Mage Quest woy-3

by C. Dale Brittain

  “More automatons?” I asked as casually as I could.

  “Of course,” said the grower. “This is the courtyard of the emir’s maturity, where he commanded great armies and reveled in great luxury.” As we headed out the far side, the automaton birds behind us began to sing, a song of such intense sweetness that I stumbled.

  But the grower kept on walking. I had completely lost track of the turnings. Finally we reached a third courtyard, also open to the sky but lined on three sides with shady arcades. More flowers bloomed riotously in the center. In the distance beyond the lower, fourth wall we could see sunlight glinting on the Dark Sea. Here fountains played and an old man, turbaned and dressed in dazzling white, sat on a bench by the fountains, watching us approach.

  It was not precisely the image of the East I had had back in Yurt, but it was close. Another of the strange automaton shapes, radiating magic, stood behind the old man. The rose grower knelt before him and kissed the pavement between his hands. “Oh, glorious one, live forever! I have brought you something new and strange, a great wonder, travelers from a distant land who say that they have heard of your blue roses! One of them is a normal boy, but the rest claim to be westerners. Their skin may be pale and their accents strange, but their enthusiasm for roses is unfeigned.”

  I had thought that our skin had become quite dark after months of travel, but we could still not match the swarthiness of the men here. The emir motioned with one hand. When he moved I could see that his white robes were sewn all over with pearls.

  I got a better look at the automaton behind him, shadowed by an arcade. As I watched, and indeed the entire time we were in the courtyard, it spun about very slowly and deliberately, and without a sound. It had five sides, five eyes, and five arms, and each of its five hands clutched a long knife to protect the emir. Two enormous spotted cats on leashes, real animals these, reclined beside him. They gave us bored looks and looked away.

  “These do indeed appear to be something both new and strange,” said the emir, although I would have thought we rather paled in comparison. “Approach, then, travelers from afar!”

  There were rose bushes growing in the courtyard, but a surreptitious glance found no blue flowers. The king stepped forward at once, but Ascelin gripped my arm. “Something’s wrong,” he hissed into my ear.

  The others were following the king forward. “You’ve been doing this ever since we reached Arnulf’s house,” I hissed back. “If you don’t want to be here, fine, go back to the horses, but we can’t let the king miss his opportunity to find his rose, or probably for Hugo to find his father.”

  Ascelin bit his lip and flashed me a look from blue eyes that I had to admit looked surprisingly strange when the eyes of everyone around us were black. But he took a long, slow breath and stepped forward as well, without enough hesitation to provoke comment.

  Since King Haimeric knelt before the emir, the rest of us did too. “This one says he is a western king,” commented the rose-grower.

  “But I come to you not as someone claiming equality,” said the king, sitting back carefully on his heels, his first movement in the last hour that looked as though it might pain him. “Rather, I come as a suppliant. I have dreamed all my life of a blue rose, a true blue, one that would rival sapphires in color and the most expensive perfumes in scent.” So my expectations were also his. “And we have heard in the west that you have grown such a thing.”

  The emir made a slight motion of his hand, and a man stepped out of the shadows at the edge of the courtyard to bring the king a pillow, on which he settled himself gratefully.

  “You then ask to see such a rose?” asked the emir. One of his spotted cats gave a long yawn, full of teeth, as though in disdain. I looked toward the grower, worrying that he might be offended by the king’s implied insult to his best blue, but he only beamed as though proud to have brought the emir such an amusing guest.

  “I seek even more, glorious one,” said King Haimeric. “Even we in the west know that an emir’s power, to help or to harm, to raise up and to cast down, is unlimited. I would like the rootstock of such a rose for my own.”

  At this the emir began to laugh, in what looked to me genuine amusement. “And this is your only request?”

  “I do have other requests, glorious one,” the king continued, undaunted. “We would like to inquire if you have perhaps seen friends of ours, a group of four westerners including a wizard. The wizard has red hair.” The emir’s smile disappeared abruptly.

