A Man of His Word

by The Complete Series 01-04 (epub)

  As hers did! Inos had not told Azak of that and she did not think it had been mentioned during her shouting match with Rasha when she first arrived.

  “In fact, I am certain of this,” Elkarath said. He stretched out a hand, glittering in the sunlight. “This ring?” He pointed with a plump finger that shone just as bright.

  Inos peered at the treasures. “Opal, is it not?” The stone was large, but it had a milky sheen, with little of the variegated fire for which opal was valued. The setting was of plain silver, and worn smooth. In a double handful of rubies and diamonds and sapphires, that seemed the least interesting gem by far. “It is magic?”

  “Sorcerous!” the old man said dramatically. “It belonged to my great-grandfather. Where or how he acquired it I do not know.”

  “It detects sorcery?”

  She was probably not supposed to have guessed that—Elkarath sighed crossly. “Yes, it does. When the actuary of whom I told you performs his wonders of ciphering, this stone will shine with green fire—and on the side closest to him.”

  “I thought the words of power could not be detected by magic?” Inos felt suddenly very uneasy. She wondered when—or how—she would provoke a green flame from this occult device, or whether she already had done so. Since she had yet to gain as much as one copper groat of benefit from the word her father had told her, it seemed unfair that it should constantly be throwing her into danger.

  “Words can not be detected even by sorcery,” Elkarath agreed, “so ’tis said. But their use can certainly be detected.”

  “Tell her of my grandfather. Greatness?” Azak suggested. “My grandfather of blessed memory.” He turned a blandly hypocritical gaze on Inos, as if daring her to comment.

  “Blessed indeed.” The sheik signed. “An increaser of the Good, deeply mourned … I speak with all due respect, your Majesty.”

  “No offense. But should we not practice the relationships we agreed upon?”

  “True, Lionslayer, then. He was a man of great powers. Your familiarity with the occult extends to comprehending the abilities of an adept?” The question appeared to be directed at Inos’s knees, which was as close as the sheik had yet come to meeting her eye.

  “An expert at anything?” Inos recalled Rasha saying that.

  “So it seems. The late Sultan Zorazak was an adept. Oftentimes have I strolled past the palace of an evening and seen my ring flame yellow.”

  Azak chuckled coarsely. “Late in the evening, I presume?”

  The sheik seemed to smile in his general direction. “Sometimes. His strengths were legendary. But even when he rode by on a horse, I could see the evidence of his adepthood.”

  “A flawless horseman,” Azak agreed sadly.

  “And Rasha?” Inos demanded.

  Another exasperating pause told her that she was again misbehaving. The fountain tinkled, the leaves overhead rustled busily. Somewhere in the distance a child was crying. Inos persisted. “What color does Rasha turn your ring, Greatness?”

  “Red,” the old man said grumpily. “And very bright. Even here, so far from the palace, I can oftentimes tell when she is enchanting. You can understand my alarm when I first learned that there was sorcery loose in Arakkaran!”

  “You said it was all around us.”

  “No!” the sheik snapped. “I said the occult was all around us, not sorcery. I had never detected a sorcerer before, although my father claimed to have done so. In Ullacarn my ring flashes often—there must be several mages there, and I know of an adept or two in the interior, as well as geniuses. Even here in Arakkaran, I estimate at least three geniuses.”

  Was this devious old rogue threatening her or wasn’t he? Inos wasn’t sure. He still hadn’t looked at her, so he could not have noticed her uneasiness. She said, “Then why do you not start collecting them and become a sorcerer?”

  “Why do you not become a whore and grow rich?”

  She stammered out her apology, annoyed by the twinkle of joy in Azak’s red eyes. Apparently her words mollified Elkarath, or else he was content with having bested her, for he chuckled. Sunlight danced in the rubies on his headband.

  “The theft would be not only immoral, but also difficult. A brief flash is not enough to locate a man exactly. When I said I knew of adepts in the interior, for example, I meant only that in certain villages I often see my ring shine yellow. Who the geniuses are in Arakkaran, I do not know. There! Did you see?”

