A Man of His Word

by The Complete Series 01-04 (epub)

  Hugg was twenty-four years old. When he was fourteen he had wandered into a village to trade some bright stones for a chisel. Trolls were much given to erecting massive edifices of raw masonry among their jungle-quilted hills, usually choosing a site that straddled a stream, so that they could have running water in every room. A troll might spend years on such a construction and then just walk away from it before it was complete, only to begin another two or three valleys over. Hugg had begun to feel restless and unsatisfied with the tower his parents were building. He had decided to go off and begin work on one of his own rather than continue to help on theirs. Perhaps, when he had completed two or three rooms by himself, some wandering trolless would come along to help. Meanwhile, the first thing he needed was a chisel, one of those shiny bronze ones and not the junky steel kind that rusted away in a week or so.

  Ever since conquering that part of the Mosweeps fifty years earlier, the Impire had been striving to gather the inhabitants out of their dark, damp forests into specialty designed model villages, hoping to civilize them and keep an eye on them and encourage them to increase their numbers. Out of the trees and into one of these villages wandered Hugg. He was at once arrested for indecent exposure and for not possessing a permit. He did not know what a permit was. He did not know why clothes were necessary. He explained patiently that he would cover himself until he departed if that was required, but normally he never saw anyone except his own reflection; and in the forest, cloth or even leather would certainly rot away to pulp within a few days. He did not understand why his offer was not an acceptable compromise.

  Nor did he understand the courtroom proceedings, short and simple though they were. He was sentenced to two years’ hard labor and led off for a three-week introductory course in the value of docility. His bright stones had been taken from him, but they were not mentioned in the court records.

  Ever since the reign of the Impress Abnila, slavery had been illegal in the Impire; but the army had to find some way to cover the cost of its occupation of the Mosweeps, and graft was as widespread and inevitable as weather.

  As soon as Hugg had learned to do exactly what he was told as fast as possible and never to speak unless spoken to, his place of confinement was changed from Hamlet 473 to the town of Danqval, and from there he was marched in an ever-increasing brigade of other convicts down to the market in Clamdewth.

  Later he and a few others enjoyed a brief sea voyage, Hugg having an oar all to himself on the basic principle of two men or one troll. He arrived at last at a plantation somewhere to the north of Milflor and was then provided with a chance to escape, which he did.

  They always did.

  He was run down with hounds and horses and given a lesson that left him ever after with a slight limp and a ringing in one ear. Even trolls could learn from that sort of teaching, and they healed quickly. Never again did he try to escape.

  At twenty-four, Hugg was still there. He did not know that he should have been shipped home after two years. Had he known that, and asked for an explanation, he would have learned that his file had been mislaid and he must pen a formal petition to the marshal of the armies, in Hub, as his area had been under military rule at the time of his offense. But he did not ask, and no one told him, and nothing would have changed anyway.

  He dug and tilled and harvested; he chopped wood and bore burdens as he was told. He grew to be the largest and strongest troll on the plantation, and no one ever stole his supper.

  Following the scent and unmistakable sounds of flight, Hugg plunged through the trees and bushes, smashing and breaking and even uprooting as required, heedless of his own noise or the damage to his clothes. After a few minutes, he realized that there were two or three persons ahead of him and he remembered old stories of headhunting fairyfolk. Perhaps he had been rash, therefore, but he had never heard of any natives coming near the plantations, and the fugitives were obviously running away as fast as they could. That was good, because their scent was not troll scent, and therefore he could outrun them in this undergrowth. Furthermore, if they were running away they were probably unarmed, and then he would not hesitate to accept odds of three to one, or perhaps even four. Trolls were placid by nature, but they could be roused to anger like anyone else. Hugg enjoyed his daily bucket of slop. He intended to win it back.

