A Man of His Word

by The Complete Series 01-04 (epub)

  “You survive, your Majesty?”

  She thought he was being humorous, but she wasn’t sure; his moods were too hard to read. “Certainly I survive. I wouldn’t ache all over like this if I were dead.”

  He nodded in satisfaction and glanced at Kade, who was raptly holding the chicken over the brazier, singeing pinfeathers.

  “We northern women are tough,” Inos said.

  “I knew that, or I would not have planned this.”

  Inos detected an odd note in his voice and wondered if she had at last managed to light a spark of admiration in me giant. Could tent erecting have succeeded where hawking and riding had failed? The idea brought a twinge of uneasiness, almost guilt. If anyone deserved admiration in this situation, it was Kade.

  “Are you First Lionslayer yet?”

  Azak grunted. “Second, still. First wishes to put the matter to the test. I do not anticipate any problems, but if he should be lucky enough to kill me, I am confident the sheik will see you safely to Ullacarn.”

  Kade looked around sharply, Inos dropped the onion and knife. “Kill you? …”

  “Unlikely, as I said. I am undoubtedly the better man, and a minor flesh wound is normally adequate in these cases.”

  He was serious!

  This was not the Impire.

  And even in the Impire men fought duels.

  Inos was so aghast that she could hardly find words. “What does it matter whether you are First or Second Lionslayer? Why—”

  “It matters,” he said flatly.

  It mattered to him. Whether or not it mattered to anyone else was immaterial. Azak’s life was his own to risk; Inos and her aunt were mere passengers on his expedition. He was not their paid guide or guard. He owed them nothing; they had no hold upon him.

  Somehow this new outrage seemed to throw the whole insane situation into a different focus. Camels … desert … hiding from a sorceress …

  “Azak! That’s crazy! The whole thing is crazy! Surely everyone here knows who you really are, and—”

  “Of course they know!” he snapped, his voice harsh enough to stop her protests dead in their tracks. “It will be the locals we must conceal you from.”

  “What locals?” She looked around at the empty land beyond the tents.

  “Most nights we shall stop at more settled places than this—at mines, and goat farms. Elkarath is a trader, remember, not a tourist. As a djinn, I shall not be noticed, except for my stature and remarkable physical presence, and I can do nothing to diminish those. You have green eyes; your aunt’s are blue. We do not want word of such freaks drifting back along the trade routes to Rasha. But the sheik’s people are almost all his relatives, and reliable.”

  “Not the lionslayers, though. They’re not his relatives!”

  “Of course not. Most of them are mine. First is a nephew I banished only a few months ago. That is why he feels the call of honor, that one of us must bleed. Quite understandable. In his place I should feel the same, and I shall let him off as lightly as I can. But the lionslayers will not betray me. You can always trust the code of the lionslayers.”

  “I thought you despised lionslayers?”

  Azak shook his head. In the fading light she could not make out his expression. “What leads you to think that?”

  “Just something Kar said as we were leaving the palace.” That seemed like a long time ago.

  “Kar may despise them. I neither know nor especially care what Kar thinks about lionslayers, I pity them. Their fathers ruled kingdoms; their sons will herd camels.”

  “Talking of kingdoms, how can you possibly risk being absent from yours for three months?”

  “It will be longer,” Azak said, but Inos thought she detected an odd note in his voice, and she remembered his subtle wink in Elkarath’s garden. She also sensed a warning that made her bristle. The only person within earshot was Kade.

  What devious intrigue was boiling inside that deceitful djinn mind? Surely he could not suspect Kade of being unfaithful?

  He rose suddenly, looming against the stars. “I must go, while there is still light enough for fighting.”

  “By the way,” he added, “I don’t like onions.”

  He stalked away before Inos could think of a suitable reply.

  After a few minutes, she decided that there wasn’t one.

  4

  Night came at last to Faerie.

  Moonlight shone in through the wicker walls of the hut, and Rap could not sleep.

