“Whatever else one may say of Panurgus,” Ottaviano said, “he maintained the roads.”
“You are a fair-minded man,” said Dewar.
Ottaviano ignored this, turning to inform Clay that they would stop to water the horses.
“We seem to have lost Ocher, sir,” Clay said.
“I doubt it’s permanent,” Ottaviano said, “so make the halt brief.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ottaviano dismounted; Luneté got down also before he could assist her and led Butterfly to the trough. Clay, having passed the order on to the men, asked his commander where he intended to halt next. Otto drew Clay to one side, watching Luneté and the sorcerer. They were talking, he stroking his horse’s neck, she nodding.
“I’d planned on stopping in Champlor,” Ottaviano said to his lieutenant. “However. I don’t trust this sorcerer, although I’d rather keep an eye on him than not.”
“Maybe it would be best to push on to Champlys, then?”
“Maybe.”
Clay looked over the men, nodding. “If we’d had to fight Ocher, sir, I’d say no, we couldn’t do it. But as it is …”
“With a feed and a rest in Champlor instead of a night, they’ll make it.”
“The horses have been ridden long, but not too hard. Easily, we’d make it, sir.”
“We’ll go on,” decided Otto.
“And when you arrive in Champlys—”
“We arrive. What do you mean?”
“The sorcerer,” Clay said, his eyes narrowing a little.
The sorcerer had turned away from Lys and led his horse across the crossroads. He appeared to be addressing the pillar, bowing and gesturing, and the men were carefully and uneasily not watching him. Luneté was, though. Dewar knelt. Ottaviano saw him pouring from his wineskin at the base of the pillar and nodded to himself.
“Oh. Him. I don’t know. They’re tricky bastards. I’d just as soon he jogged along, but I have a feeling there’s damn little I might do to encourage it.” Ottaviano shrugged slightly. “I suspect that if Ocher attacks, he’ll find the place less interesting than he thought, and if he sticks around—” He shrugged again.
Clay nodded. Ottaviano moved away, leading his horse to the trough.
A light, misting rain began falling as they left Champlor, which was a small, fortified city on the border of Lys and Sarsemar. The rain became more determined in the last ten miles, and the horses’ hooves splashed through puddles on the road.
Dewar, who by his sorcery needed no light to know the road, carried none; a soldier riding beside Ottaviano bore a torch. By its light, Dewar glanced from time to time at the other, picking up a new detail of his bearing or face each time. He was perhaps a hand’s-breadth shorter than Dewar, neither bulky nor slender, and quick in his movements—mirroring quickness in his thoughts. Dewar considered that Ottaviano had acted rashly toward him, but admitted to himself that, were he indeed a spy of Ocher (which seemed to be what Ottaviano thought he was), Ottaviano’s handling of him was shrewd enough. By picking him up, Ottaviano exerted a certain control over his movements.
Dewar’s curiosity was engaged by the situation into which he had ridden. His knowledge of Landuc’s local politics was spotty. Who was Ocher? Why was the Countess of Lys fleeing him, with Ottaviano’s assistance? What would they do in Champlys, and would it be worthwhile to stay and watch this play itself out? And he thought also that he would enjoy talking more with Luneté, or flirting with her to amuse them both. His travelling was without timetable; he could linger a few days or a month and cement an acquaintance that could prove useful later. Surly Ottaviano might object, but Dewar had the clear impression that his influence over the lady was something less than iron-banded. He glanced at Otto again; their eyes met, for Otto was studying him with the same surreptitious intensity.
“I thought sorcerers hate the rain,” Otto said, feeling caught out.
Dewar raised his eyebrows. “Your Majesty, show me a man who will indifferently stand out in the wet and be soaked to the skin, and I will show you a man who is at least half an animal. Probably a sheep.”
Ottaviano blinked, then smiled, then laughed softly. “Touché.”
Dewar smiled and looked away, suddenly liking Otto for all his bluster. He caught sight of a milestone at the roadside in the dull torchlight. “Five to Champlys,” he observed. “Or fifteen.”
“Five. I know where we are.”