  He heard a few loud oaths ahead of him, a couple of shouts, and knew from the sounds that his pursuit was to be contested. Two kept running—still carrying his meal, doubtless—but one had turned back to challenge. A moment later Hugg crashed through a dense wall of shrubbery and saw him. He was a husky youth, but shorter even than the average imp, and half the size of a troll. In the dappling shade of the branches, he seemed a very odd color. He smelled strange and his eyes were curiously angular. He was standing in a half crouch, holding out his hands and waiting for Hugg with a big toothy grin.

  Trolls preferred action to thought. Roaring with joy and never breaking stride, Hugg swung a fist that should have stoved in the brat’s chest. The last thing he saw was a tree trunk, dead ahead.

  “God of Mercy!” Rap shouted. “Did you have to kill him?”

  Little Chicken folded his arms and turned his smirk into a sneer. “You think he wanted to talk?”

  No, the giant had not wanted to talk; and now he would never talk again. The bark of the tree bore more obvious damage than did his head, but his neck was undoubtedly broken. Abandoning futile efforts to find a pulse, Rap rose shakily to his feet and glared across the corpse at the goblin.

  The situation was a creepy echo of the time they had faced each other across the body of the fairy child, but then Little Chicken had been as distraught and bewildered as Rap. Now he was showing his huge goblin teeth in a satisfied grin, proud of having beaten an opponent so much larger than himself.

  Since the castaways had left the fairy village and headed south, Little Chicken had changed ominously. He now spoke passable impish and thus could express himself better, but there was more to it than that. He had grown in confidence. He swaggered now, he often smirked as if relishing some secret joke, he patronized Rap again, as he had in the taiga, and he treated Thinal like an unwanted and unpleasant child. He was obnoxious and unnerving.

  “Used a leg throw on him,” he said, nudging the corpse with his foot. “Didn’t see the tree there. Not much time to plan ahead when you’re about to be smeared, Flat Nose.”

  That was not quite what Rap had seen with his farsight. Admittedly his attention had been mostly on his own undignified flight through the shrubbery, and he had not seen the throw, but he was fairly sure that Little Chicken had then picked the troll up bodily and rammed the tree with him. In fact the evidence was clear—the man had obviously made a right-angle turn somewhere on his journey.

  Thinal was creeping back through the bushes, at the same time gobbling whatever was in the pail he had stolen. Using two fingers, he was scooping mush into his mouth, spreading it liberally on his chin, also. Rap shouted to say it was all clear, then went back to scowling at Little Chicken’s self-satisfied smirk.

  Time had ceased to mean very much, but the moon was almost full now, so the refugees had been in Faerie more than two weeks. Their journey south had been aided by the equipment salvaged from the deserted village—nets and waterbottles, hats and boots made by Little Chicken, backpacks jammed with food. Those supplies had lasted them all the way to the edges of the impish colony around Milflor. Here they had been forced to detour inland, staying in the fringe of the jungle and gradually replacing the fairy kit with whatever Thinal’s quick eyes fancied. Their passage through the settled lands had been marked by a steady pilfering of local garments and foodstuffs, as the little thief looted larders, clotheslines, and even ovens.

  So Rap had a good pair of boots at last, and a fine cotton shirt. Little Chicken wore nothing at all except a soft and frilly pair of silk pants. He was extremely proud of those, not having realized that they were actually a woman’s undergarment, as Thinal had sniggering
ly confided to Rap.

  Now Thinal himself squeezed cautiously through a canebrake and gulped at the sight of the corpse. “By the Powers!” He looked at the goblin. “How’d you manage …” He shot a scared glance at Rap, who knew what he was thinking, although none of them had ever yet put it into words.

  “Little Chicken is a skilled wrestler.”

  “Skilled?” Thinal shook his head in wonder. “That’s a full-blooded troll!”

  “He’s big.”

  “Big? They’re just about indestructible. Even the half-breeds … Listen, officially there’s no such things as gladiator contests anymore, right? But some of the big houses round Hub … Darad’s made money fighting at them.”

  Little Chicken looked interested. “They wrestle?”

