Gaston reached his tent and sat down at a veteran wooden desk, giving his whole attention to the idea germinating in his thoughts.
Prospero was interested in Dewar, kindly so. Else he’d have challenged him. Prospero had duelled Esclados, a swift challenge that had ended swiftly with Esclados wracked and nearly dead and fleeing to his hideaway, where he’d lurked humiliated and silent ever since. Esclados had breached contract in the flight; he wasn’t dead, but he might as well be, and only cowardice had spared him. Dewar would stand to his own destruction in such a duel. Prospero had not challenged him, had wined and dined his young opponent with a courtesy mostly missing from the world nowadays, had questioned him and gotten answers. About Dewar’s mother. And had then released Dewar.
Gaston turned a dagger in his hands, staring at the light on its blade without seeing its flash and dance.
His heart’s-feeling was that Dewar was not treacherous. He was brash, adventurous, young and admittedly inexperienced, but he had been holding his own defensively against Prospero. And no more could they ask of him than what he might choose to do, without contract.
Prospero had countered Dewar’s spells, had sparred with him during skirmishing, but Gaston knew the protocol of sorcerous war was as any other: the older man had been testing and studying his adversary, waiting until the right moment to take him on full-blooded and life-staked. Dewar had said so himself when questions had been put to him in a staff meeting. Golias had asked Dewar if he would meet the challenge when it came and Dewar had pointed out that he was not under contract and had received no support from the Emperor. It was his answer to many questions. Gaston took it to mean that Dewar didn’t know what he’d do; in the heated excitement of battle, he might well lock himself up with Prospero and fight to the end of either or both. Such premeditated unreliability galled Golias and Herne, unexpected common ground between them for muttering and dark glowering, but Gaston could not fault Dewar for it.
Such a battle would put Dewar beyond usefulness during the earthy, earthly fighting around it, but would also preoccupy Prospero, who was his own marshal-general.
Gaston twirled the dagger, its point on a block of blotting-paper, his eyes half-closed.
Now suppose, Gaston thought, suppose Prospero would not engage Dewar at all. It would be expensive, but if Dewar challenged Prospero, he must answer. But if Dewar would not challenge him, and Prospero would not challenge Dewar, then things would continue as they had, neither sorcerer at great risk.
But there would still be some risk. Gaston had seen Dewar after a hard bout, his third skirmish with the Prince of Air. Missing him after the battle, they’d sought and found him ash-white, trembling, blood running from his nose, so sick-exhausted he could not speak or eat, and Otto had put his cloak around him and sent for wine-laced soup, which he poured from a coffee-pot down Dewar’s throat until Dewar was able to stand and stagger from the hillside. Dewar had kept Prospero from striking directly at the Emperor’s forces—actually Prospero aimed most at Herne’s troops and at Herne, under whose command Gaston had put Otto and his Ascolet and Lys men—but it had cost him; even a restrained duel could injure a sorcerer. Dewar had kept to himself for two days, and Otto had become the butt of soldiers’ jests by his concern, sitting watching by his bed for the first half-day. Certainly there was danger to Dewar.
Prospero knew that.
He had brought Dewar to him to challenge him to a fight Prospero would certainly win and had changed his mind.
Gaston stopped twirling the dagger and forced the budding idea into full-flowered thought.
How much did Prospero want victory?
Did he want it enough to kill this Dewar, who reminded Gaston every day of Prospero before he had wrapped himself wholly in sorcery and power, before the dead King had exiled him?
Suppose Prospero, for some reason, renounced sorcery for the battle, or at least the great workings that had moved him this far so swiftly. Suppose Prospero held his spells back and relied on his steel.
Gaston would win, he was certain of it. It was the combination of sorcery and mortal warfare that had worked for Prospero thus far.
Gaston pushed the dagger slowly through the blotting-paper until it penetrated two fingers’-breadth into the wood.
