Missing Piece

by Robert Priest

  Lirodello feared the thump of his heart must now be quite audible. He looked up at the ceiling, summoning the image of Imalgha to give him strength. He sought desperately for something to say, but nothing came.

  “Please,” she said, “I know and see that you are a gentleman.” Lirodello was now officially trembling. He almost felt sick to his stomach. “I certainly won’t dream of letting you lie on the floor,” she persisted with great sincerity, “though I do so appreciate your offer.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up.

  “No, I insist,” Lirodello said, crossing his arms over his chest in hopes of stilling that wildly beating heart.

  “No, I insist,” she countered, also folding her arms across her chest. They stood there for a moment facing each other, stalemated. Finally she said, “Lirodello, I cannot take your comfort from you. You have to have some sympathy for my own desire to avoid the dreaded churl state,” she went on half imploring, half teasing.

  “But—”

  “You have no choice,” she said. She smiled and her face turned further into the light, giving him the clearest glimpse yet of her beauty. He shrugged and swallowed, shifted from one foot to the other.

  She gestured to the bed. “You first.”

  Lirodello took a deep breath, bowed, wedged off his sandals, and lay down.

  “You see,” she grinned, pointing to the narrow expanse beside him, “there’s lots of room.”

  Lirodello lay there stiffly, flat on his back, his arms at his sides, looking up toward the ceiling, his ample eyeballs over in the corners of his eyes watching her.

  “Now was that the least bit churlish?” she asked. He shrugged nervously.

  The candle on the small table beside Lirodello lit her from below. This added more dimension to her charm, her loveliness. She turned slightly and undid her cloak, and as Lirodello blew out the candle, she slipped under the covers beside him.

  Immediately, the side of her shoulder and her hip brushed up against him in the dark. It felt warm and spongy and there was a smell like moss and water lilies.

  “Who was that other one?” she asked.

  “What other one?”

  “The one who shouted. The one who ran.”

  Lirodello pretended he didn’t hear the elevated level of excitement in her voice. “He is known as Xemion of Ilde,” he answered. “That was the first time I’d seen him in five years. I thought he had died.”

  For a while she was silent. The room was dark as a grave.

  “Where was he?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows.”

  After another ten minutes, her voice broke the silence. “May I ask you one more thing?”

  Lirodello was still wide awake. “Of course.”

  “It is hard for me to just go off to sleep.”

  “I see.”

  “Could I ask you for just a little kiss goodnight?”

  19

  Vihata the Pathan Trader

  The portal looked like a wrought gold archway suspended in the night sky about thirty feet above the bog. Pale light streamed all around its edges, but even though the moon was directly behind it, no light made it through the archway’s opening. It was as though the darkness that occupied it instead had been transported there from some other realm, and was impenetrable. Down below stood Vihata, the same rogue Pathan trader who had almost succeeded in capturing Xemion five years earlier. He was overseeing the efforts of three Thrall scavengers as they poked with their tridents and dragged their long nets through the shallow waters at the the edge of the bog. He had his hood up, his features mostly hidden in the shadows. Occasionally, though, one of the few remaining crystal facets of his face would catch the moonlight and glint as he turned.The three Thralls were busily harvesting arms and legs like eels from the shallow black waters and forcing them into sacks, where the limbs continued to strive toward whatever union or destiny their compulsions drove them.

  Suddenly, the night was filled with a shrill sound that caused the Thralls to look up at the portal. Someone in a red jacket shot out of the arch of darkness above and fell silently as though asleep, landing about twenty feet out in the bog, where the impact was absorbed by the spongy peat and the shallow water. The figure that had fallen was briefly submerged, but then came wildly to life, leaping up out of the sucking morass with a scream of horror. Still screaming, he lunged and galloped toward the shore.

  Vihata and the Thralls, having ducked down, hid quietly in the shadows until the figure drew near. Then the Thralls launched their nets at him. He fought them hard with his fists, but he had no sword, and soon he lay tangled in netting with one prong of a trident at his neck

  “Look at his pretty red uniform,” said Vihata. His voice was like ground glass and he sounded joyous. “A member of the academy, no less.” He turned, and for a moment the moonlight shone full on his face. The Thralls saw a look they hadn’t seen before there, but which they interpreted as a smile. “Just when information is so very rare. And so very … expensive.”

  “Let me go!” Torgee bellowed.

  20

  Red Streaks

  When Tharfen got out of bed the next morning, her heel still hurt. She lifted it to look and there were red streaks radiating from the puncture mark. She’d seen streaks like this before when her crew had ripped themselves on nails. She should probably bathe the foot in salt water, but there was no time for that now. She had to speak at Lirodello’s assembly.

  Images of Xemion flashed before her — his face that night on the beach and then again the image of his eyes last night. She’d known he was here. She’d known all along. And he had seen her, too. She was sure of it. She felt sick. There was bread and cheese to eat and a carafe of water in her room, but she had no appetite. She sipped at the water and breathed in deeply, trying to still the nausea at her centre.