  “Not usually.” Thinal shoveled more of the paste into his mouth. “But a troll with a club against men armed like legionaries—that’s a popular match. Big stakes.”

  “How many imps?”

  “All together, usually three. One at a time, it may take five or six to wear him out, sometimes more. And you just knocked off a troll singlehanded?”

  The goblin chuckled. With a lightning snatch he relieved Thinal of the bucket, then held it out to Rap. “Eat!”

  “I don’t want any.”

  “Eat, Flat Nose!”

  “No!”

  “I will stuff it down your throat. Have to keep your strength up, faun.”

  He was mostly just mocking, Rap thought, flaunting his superiority; but perhaps he still regarded himself as Rap’s trash, who must care for his master. Either way, Rap had no doubt that he had best do as he was told, for clearly Little Chicken’s blood had been roused by the fight, and he would love an excuse for another tussle.

  So Rap took the bucket and stepped back from the huge corpse. Flies were buzzing around it already.

  “Let’s go somewhere better, then. None of this poor guy’s stuff will fit any of us.” In fact, only the troll’s boots were worth a second glance. He had pretty well stripped himself naked coming through the undergrowth, ripping even his leather breeches in a dozen places. His fungus-colored hide was barely scuffed.

  “Let’s get well away!” Thinal said, wiping his mouth and then licking his hand. “Someone’ll come looking soon …” He gaped at Rap in sudden horror. “Hounds! When they find his body, they’ll put hounds on us!”

  “Leave hounds to me,” Rap said, gagging at the sour taste of the slave’s mash. “But they may have more trolls, and this one was following our scent.”

  Thinal nodded with disgust. “I’ll remember in the future.” A city thief had not expected a victim to trail him that way, nor thought to check wind direction. Even an occult genius was not infallible.

  “Leave trolls to me,” said the goblin, with another satisfied gloat at the dead one.

  Destiny with men:

  ’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

  Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:

  Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

  And one by one back in the Closet lays.

  Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (§49, 1859)

  FIVE

  Slave and sultan

  1

  The moon was all wrong in Zark. It rode much too high in the sky and it seemed to have been tilted sideways, so its face was strange and unfamiliar. Not that Kadolan was looking at the moon, but she was aware of its beams shining on the floor below the windows, and those bright patches were much smaller than they could ever be in Krasnegar. Such unleaded windows would be unthinkable there at any time, while here even in the middle of a spring night, the wind was no worse than cool. Reflections of moonlight on marble gave ample light.

  She huddled on the edge of her bed in her flounced robe, a frilly nightcap pulled down low to hide her curlers, and her feet snug inside goatswool slippers. Her niece was pacing the chamber as the cheetah in Duke Angilki’s zoological garden paced its cage. Just as the cheetah made a sort of half rear at the end of each length to start its turn, so Inosolan swept her train around in a swish of samite before retracing her steps.

  She was on the third or fourth telling now, still very upset, understandably. “Aghast” might be a more exact word. Kadolan had not even grasped the enormity of it all herself and had not experienced the terror of it firsthand, as Inosolan had. Small wonder that now she need talk herself down from an emotional high that had flown perilously near hysteria. “… so here’s my choice except that I don’t even get to choose but apparently I’m either to be married off to a goblin or else the imps and the jotnar will fight each other to the death and the goblins move in to finish up the survivors and everyone I know’ll be dead and there won’t be a kingdom left to rule anyway and as for me I’ll probably end up entertaining important guests down on the waterfront …”

  The windows opened on a balcony overlooking one of the many moonstruck gardens of the palace. Kadolan worried that many ears were listening, but Inosolan had ignored all suggestions that she lower her voice. The sorceress certainly wasn’t listening, she said; she was occupied otherwise. That bit had not been explained yet.

  What Inosolan really needed was a good, long, motherly hug, but Kadolan was not skilled at such intimacies. Her strong point had never been children, and she had not known Inosolan as a child. By the time she had reached Krasnegar after Evanaire’s death, the chance for closeness had gone. They had not shared more than two or three hugs, ever.