  He was not accustomed to a hammock, for one thing.

  Little Chicken was snoring, for another.

  There were bugs, for a million more.

  He ought to be used to bugs by now.

  He was going to die. The word his mother had told him was worth more than his life; not that any man’s life would be worth very much to a warlock, probably.

  He had always thought of jails as being cramped, dark places, built of stone; smelly and cold, like the dungeons in Krasnegar. In Holindarn’s day those had been mainly used as storerooms, and the palace children had played in them sometimes. At eleven or so, Inos had enjoyed ordering people locked up, tortured, and beheaded. As she would never let anyone else order such things done to her, the rest of the gang had tired of that game long before she did.

  Proconsul Oothiana’s jail was not like those nasty stone boxes at all. The hut was airy and pleasant, and even reasonably clean. Clear water flowed up magically in a stone bowl and trickled away down a magical drain that served for a toilet.

  There were many of these huts in the woods, and probably they were all much the same, all set in the same sort of grassy clearing. Quite probably these were the most pleasant dungeons in all Pandemia, with fresh air, room to exercise, and no ugly stone walls. Birdsong and sunlight.

  The hut was enclosed in an invisible occult barrier. Merely by closing his eyes, Rap had been able to establish that the shielding cut off the tops of trees, so it was a dome like the dome that enclosed the whole palace compound, or the smaller shield over the castle at Krasnegar. Only someone with farsight would know that it was there.

  But the magical cowl did more than block his farsight; it was also an aversion spell. Inisso’s chamber of puissance had been protected by such a spell, but that one had been old and worn out. This one was irresistible. If he tried to walk away down the path, he felt a strong desire to turn back. If he persisted, he became giddy and nauseous. Inos had often accused him of being stubborn, but he wasn’t stubborn enough to resist what that sorcery did to his mind. He just could not make his feet obey.

  Simple!

  A pleasant jail. At mealtimes imp slaves brought around baskets of food. Legionaries guarded them, and they were not affected by the spell.

  Simple, but very effective.

  He was going to die.

  Unless the mosquitoes ate him first, he would be tortured until he told someone his word of power and then he would die, just like the fairies who had been abducted from the village.

  And Inos would never know that he had even tried.

  Buzzing of insects, and sea noises. Then the wind shifted in the treetops, and he heard a distant beat.

  He sat up suddenly, tipping himself sprawling from the hammock to the dirt floor. He yelped. The goblin grunted, twisted, and went back to sleep.

  Rap fumbled around to find his boots, then walked out into the moonlight. The night was warm and soft and restless.

  Now that he was trying to hear it, it was quite audible, a rhythmic tattoo somewhere to the north of him, nearer the end of the headland. The fairy child had said, “I will clap for you to dance.”

  So at least some of the fairy captives were still alive, somewhere in this jail. The moon was shining, and they were dancing. The beat was complex, and stirring, and joyous, and it brought a hard knot to his throat. The fairies faced the same fate as he did, but they were much more innocent. He was a thief, an accessory to murder, and any respectable court of justice would condemn him to death
anyway. Their crime was to have been born fairies.

  In the faint, hopeless hope that the aversion spell did not work at night, he headed for the path through the trees. In a few minutes he felt strongly disinclined to go any farther. He stopped, balked, a few paces from the occult shield that blocked his farsight.

  He was going to die.

  So was the goblin, although he might not have realized that yet. Possibly the forbiddance that Proconsul Oothiana had put upon Rap would prevent him from warning Little Chicken of his fate. He hadn’t tried. There was no hurry. Warlock Zinixo might take weeks or months to make up his mind, but eventually he would come for all his captives, each in turn.

  A pleasant jail. Night-flowering plants were putting out heavy, drowsy scents. Bugs whined nearby, and the sea rumbled far away. Somewhere in middle distance the beat of the fairy dance rose and fell as the warm wind toyed with it. If he were Zinixo, Rap decided, then he would definitely harvest the faun and the goblin before slaughtering any of the fairies.