  There was a brief, very tense moment in which I could have sworn the air crackled. Ascelin nudged me with his foot and let his hand rest, as though casually, on his hilt. I kept my eyes on the silent automaton behind the emir and put together the first words of a lifting spell, to transport the king up and out of here.

  But then the emir smiled again. It did not look to me like the same smile. “I am delighted to help such amusing guests. And you will be my guests, won’t you? I have rooms where you shall stay. Refreshment will be brought to you at once.” For some reason, I could feel Ascelin start to relax. “We can talk more in the cool of the evening.”

  IV

  The emir clapped his hands once, and half a dozen young women darted into the courtyard. Their faces were veiled so that only their eyes showed, but the rest of their clothing was very brief, and their loose, silken trousers did nothing to hide their legs. They whisked us to our feet with gentle touches under the elbow and escorted us, wordless but giggling, out of the courtyard, down more passageways, and into a low-ceilinged outer room whose single window led to a balcony looking down over the sun-drenched city and the Dark Sea. An open doorway led to a white-tiled room where hot water was already beginning to steam. The women left us for a moment but were back almost immediately with a tray of fresh fruit, a hot pitcher of what I assumed was tea, bread, and salt.

  Ascelin plunged his finger into the salt and licked it off. Maffi joined him. “It’s all right now,” Ascelin said in a low voice when King Haimeric opened his mouth to reprove him. “They wouldn’t share salt with us if they meant to kill us.”

  “But why should they want to kill us?” asked the king.

  “The emir has seen my father,” said Hugo in a tight voice.

  “We were greeted as something to amuse a bored old man,” said Ascelin, “but everything changed as soon as you mentioned Sir Hugo.”

  Maffi nudged Ascelin. “Not in front of the slave girls, my masters,” he murmured.

  The slave girls stood across the room, watching and whispering to each other. “Thank you,” said the king to them. “We’ll call if we need anything else.” They trooped out, giggling again, and one winked over her shoulder at Hugo.

  “They are slaves?” said Joachim to Maffi. “I fear I did not recognize them as such. I wonder what sort of ‘duties,’ degrading and debilitating to the soul, they are expected to perform in a place like this.”

  Ascelin closed the door carefully behind them. I poured a cup from the pitcher. It neither looked nor smelled like tea.

  I hesitated, but Maffi took the cup out of my hand. “It’s coffee, my masters,” he said with a grin. “We of the desert were drinking coffee long before traders to the far East began bringing back tea. Tea is such an insipid brew in comparison; I’m not sure why you westerners ever took it up.”

  He began an explanation of where coffee came from, somewhere far to the south of the desert where dry sand gave way to wet jungles, but I was not listening. Instead I stood quietly to one side, probing with magic. Even though I had snapped at Ascelin, I trusted his hunter’s instincts more than I trusted anyone in the emir’s employ.

  I could find no one actively working magic in the palace, though the presence of the automatons made it hard to make sense of all the magical currents. But outside, either in the city or perhaps even beyond the city, I sensed a disturbance in the forces of magic, suggesting someone-or something-of enormous power. I came back to myself with a start, not wanting to let whoever or whateve
r was there knew I had spotted them. Either Kaz-alrhun, I thought, or an Ifrit.

  “Is my father here?” asked Hugo in a low voice at my shoulder.

  Since I had never met his father, I would not recognize his mind even if I touched it, but I knew his wizard. I let myself slide along the surface of the forces of magic, slipping past the minds of all those in the palace, a long process as there seemed to be a remarkable number of people here. But I did not find Evrard. “Not here,” I said at last.