Dewar nodded and sighed to himself, settling in for the last handful of mud-weighted miles.
Luneté left her place in the middle of the troop of men and rode forward to join Ottaviano as the walled city of Champlys became vaguely apparent before them in the rain and darkness. She nudged her horse between Otto’s and the sorcerer’s and smiled at them both, unseen in the smoky light, but the smile colored her voice.
“Welcome to Lys,” she said.
“But I thought we had been in Lys for some miles,” Dewar countered.
“Champlor has been part of Lys for not more than a hundred and fifty years,” Otto explained. “It was somebody-or-other’s dowry.”
“Ah,” said Dewar, “from Sarsemar …”
“It came from the penultimate Baron of Yln, actually,” Luneté put in. “He had five daughters, none of them inclined to religion. Champlor went with the youngest, who was a spendthrift and a burden to her family. Unhappily she died just ten years later of the wasting disease, which annoyed the Baron greatly—but it was too late to get the city back, because it had passed to her husband, my father, by the terms of the marriage contract.”
“Which is why Yln today is so much smaller than it used to be,” Otto said. “There’s a moral there.”
“Don’t dower your daughters with real estate,” said Dewar. “But he is hardly the first to learn that the hard way.”
“Hmph,” said Luneté.
In spite of himself, Otto chuckled.
Behind them, Clay yelled an order to shape up; they were half a mile from the city gate now. Luneté glanced back at the sodden line of men and shook her head slightly—they looked as if Ocher had beaten them soundly and harried them home. But at least, she thought, nobody was killed. Otto managed it all very neatly, and the sorcerer Dewar’s fortuitous intervention came in time to prevent the one potentially lethal confrontation they had. Ocher must be apoplectic with frustration. She smiled to herself and lifted her head in the rain, which had lightened to a drizzle, as they drew near the gate.
The standard-bearer blew three lamentable notes on his horn. “Open for the Countess of Lys!” bellowed Ottaviano at the watchtower.
“Who calls without?” cried back the watchman, querulous.
“Shsh,” Luneté said to Otto, and raised her own voice and her face to the tower, pushing back her hood to be clearly seen in the torchlight. “It is I, your Countess Luneté of Lys with my escort come from Sarsemar, and if you do not know me, you are a fool,” she called.
“Aye, m’lady,” called back the watchman, and some wet minutes later the gates swung outward, admitted them, and closed behind them.
Dewar began edging away from the party as Luneté leaned down and spoke with a man who stood with a torch inside, under an archway. Luneté, however, had kept her eye on him, suspecting that Ottaviano meant to tell him to begone, and called, “Wait, Dewar.”
Otto sighed and wryed his mouth in his hood.
“At your ladyship’s command,” Dewar replied.
“Your company has been a welcome diversion on the road. Accept my hospitality, I beg you, and permit me to offer what comfort may be found in my house to you for your courtesy.”
Dewar smiled and inclined his head. “Your Grace could not have bethought herself of a more welcome nor a more generous offer,” he said.
Luneté smiled at him and returned to her conversation with the man, which concluded half a minute later. She nodded to Otto and nudged her horse forward; Dewar came up on her left again, Ottaviano to her right, and Otto’s men followed as
they clopped and splashed through the dark town, past another arch, through a wide market-square, up a modest hill to a modest castle, where they were received.
8
TWO MEN SIT IN A TAVERN where the lighting is bad and the clientele worse. They are in the back, at a table barely big enough for their forearms and steins, but of a perfect size to lean head-to-head and dice, as they are doing.
The room’s low ceiling is simply the floorboards of the second storey, supported on timbers as thick as a big man’s thigh. It is stained from above and below in a free-form mosaic of blood, urine, beer, wine, water, and smoke-circles. There are names, initials, and occult signs carved into the crossbeams, so many that the beams are nowhere square. The corbels and braces at each wall-end of each beam were decorated early in the inn’s history and have been acquiring a patina of adornment since; some have become buxom figurehead-like women (some with additional heads where their breasts should be); others are fantastically Priapic expressions of wishful thinking (around these are carved many exhortations and insults); and fully half are deformed gargoyles and sheela-na-gigs. The broad-brimmed plumed hat of one of the two gamblers hangs from a set of male genitalia at half-mast over his head, getting smoked by a greasy lamp below. The walls are sparsely adorned by such lamps, whose chimneys are dirty and wicks ill-tended; they have black-striped and greyed the graffiti-laced walls with their soot over the years, and the few tiny high-placed window-panes are nearly opaque from their accumulation of grease-cemented smuts.