  Tharfen did not often wear her full ceremonial uniform. In general, she disliked showiness without a purpose. But she took this task of speaking to the people seriously, and if she was going to do it, she wanted to do it well. They needed to hear her and take her words to heart. And if having a navy-blue jacket with golden epaulets and silver trim embedded with rubies was going to help them listen, that was purpose enough. The same went for the tri-cornered hat. She also pinned on her medals and grabbed both the ebony scabbard and the black cutlass with a black diamond on the hilt. There was no sense having regalia like this if you were not ever going to wear it, she thought.

  The pain in her heal increased as she started to put on her patent leather boots, so she went to her drawer and took out a never-opened bottle of rum, sat down, positioned her heel over a bucket and slowly poured the liquid over the puncture. It stung a little, but when she was done the little wound looked and felt better.

  And in any case, she told herself, a little infection in the heel was worth it to attain this feeling of unpolluted wholeness. The piece was gone. The piece was finally gone. She would never again have to worry about that extra alien fragment throwing her off-kilter. She had hardly known how much of an intrusion it had been upon her, but now that it was gone she felt such relief.

  And the timing was perfect. Getting rid of the piece completely justified this whole excursion off course and back to her origins. She would need all her wits, patience, and skills for the voyage ahead. She would need to be level-headed and sturdy. The underearth oceans had driven many a good mariner mad.

  There was a knock at the door and Lirodello opened it and stepped in, bringing a faint bog-like scent with him. He looked at her and his smile was so full and toothy and gleeful she was astonished. “Utterly enthralling,” he burbled, his eyes taking in her splendid regalia. “Gratitude fills my very heart for what you are doing for us, Tharfen.”

  “How is the child?” she asked.

  “If anyone can help the child, it is Mr. Stilpkin.”
/>   “I hope that is so,” she said seriously. “And Torgee?”

  “What about Torgee?”

  “Has he been seen?”

  “I have not heard. But it is not unusual for him to disappear for days at a time.”

  Dawn was just coming up as Tharfen stepped across the boarding plank. The crew were already in the rigging, tightening the sails. The bo’sun had a compass out and was consulting a map on the foredeck. He looked up as Tharfen and Lirodello emerged from the ship and stepped onto the wharf.

  “Mr. Japes,” Tharfen called out, perhaps a little fondly.

  Mr. Japes’s salute was spotlit by a ray of rising sun. “Captain Tharfen,” he replied.

  She saluted back. “This evening,” she said.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  By the time Tharfen and Lirodello had been swallowed by the gateway at the end of the wharf, the Dawnrider was leaning out from her mooring, her remaining two sets of sails filled with early-morning light and a faint eastward breeze.

  21

  Parade

  Word that Tharfen of Ilde had returned to the city and would in fact be addressing the populace at the annual meeting of The Fifty had spread quickly. People were unusually excited as they converged on the grand avenue hoping to catch a sight of her. Standing behind a barricade in front of an empty four-storey marble building destined to become the new library, the poet and four of the other scribes had their new pocket telescopes out watching the slow progress of Lirodello, Atathu, and Tharfen toward them.

  “When I close in and look at her features separately, they don’t seem extraordinary at all, but somehow when I pull back and they all come together …” Ambani Butterwolf’s adolescent vocal cords creaked with excitement. He had a large bulky frame and fine yellow hair that hung over his slightly porcine face.

  “Look, focus on her eyes,” Jik demanded. Jik was tall and skinny, bald and angular. “Do you see the trouble in them?”

  “Such beautiful trouble,” Butterwolf mused.

  “I tell you, you do not want to go down too deeply into those eyes. I see pain,” Jik warned.

  “Such beautiful pain,” Butterwolf countered.

  “I can tell you, as a more complex person than any of you that her attractions are multi-dimensional,” said Eta. Tall, with strong features and long, grey hair, Eta was much older than the others. Due to the effects of a blocked gender spell from fifty-five years earlier, he spent one day as a male and the next as a female. “The man part of me understands the poet here.” His voice today was deep and resonant. “The woman part of me sees the strength in her and the sharpness of mind and the ferocity of eye and—”

  “Yes, you are so nuanced!” Butterwolf said mockingly.

  The poet’s whole body trembled at the thought that soon she would walk by him and he would see her close up in broad daylight. “Shut up,” he said quietly.

  “Come, come,” Corwald, a scar faced Nain, protested. “Her beauty is medicine to us. It buoys us up. It’s good for our morale to praise it.”

  “I’d rather be girled up,” quipped Jik.

  “What makes you so quiet?” Corwald asked the poet.

  The poet grinned. “Sheer adoration. She makes me believe in something like deity. I suddenly completely understand why people made temples. Why they prostrate themselves and pray. I’m just glad that poetry has already been invented; otherwise, I would have to invent it myself just to have a way of speaking of her.”

  “I haven’t heard that one before,” Jik observed dryly. He took his telescope away from his eye for a moment and blinked up at the blue sky.

  The poet continued ecstatically. “From here on in I am changed. Everything I was before I first saw her is gone. Swept away with one sight.”

  “I wish you’d change your shirt.”

