A Man of His Word

by The Complete Series 01-04 (epub)

  “Very soon. Cubslayer never wastes time.”

  Cubslayer? Inos tried to imagine a much younger Zana with a little brother, a very much younger little brother—precocious, ferocious, ungovernable. She had never heard the name before, but it sounded so genuine and so obviously appropriate that it somehow banished the small suspicions starting to sprout in her mind.

  “I am the only man he trusts,” Kar had boasted. He hadn’t mentioned women. Zana was loyal. That was why she had been put in charge of the suspect royal visitors in the first place.

  And Inos knew Azak was a man of instant decisions; his deadly archery alone proved that. Escape from the palace might be tricky, and here they were leagues from it already, a chance not to be missed. He might just haul her onto a passing ship with him and be gone before the sorceress could find out what was happening. And Kade was still back home in the palace … it was astonishing that Azak would ever agree to include Kade.

  “What do I write?”

  “Just that she must trust the bearer.”

  It was an added risk, obviously. Rasha might well be holding Kade as hostage for Inos’s return and be keeping close watch on her, or might perhaps have cast some sort of spell to raise an alarm if she tried to leave, or … but how could one outwit a sorceress at all? Kade would be horrified, but she was much less inclined to put her trust in the sorceress since she had heard about the meeting with Olybino.

  Inos leaned the paper on a knee and wrote, hoping the words would be legible.

  “What now?” she asked, giving both feet a quick dust and then stuffing them into sandals.

  “We carry on as if nothing had changed,” Zana said, gathering up clothes and towels.

  Hunch suddenly became certainty. “He was planning this all the time! That was why he wouldn’t talk to me sooner?”

  Zana straightened, jiggling her bundle into a comfortable position under her arm. She turned an unreadable gaze on Inos. “A wise sultan always has a variety of plans in store, and rarely tells anyone what they are. I suggest we go to the meal now, ma’am, and talk of other things.”

  Full moon hung over the Spring Sea, so bright that even the distant snowy peaks of the Agonistes glimmered. From the bustling encampment drifted smoke and mouth-watering scents and much laughter. Half of the people there were women, many of them sounding very young, all paired off with the brown-clad family men.

  Neither Kar nor Azak was in sight. Inos, as befitted her rank, was served her meal in solitary magnificence on a rug under a canopy, although everyone else was sprawled on the sand at the edge of the firelight. Undoubtedly there were guards posted, but she could detect no activity more sinister than merrymaking and good humor.

  Gradually eating gave way to singing and the uncanny twanging of citherns. Palace women would rarely have the chance for an outing such as this and they were making the most of it. Inos could not help wondering how many of them had been gifts from the sultan, girls snatched from poverty in childhood to stock the royal seraglio. It was, of course, none of her business.

  Nor was it her business if the sultan chose to provide a holiday for his guards, and his disappearance was probably a tactful way of letting the company relax. He had unpredictable corners, did Azak. She was confident now that an escape from Arakkaran had been in his mind even before she spoke to him. Her arguments might have convinced him to put his plans into effect, or perhaps just to include her in them … or she might have had no influence on him at all. He might be already gone, and she was merely part of the camouflage. Time would tell.

  She decided to follow his example and disappear. She withdrew into her tent, dismissing Zana and the other women who expected to attend her. Anything that she could possibly require had been brought and was already set up, including a soft and commodious bed.

  She was exhausted by a wearying day, yet for a long while sleep evaded her. She lay and studied the centipede tracks on the tent roof, where moonlight peeked through needleholes. It was not the festive sounds from the shore that kept her awake, nor the distant boom of the surf beyond the headland. The flapping of a tent was a familiar lullaby.

  Strangely, she did not even feel like gloating over her victory. If she had indeed won an ally, it was because in the end Azak had proved to be very vulnerable. Rasha had shattered his mystique as a sultan when she flaunted him before Inos as her plaything. Rasha had erred there, and she had certainly erred earlier in placing that fiendish second curse on him. More than anything else, that intolerable burden must be driving him to seek out the Four, even if he would not admit it. So Rasha had overreached herself, but Inos had learned of the second curse through sheer folly, not by any great triumph of wits. She was happy to believe that she had won, but she felt no need to celebrate yet.

