won victory.
At last the fifty remaining Waiters stopped weeping and gathered around Douglas in Delond’s dining hall to listen to the unheard news of the last two centuries, silently but slowly recovering their wits and common sense.
An elderly footman asked, “We exist to serve the King! Without the King, what are we?”
“But who can we serve? We are trained to serve!” came fearful cries from all sides.
Douglas shook his head. He was unsure how much help he should give these poor, forlorn souls. Too much would be as fatal as too little, he suspected.
“But we must serve!” wailed a laundress. “Or we are nothing!”
“Nonsense,” Douglas said angrily. “You’re free men. Who should you serve? I’ll tell you. Serve each other.”
“Each other?” they cried out, some in abject fear... but others repeated the words in wonder. They fell at once into a furious discussion of this novel idea.
“How can this be? Who will rule? Make the decisions? Give the orders?”
“Figure it out for yourselves!” said Douglas, shaking his head.
They were positively dumbfounded. At last young Antia spoke up.
“It is sensible that we serve each other, isn’t it? And if we serve each other, why can’t we also rule each other!”
Their logjam was at last broken. Douglas saw it would take them weeks, months, perhaps years to reason it out, feel out the details, but they were on the right track at last.
“Rule and serve!” cried an excited Delond. “Serve and rule! Sir... Douglas ... Wizard?”
“Yes, Delond?”
“We owe you an extremely deep debt of gratitude.”
“I don’t think so. I just told you the plain harsh truth.”
“The truth, to show us the way,” said Antia. “We will long remember you, Douglas Brightglade!”
“Douglas Brightglade!” they shouted. “Make a speech, Wizard!”
The Journeyman Wizard stood and bowed to the assemblage.
“It’s close to noontime. I must be getting on my way and you have a lot of things to decide and do,” he told them. “It isn’t going to be easy, you know. I can’t help you any more than I have. You must clean out and fix up your ruined city, mend your ruined houses, and rebuild your neglected lives. Learn how to be served rather than just to serve, how to rule justly and mercifully, and be ruled in turn by common sense and humane, open minds.”
Aquamancer (mancer series Book 2) Page 5