  Hugo nodded glumly. “I hadn’t expected it would be that easy. At first I hoped that if the emir liked King Haimeric he’d be willing to assist us, to command his dependents to help us investigate their disappearance. But as soon as the king mentioned the red-haired wizard and I saw the emir’s face change, I knew he did know who they were, but there was no chance he was going to help us find them. If they’d just been held prisoner here, at least we could have tried to rescue them …”

  The king sampled the coffee and declared it strong, quite unlike tea, and much better than he expected. I tried some as well and agreed with his assessment. The aroma slipped into the consciousness as delicately as a distant melody, and a long hot swallow made one feel rather abruptly awake. I wondered if King Haimeric was planning to take home to the queen some of the leaves or berries or whatever it was brewed from.

  The sun had set, touching the Dark Sea with fingers of gold, when the emir sent for us. I had spent the afternoon making further desultory and unsuccessful attempts to unravel the spell on the onyx ring. Back in the emir’s courtyard of old age, candles had been lit inside paper lanterns, giving everything a fairy glow. The air was no longer hot but still warm, and lay on our arms like a sensuous touch.

  Freshly bathed, dressed not in our goat’s-hair desert robes but in the cleanest clothes from the bottom of our packs, we reclined on padded benches while the slave girls brought us iced sherbet and almonds. The last place we had had an iced dish had been at King Warin’s castle, tucked into the foothills below icy peaks. I tried to calculate the nearest place from which the emir could obtain ice, and how expensive the transportation would be, and gave it up.

  A tune then arose from within the arcaded shadows beyond the light of the lanterns, and the girls began to dance, swaying back and forth, twirling around each other in a complicated pattern that I couldn’t quite follow. Their bare feet moved quickly and surely, and dark eyes flashed at us from above their veils. Then the music paused and again they served us, this time with diced lamb and pickled eggplant.

  “If the old man is a prisoner somewhere,” commented Hugo to me with a grin in his voice, “I hope he’s got entertainment like this.”

  At last the emir spoke. “So you have come all this way in search of a blue rose, western travelers? I would have thought it would have been simpler to send a message to your agents in Xantium than to make such a difficult journey yourselves.”

  If any of the western kings kept agents in Xantium, the royal court of Yurt certainly never had. But King Haimeric did not respond to this part of the emir’s remark. “Agents and messages are no use when one wants to see a blue rose oneself. It was messages and rumors that told me there might be such a thing here, but if you have really developed a blue rose I thought it unlikely that you would be willing to sell the rootstock, or even if the rootstock would survive transportation.”

  “And are you satisfied, now that you have seen my roses?”

  In spite of the emir’s friendly manner, I would have been very careful to be as flattering and diplomatic as possible. Someone accustomed to having people kiss the ground at his feet might not like to be reminded that his best blue rose was rather inadequate.

  But King Haimeric surprised me. “No, I am not satisfied, glorious one,” he said in a good-natured tone, “as I’m sure you would have guessed even if I lied to you. The roses your grower showed us out at the edge of the city are an excellent start toward blue, closer than anything I’ve seen in the west, but they are not the true, sapphire blue which I had heard rumored you’d grown. I expect you have something much better hidden away in the palace, and have that rose garden at the entrance to town, where anyone can find it easily, to distract all but the most knowledgeable rose fanciers.”

  The emir was silent for a moment, either considering his reply or deeply insulted. There might in the morning be six more headless bodies on the edge of town, waiting for the desert to purify them. On either side of me, I could hear Ascelin and Hugo take determined breaths, though neither had worn his sword to the emir’s dinner.

  But the emir said in a mild tone, “You can see all the roses I have in my palace here in the courtyard. Do any of them seem finer to you?”

  In the dancing shadows of the lanterns all the roses looked gray to me. “These are fine roses but they are not your true blues either, glorious one,” said the king. “If you have blue roses in the palace, you have concealed them well.”

  “But what good would a blue rose be if no one but I could see it?”

  “You would know you had succeeded where no one had ever succeeded before,” said the king. “Is the personal satisfaction enough?”