  “No, I didn’t, your Greatness.”

  Azak frowned and shook his head, also.

  “It was subtle,” Ellcarath said, “and likely distant, therefore, but a definite green flash. Downhill, toward the harbor.” He poured himself another glass of coffee in celebration.

  Downhill was not toward Inos, so she had not caused the signal, if there had been one. She decided she did not like this fusty old man and his stupid magic detector. It might endanger her, if her word of power ever started to do its job. It might alienate her from Azak, who would be happier not knowing about her supposed word. She had begun to have serious doubts about the sultan and his overly complex intriguing.

  “So when you told me that here I would be safe from the sorceress, then all you meant was his Greatness’s ring?”

  Azak scowled and nodded. “I may have overstated the situation in my overweening joy at seeing you safely arrived, your Majesty.”

  Well! “But that’s all?” Inos repeated. “A magic detector!”

  What sort of idiocy had she got herself into? She wondered if Kade had successfully fled the palace. She might have already boarded some foul-smelling tub in the harbor. Had Rasha yet thought to inspect the spurious royal procession jogging northward from the bay?

  Or was the sorceress even now rolling on the floor in merriment at the antics of these half-witted mundane conspirators?

  “You don’t also have a magic umbrella, do you, your Greatness?” Inos said. “Because I think that’s what we need. I can see how your ring would help in a bazaar, or bargaining in the horse market. If it flashes for you every time your opponent opens his mouth, then you will be well advised to deal elsewhere. But that’s not my—our—problem at the moment!” She caught herself starting to shout and forced some queenly dignity back into her voice. “At the moment we’re attempting to escape, to hide from the sorceress. I fail to see how your ring can help at all. Suppose we get to the ship and set sail, and then your ring flashes red? That’ll mean she’s found us, won’t it, and all the good it’ll have done us will—”

  “No ship,” Azak said, pouring coffee from silver pot to crystal glass.

  “No ship?”

  “Too obvious. Too easy to search.”

  “Then how?” Inos could think of only one alternative, and she immediately didn’t want to think about it.

  “Camels, of course.” Mockery tugged at the corners of Azak’s mouth. “Not a dozen ships a day leave the harbor, half going north, half south. On the other hand, there are scores of camel trains and mule trains and wagons trekking around Arakkaran in a hundred different directions. We shall vanish into this web.”

  He was assuming that Rasha would need to inspect every traveler individually, but of course the alternative was to credit her with such power that nothing the fugitives could do would be any use at all. Doing nothing achieves nothing. That had been another of Rap’s little mottoes.

  Elkarath laughed softly. “I am a merchant. My caravan is even now being prepared. Every spring since long before you were born, child, I have made my annual journey to Ullacarn.”

  Spring? Summer was unpleasantly close. “Why not go in the winter?”

  A sigh of patience. “Bulls come into season in winter. They become dangerous and unmanageable.” If the sheik was smiling, she could not tell. The lack of eye contact was annoying her intensely. It wasn’t just her—the old man never seemed to look directly at Azak, either.

  “This was the opportunity his Greatness revealed to me,” Azak said, as if explaining to a small, none-
too-bright child.

  Inos tried to imagine Kade balanced precariously high on the vertiginous hump of a camel. She groaned. “How long?”

  The old man shrugged his pillowed shoulders. “If we effect our escape, well, three months, usually.”

  “Three months?” Bewildered, Inos stared at Azak. “You are willing to be gone for three months?”

  “That should get us to Ullacarn.” Azak was certainly amused. “The fastest road between two good ports is never by camel.”

  “I usually cross the Agonistes by Gaunt Pass,” Elkarath said, “head north through the Central Desert to visit the emerald mines, and then south along the Progiste foothills. Sometimes it takes less time, sometimes more.”

  “Hub is much farther, of course,” Azak added.