  The greater battle lay ahead. Her new ally must prove his worth by organizing their escape, and obviously Azak usually lost matches with the sorceress. The whole mad idea might vanish like a soap bubble before the hard edges of reality. Inos did not dwell much on that, either.

  From time to time she would hear some particularly rousing chorus from the fireside, or an especially loud peal of laughter, but those disturbances were too filled with joy to be annoying, and in a way they were even reassuring. If what she had been told was true, then at least some of those women had come from the same poverty that had so shocked her that day. There could be happiness in Arakkaran, for some.

  No, it was the faces of children that haunted her tent. She kept remembering the shameful poverty of the villages she had seen that day, and contrasting it with the luxury of the palace—like the luxury of silk sheets and soft bed she was enjoying at the moment.

  Krasnegar was a humble place. In bad years there could be real hunger in Krasnegar, but then the king’s household ate sparingly, also. She suspected that a famine in Arakkaran would fill the ditches with peasant corpses before it ever curtailed the princes’ diet. As a native of the subarctic she had always believed that life would be easier in a warm climate. Obviously that was not the case, not for those so-forlorn children.

  The fire died, the moon rose higher, the singing faded. Discourse became quieter and more intimate.

  She had just drifted off to sleep when she jerked awake again, hearing a baby crying. A baby? Why would there be a baby? She had seen no children earlier, yet there could be absolutely no doubt that Azak himself had planned and approved every detail of this expedition. Why would he have ordered a baby? She had failed to think of even one logical reason before she was asleep again.

  2

  Although the sun had departed from Zark, it still beat down upon the sugarcane fields of Faerie, where Rap and his companions had been striding brazenly along a red-dirt track for what felt like a long and unmemorable lifetime. Now and then they passed scattered bands of peddlers, herders, and farmhands.

  The view was restricted on both sides by high walls of greenery, but Rap could see that it contained nothing more dangerous than rats. He scanned the faces of the people, also, seeking some sign that the goblin had attracted attention, or that his own absurd tattoos had been noticed, but he detected nothing more than mild curiosity, soon to be forgotten in the press of the day’s business. Once the three castaways took refuge on the verge with everyone else as a troop of cavalry went cantering by, and the legionaries paid them no more heed than they did the genuine peasants.

  Most of the natives seemed to be imps, but Rap identified a few trolls and troll half-breeds, and once a troop of dwarves—short men, thick and broad, with rough, grayish skin. They carried picks and rolled as they walked. Rap had never seen dwarves before, but one brief glance was enough to convince him that they probably deserved their reputation for meanness.

  Now it was almost noon; Milflor had been much farther away than Rap had expected. Swaggering along the dusty track, Thinal chattered disparagingly about the town, drawing on memories of Sagorn’s visit long ago. Even though it was the largest settlement on Faerie, he said, it was tiny by mainland s
tandards—a quaint, rambling little place sprawled aimlessly around a fine natural harbor. The beach was one of the finest in all Pandemia, so the shore was lined by great mansions belonging to rich aristocrats, most of them retired Imperial officials enjoying the fruits of a lifetime’s corruption.

  The harbor was famous for its beauty, he said, a bay sheltered by a high and rocky headland. The water there was deep even close to shore, making for good mooring. The proconsul’s palace stood on the crest of the ridge. Then he chuckled.

  “Now, just a minute!” Rap said. “What has the proconsul’s palace got to do with us?”

  Thinal shrugged. “You don’t think we’d be welcome? Sagorn might be. And Andor certainly would. He’d be dancing with His Nibs’ daughter before sundown. Sleeping with her by dawn, if she was worth it.”

  Rap caught a frowning glance from Little Chicken, walking on Thinal’s far side. Obviously the goblin felt the same uneasiness. For a moment all three fell silent, being cautious as they overtook a shambling knot of elderly farm workers. A family of very small people went by in the opposite direction, hauling a cart: a man, two women, and about eight assorted children, all of them sour-faced and grubby. Thinal wrinkled his nose and said “Filthy gnomes!” with disgust, and quite loudly. The gnomes paid no attention, and soon the squeaking of their cart died away behind.