  “You can laugh, but I am like someone who suddenly converts to the goddess, Loceklis. I love her and I believe one day she will know my love,” the poet rhapsodized, almost in a trance. “I know I’ve said it before about others, but this is different.”

  “You’re a fool to think of her in terms of individual love,” Eta advised. “She will not individually love anyone, I’m sure of it. It would not be good in a commander. Her love must be for the all. To the large idea.”

  “Well, I have a large idea. Maybe she and I could—”

  The poet cut Jik short with an elbow to the ribs. “Don’t say it,” he growled.

  “Or what?” Jik shot back. “You’ll punch me with that little bud of a hand?”

  The poet didn’t flinch at this reference to his incompleteness. “Not if it means getting my knuckles filthy on your little bud of a face.” All five scribes laughed and the five telescopes that had come down at the outbreak of this small fracas now returned to their five eyes and continued inspecting the oncoming Tharfen.

  “She does walk like a pirate,” Jik observed.

  “Yes, like she’s always expecting some big wave off the starboard bow,” Butterwolf added.

  “Even poor old sad-faced Lirodello is smiling,” Butterwolf chortled. “I’ve never seen such a thing.”

  “It should be marked down in the book of days.”

  “He gives grief a bad name.”

  “He looks ridiculous in that red jacket.”

  “I like the way the tassels jerk back and forth on the epaulets with every step he takes.”

  “Look how close he stands to her. Like he thinks he has a chance or something.”

  “He had better not let that Atathu see.”

  At that moment, Atathu strode purposefully forward, large and silent, her broad shoulders constrained in crisscrossed strips of brown leather and purple feathers.

  “I wouldn’t want to get in her way,” Jik agreed.

  “Oh, yes you would. You’d love it,” joked Butterwolf.

  “She’s hopelessly in love with Lirodello,” said Eta.

  There was a great cheer as Lirodello, Atathu, and Tharfen came to the next intersection. Tharfen, unaware of the five telescopes trained on her face, was rejoicing in the moist sea air and in the jubilation of the crowd, but it was her relief that the odious piece was finally out of her that really made her feel like dancing — even if her heel still hurt a little. She nodded to three veterans of the Second Battle of Phaer Bay who stood on guard inside the barricades. Two of them were missing a leg and the third an arm and a leg. They held themselves upright with long poles atop which gorehorse flags waved. Tharfen saluted. The people cheered.

  “As I mentioned yesterday,” Lirodello said, looking toward the library, “we have a large shipment of recently recovered and very much cherished books on their way today from Lyess.”

  Tharfen nodded noncommittally.

  “It will be magnificent to have so much of the literature we thought we’d lost forever available once again in our capital city,” Lirodello continued with uncharacteristic amiability. “News of that will travel around the world and people will be uplifted.”

  Tharfen nodded again and waved to some happy Thralls on the side of the road.

  By now they had almost reached the library. The sun was bright behind it, throwing those in front into shade. She couldn’t quite see the faces of the group behind the barricades along the front wall of the great marble building, but they got clearer as she entered the shadow herself. Immediately she recognized the poet — his sideways sneer of a smile; that stupid look of adoration. She felt an instant jolt of irritation, but she did not let it show. With neither a smile nor a frown she nodded toward him and the four others. A most serious and worshipful look came over the poet’s features and he went down on one knee as though to a queen. She grimaced and kept on walking.

  “You may have to forgive some of the young men for falling in love with you,” Lirodello said. “That one there is actually quite a brilliant fellow.”

>   “I don’t care. I’ve seen it on my ship a thousand times. I allow no mooning, no flattering. I will not put up with drivel and drama. This is not some courting ritual for me, sir. This is serious business.”

  A great gust of wind nearly removed Tharfen’s hat as they came to the main doors of the Panthemium. They entered the stadium and a huge cheer arose from the packed crowd assembled therein.

  Lirodello, Tharfen, and their entourage walked down the wide aisle toward a raised dais and everybody clapped and chanted the name of the person they had all been talking about.

  “Tharfen! Tharfen! Tharfen!”

  22

  Montither’s Devotion

  Like many other kwislings on the rebel side of the civil iwar, Brothlem Montither was a recent convert to the doctrines of the great Pathan god, the Magman. And so even though it was merely a coincidence that in his drunkenness he often enjoyed cruelty, he did what he did with the texts and the librarians because it was the Pathan law. The way of the Magman was clear on this. No signification. The cursed spellcraft that had held the Pathans back from conquering the Phaer Isle for a thousand years was rooted in the magic of signs, and in order to root it out, the very signs themselves must be rooted out. And here, just when he thought he was finished with laying waste to these lands, what should he find outside the village of Lyess but seven wagonloads of ancient texts. Burning fields, torching villages, and massacring their inhabitants was not laying waste enough. He felt it in his heart. And now he knew why. And he knew that he had the Magman’s will today.

  And it wasn’t just the texts. It was their keepers — the librarians. It hadn’t taken much torture to find out their crimes. They’d hidden the books here underground, copies of nearly every significant book in the history of Phaer institute. And they’d guarded them and kept them a secret for fifty years. These were very high crimes. What fools they were to move them now. What a terrible strategy!