But little light is desired by the patrons for their pursuits. The drinkers, both sullen and boisterous, prefer the dimness and fug to bright clean air; the prostitutes working the crowd, or being worked in the corners and booths, consider the bad light an ally; the host saves pennies on oil; and many gamblers’ stratagems are covered by the shadows. The gambling between the two men at the small table in the rear, however, is as clean as a pair of loaded dice on one side and a touch of sorcery on the other could make it.
Unlike the other gamblers, those two make little noise; the movements of their hands and coins is nearly automatic, with only perfunctory emotion expressed at a win or loss. Both are well-armed and both wear heavy leather jackets with no device; they both have well-broken-in boots and bulky, weatherproof, weather-marked cloaks in nondescript tweeds. One wears his sword across his back and the other at his side; the former, very dark but with bright cold grey eyes, is bearded and the latter, brown-haired and blue-eyed, approximately clean-shaven.
“This offer of yours is a little strange,” said the brown-haired man, resuming the conversation after a meditative lull.
“So may’t seem,” his companion murmured, “yet my client, though peculiar, is able to afford such whims.” He dropped the dice back into the wooden cup they were using as a shaker.
“I’d like to know what your client gets out of me and my men heading in and raising hell. I’m suspicious of a deal this sweet.”
“Captain Golias, I shall emphasize: nothing granted for nothing done. ’Tis required to do real damage, to face true opposition.”
“I’m being used as a cat’s-paw, then, and I don’t like it.”
“There’s no need to engage; indeed ’twere counter to the purpose. Ride and harry.”
“Decoying. Decoying. They’ll be after me pretty damn quick.”
“An it please you, take Vilamar for the winter,” said the man, shrugging. “Catch them by surprise, and you’re well-set for a long siege.”
Golias studied him: aquiline nose, elegant short beard, tanned face, callused hands clearly accustomed to lifting more than dice; yet his speech was of the Court, the old Court of Panurgus’s days, and his arrogance fit his speech. The captain was perturbed by his inability to place the man’s face in memory, and a prickling consciousness that the other was not what he seemed made Golias cautious.
“This sounds like a load of shit to me, and I’m not touching it without hearing the full story first,” said the captain. “From the man who’s hiring.” He was beginning to guess who the employer might be: there were few nobles alive with a long purse and a long grudge who could locate the captain in his chosen refuge.
“You may hear it from me, but if you refuse the commission afterward …” The dark man’s voice dropped ominously.
“Oh?” said the captain softly.
“Aye,” said the other.
They stared at one another.
“So why have someone attack Preszhëanea? Grudge?” tried the captain.
“Of a sort.”
“Against someone specific?”
The dark man’s eyes were low-lidded, and they watched the captain’s hands. He lowered his head slightly.
“Some Court feud,” speculated the captain.
“Your charge is to damage the towns and roads as greatly as possible and then to withdraw to some local fortress and stay there,” said the dark man.
“To trash the place and leave,” said the captain in an undertone.
The other smiled slightly. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Preszhëanea specifically? Vilamar in particular?”
“Ere you’ll know more, we’ll discuss the contract.”
The captain nodded. “You know my usual terms. Nothing usual in this job. Four times my usual rate for it, considering the disadvantages.”
“I’m prepared to offer double your usual terms. The sole unusual clause would be that you’ll continue your … efforts until you receive word to stop. There is no other object.”
“And surrender? Three times my usual, then.”
“Done,” said the other, his voice ringing through Golias for a moment. “Nay, to withdraw to safety and there wait. ’Tis understood that you may not be in position to do so at once, but must do so as soon as ’tis feasible.”
“For example, hole up in Vilamar or one of the other little cities.”