  The emir did not answer. The girls now brought us a salad of lentils, onions, and olives, and when the melody struck up again from back in the shadows they resumed their dance. I would have enjoyed it more if I had been able to give it proper attention.

  Since so many of my sudden convictions turned out to be wrong, I didn’t know whether to doubt myself, but I now felt suddenly convinced that I knew what the older Prince Dominic had found in the Wadi Harhammi. “Something wonderful, something marvelous,” he had called it. Ever since the eastern kingdoms, I had wondered if it was the Black Pearl. Now I felt sure that it was a blue rose.

  When the slave girls paused in their dancing, King Haimeric spoke again. “You are not sure whether to trust me with your secret, glorious one, and doubtless with good reason. I would not trust foreigners with the secret of a blue rose myself.” In fact, King Haimeric would have told anyone interested in his roses anything they wanted to know, but I let this pass. “Perhaps instead I can ask again what I asked before. Did a group of pilgrims come through here, four men, one of them a wizard with red hair? Their leader, Sir Hugo, is a cousin of my wife.”

  The emir did not answer for a moment, and the only sound was the quiet chirping of a bird somewhere along the eaves-a real bird, this time.

  “Very few Christian pilgrims come down to Bahdroc from the Holy Land,” the emir said at last from out of the shadows. “And I presume that most of those who reach my city never come to the palace. No, I cannot say that I have ever seen your friends.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Perhaps my vizier may know more.” He clapped once, and a slave girl darted away.

  In a few minutes the vizier we had seen briefly before came into the courtyard, panting and arranging his satin robes as though he had been summoned from the bath or from bed. I wondered how this man, who I presumed wielded enormous power of his own within the city, reconciled himself to being virtually the slave of the quiet old man in the pearl-embroidered raiment.

  He stood stiffly before the emir, his hands at his sides. “No, of course I have seen no pilgrims such as you describe. If any such people did come to Bahdroc, I would most certainly have been informed. Two months ago several western women were here, looking, they said, for the bones of some holy saint who had lived as a recluse in the desert even before the days of the Prophet. I found it all quite unlikely. They would not be the pilgrims you were seeking? I thought not.”

  The emir dismissed his vizier with a slight movement of one hand. The slave girls brought us bowls of yogurt and cucumber and little cups of strong coffee.

  “Then if our friends did not come to your city,” said King Haimeric, “I must apologize for troubling you about them. But let me ask you something else.” The king was nothing if not persistent. “Have you heard the rumors that King Solomon’s Pearl has been found again?”

&n
bsp; The emir was silent again. But when he spoke it was as though there had been no pause. “I am surprised, travelers from the West, that you have heard the old legends. I have not heard anyone speak of the Black Pearl for many years. It was sunk beneath the Outer Sea centuries ago and could scarcely have been found again.”

  “Then I have one final request,” said the king. “We believe that our friends were on their way to the Wadi Harhammi.”

  We believed no such thing, but I kept quiet.

  “Tomorrow could you have someone direct us on the right road toward it?”

  This time the emir’s pause was much longer. For a second the courtyard was dead still, then I heard a low growl from one of his big spotted cats. “Again, you seem to have been listening to the old legends,” the emir said at last. “If you had listened better, however, then you would have realized there really is no such Wadi, that even in the legends its position is constantly shifting. The old slave women tuck the children into bed with stories of the fairies who live in the Wadi Harhammi, but that is all. By the way, I am not sure you ever mentioned it, but what is the name of your kingdom in the west?”

  “Yurt,” said King Haimeric.

  The emir did not answer but clapped again at once. “Show our guests to their quarters,” he said to the slave girls. “They will be staying with us all this week.”

  They helped us up from the couches with light hands and giggles. Hugo held the hand of his slightly longer than necessary. “I wonder if we’re going to find out more about these degrading and debilitating duties the slaves have to perform,” he whispered to me. “I notice there’s a girl for each of us, not counting Maffi, but he’s too young anyway.”