  They were mocking her, but she was thinking only of three months on a camel. Oh, poor Kade! Still, the desert on a camel could be no worse than the taiga on a horse—could it? And Rasha would never look for them in the desert unless she realized just how crazy they all were.

  “As I said,” the sheik added, having the same thought, “your aunt’s presence may aid us. Knowing she is with us, the sorceress may look less keenly at camels.”

  Inos knew exactly how Kade would look at them. She would beam bravely and insist that she had always wanted to cross a continent on a camel. “Where is Ullacarn, exactly?” she asked in a small voice and saw Azak registering satisfaction, as if her ignorance were just what he had expected. The sheik was fingering his rings again.

  “Almost due west, on the Sea of Sorrows.”

  The other side of Zark, then. “So what is at Ullacarn?”

  “Nothing. From there we can sail.”

  “To where?”

  “To Qoble,” Azak said irritably. “That is in the Impire. Then by land to Hub, and the Four.”

  This was crazy! Three months on a camel, and then more months to Hub? The Krasnegar problem would be long solved by then. The wardens would dismiss her appeal as nothing but a historical curiosity. Maybe Kade’s instincts had been right, and Rasha, whatever her failings, had been Inos’s best hope. Three months!

  It was too late to back out. Inos herself might just slink back to the palace and hope to escape punishment by pleading ignorance and the folly of youth, but Rasha would certainly find some spiteful torment to inflict on Azak for trying to deceive her, and the sheik might suffer even worse penalty for aiding him.

  God of Madness!

  Kade was always accusing her of being headstrong. What had she gotten herself into this time?

  And then Inos caught a tiny nicker of a wink from Azak. It was so out of character that for a moment she thought she had been mistaken. But of course! He was doubling his tracks again. Elkarath was yet another blind alley, like the donkey.

  “It will be an interesting experience,” she said graciously.

  A ruddy-skinned boy of about six came running in across the grass. He flashed a wide-eyed glance at Azak, ignored Inos, and fell on his knees before the sheik, bowing a head haloed in curls that flamed as if new-wrought in copper. Elkarath reached out and tousled them affectionately.

  “Well, Hope of My House?”

  The reply was so breathless as to be almost one long word. “Greatness-my-father-bids-me-tell-you-that-all-is-prepared!”

  “Good!” Elkarath raised an elbow, and Azak moved to help the old man rise. “We shall be on our way.”

  The boy had sprung to his feet and was staring up at the tall sultan with awe. “You a real lionslayer?”

  Azak put fists on hips and looked down sternly. “I am.”

  “Where’s your sword, then?”

  With a movement almost too fast to see, the big man snatched the front of the lad’s robe and raised him at arm’s length, so that their eyes were level. “Who dares question me?”

  “Let me down!” The boy stopped squirming when he realized that he was going to wriggle himself out of his clothes; already his legs were visibly longer. He clutched at the big hand supporting him and grinned. “How long can you hold me up like this?”

  “I can stand it as long as you can. Hours and hours.”

  “I’m going to be a lionslayer when I grow up! And kill brigands!”

  “Grow up? Tall and strong like me?”

  “Taller! Stronger!” But his breathing was becoming labored, and his face growing redder by the minute.

  “This tall, maybe?” Azak effortlessly swung him overhead and hung him on a tree branch. He squealed, and his grandfather—or more likely great-grandfather—bellowed with laughter and asked him what he would do now.

  Inos rose, marveling at this new, strangely playful Azak. How could anyone trust a man who changed roles so easily? How could she trust this Sheik Elkarath, a total stranger who never looked anyone in the eye? That curious shiftiness made him seem like an invisible man, as if she could not see him at all.

  Months on a camel? Or not? She must just hope that Azak had indeed winked at her, that he did have another coil on his rope, a better plan than three months on a camel. She looked up to find him glowering at her, his arms folded, his face shadowed again by his kaffiyeh. The wind playing in the boughs overhead sent bright coins of sunlight dancing over him like a glory, and for a moment he seemed larger than human. Deadly. Cruel. Ruthless. And honest as a djinn. How could she have dreamed of trusting him? He could abandon her if she became inconvenient, or sell her off to a slaver.