“An it please you.”
“Triple pay for this picnic. My, my. This is an expensive feud.”
The dark man’s left eyebrow flicked up and down. “Indeed.”
“You’re saying, you want me and my men to head into northeastern Landuc and do as much damage there as we can until we receive orders from your boss to stop?”
“In summary, that’s correct.”
“Pillage, burn crops, violate shrines—”
“As it please you. Those are the usual activities of an attacking army.”
“I could do a lot better with a goal.”
“There may be further word of ends, later. You are the means.”
“And the pay schedule? With no clear destination …”
“This quarter in advance. Thereafter, you’ll be paid for the coming quarter on the first.”
“My, my. Fringe benefits?”
The dark man smiled. “They’re what you make of ’em.”
Captain Golias chuckled. “And transportation? Just how are we supposed to get back to Landuc from here, my friend?” he asked, his smile disappearing, leaning forward. “It’s a long, hard Road.”
“I believe you can arrange that yourself, as you arranged your transport here,” said the dark man quietly.
The captain’s eyes narrowed. He considered taking exception, and reconsidered. Triple pay. There was no point losing the contract, and he could indeed arrange his own transportation from the Eddy-world to Landuc.
“Your men will follow you?”
“Oh, yeah. The hard part will be convincing them the job’s for real.” The captain tipped the dice, which had sat idle several minutes, over and over on the table with his fingertip. “Your boss wouldn’t mind,” he asked, “if I used the opportunity to get a little personal business out of the way, I take it?”
“So long as it interfered nowise with his own works and purposes.”
His. Bullshit, thought the captain. With a closed, pleased expression, the captain nodded a few times and then smiled gradually. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”
9
&
nbsp; DEWAR STOOD ON THE BALCONY OUTSIDE his bedchamber in the castle of Champlys, looking down. He was a small distance back from the lichened balustrade, so that he was not obviously looking at the couple on another balcony one floor below him; he hadn’t intended to do so when he came out for a breath of air before leaving the provincially comfortable chamber where he had spent the night. But the sunlight glinting off Ottaviano’s reddish-blond hair and the sparkling sound of Luneté’s laughter had drawn his notice, and he wanted to study them in this unguarded moment.
Ottaviano wore a purple cloak today, gold-bordered. His back was to Dewar; he leaned over the Countess of Lys, who was seated with her breakfast before her on a low table. The Countess wore turquoise and red. Dewar could see no servants with her. She was laughing at something he had said, shaking her head, now shaking her finger too. Together, they made a colorful splash on the sober old grey stone balcony.
Before she looked up and saw him, Dewar stepped back inside. The Countess’s laughter bubbled to a halt, and the songs of the birds in the courtyard below were audible again. Dewar folded his arms and looked up at the blue, blue sky revealed by the passing of the night’s rain, considering what he would do now: go on his sorcerer’s business alone, or pause here in this pleasant place, Lys, and dance at a wedding.
The Countess, Luneté, left the balcony after her breakfast. Though the day was pleasant, the weather was still cool for lingering outdoors once the sun had moved away from that side of the building, and at any rate she had business to attend to. Ottaviano, with her authorization, was working with Lys’s Marshal to organize an army to oppose Ocher, who had paused to collect a larger force. She had sent the announcement of her betrothal out with the city’s criers that morning, and to do so had given Luneté a delicious thrill. There was no turning back now. Once everyone knew, there was no way to change it.
Thinking of that thrill, smiling to herself, she walked to the Fiscor’s office with Laudine, her maid, and went in.
The first clerk who sat at a high stool in the Fiscor’s office was also the one who answered the door, ran errands, and announced visitors to the Fiscor when he was in his office. Now he wrote busily in a ledger while the Countess’s dark little maid awaited her lady’s pleasure on a bench by the door, turning her fan around and around in her fingers and looking at the three clerks, one after the other, from beneath her lashes. From time to time, the first clerk, who was closest to her, would feel her gaze on him and just twice he lifted his own eyes to meet hers for a fleeting instant. She smiled, each time. He blotted his book, each time.
A Sorcerer and a Gentleman Page 9