  With a sudden chilling insight, he realized that this was not a prison at all, it was a farm. The fairy inmates were livestock, and this jungle jail had been designed to give them familiar surroundings. There might be hundreds of them living here, generation after generation, bred to die. Oothiana had hinted —very evil, she had said. Completely unstoppable.

  He’d tried to escape, of course, but the aversion spell was implacable. The twists in the path had prevented him from working up any real speed, and no matter how hard he had tried, he had always failed to a stop before he reached the barricade, then come scrambling back from it in panic and revulsion.

  He’d persuaded Little Chicken to make the attempt, too. The goblin did not even need a long runway to build up speed. His occult strength let him take off from a crouch like an arrow leaving a bow; but it also enabled him to stop dead in his tracks when he wanted to, and of course the aversion spell made him want to. The advantage of his great speed had been completely canceled out. The path was gouged where he had dug in his heels, and he had come no nearer the invisible barricade than Rap had.

  But possibly his heart had not been in it. He had not seemed very convinced by Rap’s explanations, preferring to believe his own conclusion that the magic merely stopped him from going more than a certain distance from the hut. He thought in terms of a tether, not a fence. That was very logical, Rap supposed, if you didn’t have farsight. It might even be true, and the aversion spell might be quite unrelated to the shielding. It might just increase in power indefinitely as the distance from the hut increased. He couldn’t prove matters either way, because he couldn’t tell if the aversion spell extended outside the shielding …

  Oh, yes he could!

  With a yelp of triumph, Rap went racing back to the hut to waken the goblin.

  Rap’s mother had firmly maintained that all cats were gray in the dark. Goblins in moonlight, likewise, lost any hint of being green. But they could still look dangerously surly at having been roused from a sound sleep. What dreams a goblin might enjoy did not bear thinking about.

  Little Chicken stood on the path, scratching, slapping bugs, and showing his teeth in a fearsome scowl. His angular eyes glinted crossly as he listened to Rap’s proposal. He nodded agreement. “Easy.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “No. Then you leave the island? Leave me? You think again, Flat Nose. Find better idea.”

  He turned on his heel, intent on returning to his hammock. Rap grabbed his shoulder. Little Chicken spun around, knocking Rap’s arm away with a blow so hard that for a moment Rap thought the bones were broken.

  Never let him save your life …

  Facing a hate-filled glare, he wondered if he was about to die at once. The goblin had not mentioned the subject of trash since Rap had come to the jail. He had spoken very little, spending most of the afternoon just eyeing Rap like a cat eyeing a bird. He might now consider that his diversionary attack on the soldiers had relieved him of any further obligation to his former master. In that case, Little Chicken was now free to pursue his life’s ambition. The only thing that could be restraining him was the flimsy hope that he might one day drag his victim back to Raven Totem to enjoy the faun in relaxed family surroundings. If he ever discarded that hope, then he could start work anytime. Like now.

  “I’ll get you out, too!” Rap protested, gingerly rubbing his bruise.

  Even the silvery trail of moonlight was enough to show the goblin’s skepticism. “How?”

  “I’ll go and get a horse and a rope. I know where the stables are.”

  Little Chicken scowled. “Two horses, maybe?”

  He thought he could outwrestle a horse? He might be right, although he knew little about horses.

  “Isn’t room on the path for two,” Rap said. “I’ll toss the rope in to you. You tie it around yourself and turn your back. When the horse moves, you won’t have time to undo the knots.”

  Giant goblin teeth showed in a sneer. “Break rope!”

  “I’ll yank you out before you have time to break the rope! What’s the matter, you scared?”

  “Don’t trust you.” Again he moved as if headed for bed.

  “I’m sorry,” Rap said. “I thought we were friends and buddies right now, or I wouldn’t have asked to be put in your cage. You won’t trust my word that I’ll come back for you?”

  The goblin was still standing there, his back turned. “No.”