  “I thought we were partners,” Rap said. “Won’t you tell us what exactly you’re planning when we get to town?”

  “Just a little comfort, Rap. Lift a purse or two. Get us decent clothes and a place to stay. That’s all.”

  “I don’t want to stay. I want a ship out of here.”

  Thinal smiled rather shiftily. “Not that easy, friend. You don’t have a patron, either of you.”

  “Patron?”

  “Protector. In Krasnegar you belonged to the king—”

  “I served the king.”

  “You belonged to him, even if you didn’t know it, Anyone’d tried to put fetters on you, Holindarn would have wanted to know why. Here—who cares?”

  “So?”

  “So you and the Chicken are a couple of likely-looking types, healthy and husky. Who’s to complain if you finish up in a chain gang somewhere, planting rice or felling trees? That’ll be the end of all your adventures.”

  “Then let’s get out as soon as we can get a ship.”

  Walking eyes down, hands behind him, Thinal just smiled at the ruts.

  “You’re not planning to leave?” Rap demanded.

  “I’ll see—see what Sagorn decides. We might want to investigate Faerie a little. There could be valuable pickings here.”

  The imp turned a bland gaze on Rap then, and Rap was at a loss. He glanced again at the goblin and saw dark wariness. Little Chicken would not discuss the island’s secrets, either; ever since the fairy child had died in his arms, that topic had been off-limits for all of them.

  “Will you help me get back to the mainland, then?” Rap said, hating his need to beg. “Either buy a passage for me, or help me find a job as crewman. I don’t mind working.”

  Thinal did. He scowled at the thought. “It’s not quite that simple. The winds are shifty around here. And then there are the Nogids.”

  Rap wondered why he hadn’t heard all this before, although he remembered Thinal had dropped some hints. “What’s a no-gid?”

  “Islands. The Nogid Archipelago, between Faerie and the mainland. Sailing ships get becalmed in the Nogids.”

  “And?”

  “And anthropophagi. Canoes. Fricassee of sailor. Cabin boy au gratin with a coconut in his mouth.”

  “They really do eat people? Why … I mean, what has that to do with me? You think I might get sold to a feed lot by way of trade?”

  Thinal shook his head. “I mean most ships in these waters are galleys. Whether I pay gold for your passage or you work it, you end up chained to an oar. Even a free rower is chained to his oar.”

  “Why?”

  “Tradition? Or because the captain wants to decide when he’s worked off his contract?” Thinal shrugged, and for a moment seemed to revert more to his old friendliness. “I guess there’s no such thing as a free sailor, Rap. Not around here. You might shake hands on a promise that you’d be released when you reached the mainland, but you’d still be just trusting the captain.” The oily smile crept back. “Of course a servant of the famous Doctor Sagorn would be quite safe. He has friends in high places, so he’d be a good patron! You’d best be patient, Rap.”

  They had reached civilization. The thief was the expert now.

  Sugarcane had given way to open fields, then those became muddy paddies and finally smallholdings of shacks and vegetable patches. At last the travelers topped a slight ridge, and Milflor ran down to the sea before them. Its renowned occult defenses, supposedly proof against monsters and headhunters, were revealed as no more than a decrepit stockade, half buried in weeds. Its gates hung awry on rusted hinges. The tumbledown gatehouse looked as if it were used only by vagrants; nor could Rap’s farsight find any trace of magic shielding like the barrier around the castle at Krasnegar. He concluded that the magic defense was as fictitious as the dangers it was alleged to keep out, just one more puzzle in the overall mystery of Faerie, the mystery that so intrigued Thinal.

  Inside the palisade, he saw trees and more trees, small buildings, shrubbery—and people. He caught one glimpse of distant blue water and ships sheltered by the high headland beyond. The cape was rocky in patches, but also bright with grass and flowers and trees, and the scattered buildings there seemed larger and more substantial than anything his vision or farsight detected on the mainland. But soon he found himself down among the streets of the town and was lost among the people.