  “… maybe should be glad I don’t get to choose! I mean, suppose they line up a dozen or two bristle-faced goblins and …”

  Kadolan had never borne children of her own, or she might have learned better how to cope with them. Adolescents were her specialty. She knew by instinct how to deal with adolescent girls, or at least she could never remember when she did not have a knack for them. There was no great magic involved, only clear rules and endless patience. One had to set an example as best one could, for those quick young eyes spied out hypocrisy at once; so one stood up honestly for one’s principles, like a lighthouse at the end of a difficult strait. One encouraged, one explained, one kept one’s temper, and in the end, usually without much warning, the strait had been traversed, the ship was in the harbor, and another young lady was available for matchmaking. Very distant cousins, or just friends … Inosolan had been merely the last of many, many girls who had called Kadolan “Aunt” at Kinvale. Kadolan had failed none of them, but none had been a keener or a more gratifying pupil than her own niece. None had met with more success, or less good fortune.

  Inos was still wayward and impetuous, of course, but those traits were part of her jotunn heritage, and she would not likely ever outgrow them. They cropped up frequently in the family.

  “A goblin? Can you imagine? A goblin king in Krasnegar? What do you think—would he amuse the guests by carving up the servants or entertain the servants by cooking up the guests?”

  That was better. Murderously unfunny humor, but humor. Inosolan’s voice was steadying, too.

  And she had seen that lost kingdoms were not returned like misplaced parasols, that there must be a price to pay—perhaps not as much as marriage to a goblin, but a price. What price would Inosolan be willing to pay? Would she be given the choice?

  The irony of it all was that Kadolan, having guided her niece through to womanhood, should now feel so completely useless as an adult confidante. She was too old for this wild adventuring. Her life had been much too sheltered for her to know anything at all about women like Rasha—who, despite her incredible occult power, was still only a woman, a hard, twisted, bitter woman, a woman who had fought for every crust she’d ever eaten, a woman abused and maltreated by men in ways Kadolan could not imagine and did not want to.

  Inosolan was younger and stronger and had been coping amazingly well, considering how very little room she had to move at all. Now came this latest outrage—warlocks and warfare. No one could be expected to cope with this. Kadolan was out of her depth.
She felt she was being left behind. That was old age, she supposed.

  Suddenly Inosolan fell silent and still, a beauty’s dark profile against the moon-drenched sky within the arches.

  “I do talk a lot, don’t I, Aunt?”

  “Come and sit down, dear.”

  “Yes.” Inosolan came across and joined Kadolan on the bed, and put an arm around her. “Thank you for listening. I feel better.”

  “I wish I could do more than listen. What happened after the warlock left?”

  “Rasha threw a tantrum. I suppose she can see in the dark. She started tossing thunderbolts at things—the welcome mat and then the furniture. I ran.”

  “Wise!”

  Inosolan gulped, then laughed shakily. “It was so childish it was almost funny! I was too scared to feel scared, somehow. I slipped on the stairs and hurt my ankle—Rasha healed it for me later—but I crawled over to the doors, and they wouldn’t open, and I just crouched there until the thunderstorm stopped. Until the noise stopped and the smoke cleared and Rasha came down.”

  “How terrible!”

  “Well …” Inosolan shivered. “The worst part was that I was afraid of the panther and the wolf—they were roaming around somewhere in the dark, I thought. And maybe demons? Something flapped overhead a few times … Or maybe it was worst when the torches blazed up in the sconces and she came slinking down the stairs. Your Kinvale lacquer was very thin, Aunt. She was back to being a brothel seductress again.”

  What is a lady? Rasha had asked. Kadolan had tried to explain that being a lady was a discipline, a way of life. A lady was considerate of others’ feelings. A lady was the same to all people, of high rank or low, at all times, under all conditions.

  Those, the sorceress had said with a believing sneer, might be useful things to know. “Show me!” she had commanded. “For I must deal soon with the wardens, and these impish manners may impress them.”