  “I’ll have a lot more chance of escaping from the island if you’re still helping me. You must see that!”

  Silence. Obviously Little Chicken was tempted.

  “I’m going to try to stow away on a ship. If I can reach the mainland, then I’ll head for Zark, to find Inos. But you might be able to knock me on the head and carry me off to the northlands. You never know your luck. You certainly can’t do that here in Faerie.”

  Slowly the goblin turned around. He stared hard at Rap. “You promise to come back with horse and get me out?”

  “I swear.”

  Little Chicken grunted. “Suppose I try what you want. Suppose you break both legs, and the spell isn’t thin, like you said. Suppose you land in it, not through it?”

  “Then I’ll probably go insane. You’ll be able to listen to my screams all night long.”

  “Real men don’t scream!” The goblin stepped forward and grasped the back of Rap’s belt. “Feet first, faceup?”

  “Good a way as any,” Rap said, and was immediately hoisted into the air. Fingers like ropes tightened around his left ankle.

  He held himself rigid. He watched treetops rush by against the moon-washed sky. Little Chicken hurtled along the path, bearing Rap overhead like a javelin. When the aversion spell stopped him, he threw, and Rap went soaring onward, feet first.

  He felt a spasm of unspeakable horror, but he was through the magic before he could even cry out.

  He did not break his legs, although he did twist an ankle, the same one he had injured before. He also collected an assortment of scrapes and bruises while rolling to a stop in a bush. He rose, dusted himself off, and tried a few steps to make sure he could walk. Then he looked back at the goblin, who had retreated away from the barrier.

  “Thanks!” Rap said. “Guess it worked. I’ll be back, I promise.”

  One way or the other …

  Limping as fast as he could bear, he headed for the stables he had seen near the main gate. Proconsul Oothiana, the dwarf Raspnex, the warlock himself … and there might be many other sorcerers around the palace grounds, Zinixo’s votaries.

  He shunned the paths, cutting across-country, staying close to patches of woodland whenever possible, and also close to the many shielded buildings because what blocked his farsight must block sorcerers’ farsight, too. The wind was rising, and clouds scudded through the moonlit sky. Far off to his right lay the town of Milflor, its dying cooking fires a scattering of fallen stars. To his left was the hogback of the headland. Beyond that lay the ocean, and the mainland, and
Zark. And Inos.

  He was only one man, moving in darkness in a very large area. He thought he would reach the stables safely, but they might well be guarded, and to steal one horse in the middle of the night would panic all the others unless he used mastery. Mastery might be detected if there was another sorcerer awake somewhere. Even if he could pull off the horsethievery, he would then have to cross the palace grounds again, back to the jail. Only when he had done all that would he be able to make tracks for the harbor.

  Common sense said he should forget the goblin and head straight for the docks. He resisted the temptation. He planned to live to an extreme old age, and that meant he must live with his conscience for a long time yet. He had promised to return.

  It was a very long shot, and yet he was beginning to feel hopeful again. A word of power made its owner lucky, Sagorn had said. His luck was holding so far, for he was almost at the stables. He came around the corner of a shielded building, heard a voice, and dropped flat in the grass.

  Farsight found no one to explain the voice, but it did tell him that there was a local circle of shielding a short way in front of the building. The sound seemed to be coming from there, at the edge of one of the major roads. After a moment, when there was no outcry, he raised his head cautiously and took a look. As he suspected, the speaker was Proconsul Oothiana, her white robe glimmering in the moonlight.

  She was standing on a grass verge between the pavement and an ornamental flower bed. She had her back to him, and she was speaking in low, rapid tones to a man. All Rap could see of the man was that he was tall, and wearing a military helmet, and holding a spear.

  Oothiana could not detect Rap with farsight while she was inside that shielding. He certainly ought to vanish before she emerged, but …

  But why would these two hold their conversation out here in the middle of the night, and why had the sorceress cast an occult shield around them? It overlapped half the width of the roadway, but it enclosed nothing except the two people.