  Long ago Andor had tried to describe Milflor to him, while they sat in a dismal attic in subarctic Krasnegar. “Shabby as a miser’s nightgown,” he had called it. In the past few weeks Thinal had tried, also, interpreting the same set of memories in his own snide fashion. “A woodlot with dog kennels.” But neither of them had prepared Rap for the reality. He had never seen a city, and his efforts to imagine Krasnegar grown large and lush had done him no good at all.

  Milflor was certainly lush. There had been rain that morning; vibrant tropical greenery dripped and glistened everywhere, loading the air with heavy odors of blossoms and decay. Narrow streets, unpaved, unfenced, went weaving through the woods like animal tracks, and yet their mud steamed in hot sunlight, for these trees were like no trees Rap had ever imagined. They were not the solid, saturnine spruce of the taiga, nor yet the dense tangle of the jungle he had so recently left. Their canopies floated high overhead, transparent as lace, more like clouds of dust than foliage, letting sunlight fall through unhindered. Wind-stirred and dancing like gnats, their branches hardly darkened the sky. Palms Rap knew now, but Thinal babbled airily about acacias and eucalyptus and other strange names, although he was obviously unsure which was which.

  The undergrowth, though, was a dark soup of shrubs and vines and flowers, half drowning the buildings. The houses were mostly small and no more substantial than the huts of the fairy village—timber and wicker and shingles. Rap saw crumbled ruins rotting away right next to new construction. If Milflor was old, it was also eternally being made new. And he felt as if some trick of the light, or a sweetness in the air, had bathed it all in pure and potent magic.

  He had forgotten what crowds were. He had never been in a crowd of total strangers, of unfamiliar people thronging by in unfamiliar dress. They were imps, mostly, but draped in gowns or wraps of a brilliance that rivaled even the ever-present flowers. They jostled and jabbered all around him in unfamiliar accents, wielding mysterious burdens, driving donkey wagons or pulling carts, surrounded by laughing children, splattering mud.

  Very likely he would have been overwhelmed by it all anyway, even had he not had farsight. Farsight in a crowd, in a strange town, was an overwhelming experience; it smothered him. He forgot to keep his head down to hide his ta
ttoos; he forgot to care that the goblin might be noticed as alien. He was vaguely aware that there was something wrong—that his inner self was shouting warnings of something he should have noticed and been worrying about—but sheer overload mulched his mind. He saw the insides of the houses as well as the outsides; he saw people in the distance as clearly as he saw those close by; and he comprehended nothing.

  He knew that Little Chicken was holding his arm and steering him through the milling hordes of people—thousands of them, it seemed, hurrying everywhere, in reds and blues and yellows, all gabbling busily. He was only vaguely aware that he and his companions had reached a marketplace: a muddy clearing cluttered with stalls and tables of wares, with people—lots of people.

  Imps, and a scattering of others: dwarves and gnomes and a golden-skinned youth he guessed must be an elf, and a couple of barley-haired, blue-eyed jotnar—sailors, of course. And far away, on a street farther up the gentle hillside, two women stood deep in talk, holding babies on their hips, and they were fauns. Like his mother. Like him. Here, for the first time in his life, he would not be a freak.

  And the stalls held cloth and vegetables and shiny pots and painted pottery and straw sandals and even books and …

  Farsight: people and sounds and colors and people and motion …

  Then Little Chicken lifted Rap by the shoulders and shook him until his teeth rattled.

  “What—”

  They were out of the crowd now, some way along a weedy path that wound through thick shrubbery, down toward the seafront. Rap’s attention had still been on the people. He had not been aware of leaving the marketplace.

  “You all right?” Thinal demanded.

  Rap picked up his wits from somewhere. “Yes … Huh?” He rubbed his neck and pouted at the goblin. “Did you have to do that?”

  Little Chicken scowled back at him. “You were asleep. You wouldn’t answer.”

  Rap said, “Oh!” and grabbed his mind before it went slithering right back into the bustle at the top of the slope. He must have been entranced for a long time, walking unawares right into the middle of town, for the market lay on a saddle where the hilly cape joined the mainland, at the nub of the wishbone-shaped harbor.