  She had no hold over him at all.

  “Having second thoughts, your Majesty?” a soft voice asked.

  Inos turned to look at the old sheik. He was plump, but it was only the contrast with Azak that had made him seem small. He was actually quite large, although stooped. For the first time she saw his eyes, red like a rooster’s comb, shrouded in wrinkles, but as clear as the eyes of a child. Penetrating.

  Inos raised her chin. “Of course not!” She had vowed to play politics from now on, and politics required taking risks.

  And surely the risks were worthwhile in this case? This was the opportunity of a lifetime! She would experience the sort of wild escapade found only in the poets’ romances—caravan to Ullacarn!

  A woman of royal birth had no right ever to expect such an opportunity. A shiver of excitement ran through her, all the way to her toes and fingers. Adventure! Never since Yggingi’s cohorts closed in around her had she felt truly free, and suddenly that oppressive aura of captivity fell away like breaking shell. Sensing escape at last, her heart began to pound with joy.

  She grinned mightily at Azak. His scowl melted into a menacing smile. The big man smiled as he did everything else—deliberately, fearlessly, and very well. He must be feeling the same sense of release, even more strongly than she.

  “I will show you the desert, lady!” he said. “And teach you to love it.”

  “You can try!”

  They laughed simultaneously. How strange!

  “Come then,” the sheik said with a contented smile. “Let us depart.” He gestured for Azak to precede him, and the sun flashed a dazzling rainbow of flames from his jeweled hand.

  3

  Like a wreck on a reef. Rap was still slumped on the bench overlooking Milflor harbor. He hoped that his ankle would start feeling better soon, or that he would find the manliness just to walk on it anyway. Or that he might think of something else to do. The sun was really cooking him now, and it wasn’t near noon yet.

  He had an infuriating hunch that he was overlooking some means of escape.

  The bench would easily hold seven or eight people, and from time to time others had approached as if intending to sit.

  After a glance at the tattered and battered young man sitting there, they had all just wandered on by.

  Gathmor’s lack of interest in him as either labor or merchandise had been alarming and unexpected. To have been thought worthy of a punch party was quite a compliment, though—he must have grown. If he had been in a fit state to accept the invitation and had endured the ensuing ba
ttering well enough, he might perhaps have been considered worth hiring.

  Or enslaving. Everyone knew that jotnar traded in slaves. Why should that not be true in Faerie?

  Father, where are you now that I need you?

  He must find a way off the island soon. He could not survive in the town without Thinal, nor in the jungle without Little Chicken. He wondered if the Thinal gang had survived, and which of them was presently in being, but he had no intention of going in search of Emine’s statue. He was going in search of Inos.

  Except he didn’t know how to swim, and now he couldn’t even walk. Failure! He was a failure.

  He was very hungry and very thirsty and the sun was cooking him. He stared glumly at the line of ships moored along the dock. None resembled in the slightest the fat little cogs that plied to and fro between Krasnegar and the Impire. He wanted to study all the various craft in detail, but his farsight wasn’t working as well as usual. It made his head hurt more.

  Gathmor’s Stormdancer he should avoid. He would have to try all the others and hope to find one that needed an extra hand. He might be selling himself into slavery, but it seemed to be the only way he would ever reach the mainland. Staying here was going to result in slavery at best, with death a likely alternative.

  What would a ship’s captain say to a man who crawled up the gangplank on his hands and knees and asked to be hired?

  How was he ever going to get to Zark to help Inos?

  There had to be a way!

  4

  The courtyard was small and dusty. Camels were much bigger than Kadolan had realized, and she pressed back in a corner, half resigned to being knocked over and trampled before she left this place. High stone walls and a blazing sun made it very hot and bright; it was extremely full of camels. Their smell was overpowering, their continual bellowing intolerable.