He considered how well Prospero might know Dewar’s mother.
17
BENEATH A SHIFTING BED OF CLOUDS which toss to veil and show the stars and thin-pared moon, the peaked roofs of Valgalant are a miniature mountain-range. No window’s light betrays inhabitation in the dark bulk of the house; no soul stirs above the stables, where a messenger stands beside a saddled horse, tucking into a saddlebag a bundle which the cloaked man who holds the horse has just handed over. The messenger’s hair shines fair in the moonlight, uncapped in the cold air, the face beneath the bowl-cut fringe set and intense. No badge or emblem decorates the messenger’s leather jacket; the high riding-boots and tight-woven trousers betray nothing in their color or cut.
“Father, the ring,” the youth whispers, turning from the horse.
The man holding the horse’s reins bows his head. Slowly, from beneath his moon-darkened cloak, he reaches a gloved hand, and as he pulls the glove off slowly so does the messenger remove a glove as well, so that they both stand a moment with one hand bare in the bitterness of winter midnight. Slowly the cloaked man draws from one finger a heavy silver ring with a smooth oval dark-blue stone. The ring flashes in the moonlight as he hands it to the messenger.
The messenger’s fist closes on the ring; it tingles with the silver of the moon, the cold of the wind, the bite of snow.
“Put it on,” whispers the old man, and the messenger does, and pulls the glove on over it all in a sudden hurry, and seizes the old man’s hand and kisses his cheek, and mounts the horse with wordless haste. It is done before the old man can speak; he is looking up at the pale intense face before his hand has dropped.
“Farewell,” one of them whispers.
“Keep well,” one replies.
“I must go!” half-cries the messenger, and the horse’s heavy body is fired to move at his command, and the horse’s hooves strike sparks from the cold dry cobbles on the path out of the stable-yard.
The old man stares at the homely stained face of the moon. The moon sees all; the moon still sees the mounted messenger with his weightless burden of heavy news going more slowly and cautiously along the dark-rutted road; the moon sees the whole of the journey, every road and river, before the messenger, and all the traps and snares that lie between this dark house and the journey’s end. If someone were looking through the moon, as in a mirror, sweeping his gaze across the world as the moon’s path swept it, would he not see the messenger too? Would he know the messenger to be bound for him?
“Oh, Miranda,” whispers the old man to the moon, “may the Well send thee home again to me.”
The moon turns its face toward a veil of cloud and disappears. The old man walks slowly, groping with his feet, back to the house alone.
18
IN THE NIGHT FOLLOWING HIS DISTURBING interview with Gaston’s young sorcerer, Prospero left under cover of a storm which Ariel raised. The storm had the additional benefit of battering the Landuc camp—Prospero’s own forces were spared all effects—and Ariel paid particular attention to the supply tents, making sure they were flattened and thoroughly soaked.
Prospero left the war in the hands of his captains, reluctant, but fearing to postpone his errand. His black horse Hurricane carried him at a constant gallop away down the Road; between Landuc and his destination Prospero halted only three times to rest and recover, drawing on the Well to sustain himself. Hurricane was half-made of Well-force himself now, having been fed on it so long, and never tired.
The long journey through the desolate marshes took another day. Hurricane balked at the Limen, whose thickness and color and brightness fluctuated in unrelated, irregular cycles.
“Softly, softly,” Prospero murmured, stroking the horse
’s neck. “ ’Tis painful to thee, we’ve been here ere this, but fear it not, we’ll pass it and go on. There’s naught to fear of it, good fellow, good Hurricane …” and so on, until Hurricane lifted a hoof, placed it fastidiously in the marsh, and walked, shivering, into a rosy haze that turned a bilious yellow-green as soon as they touched it. Pheyarcet and the Well were left behind with that touch.
The passage was brief and not overly difficult; Prospero was relieved. He had known it to seem days long, when forces from the Well on the Pheyarcet side and the Stone in Phesaotois had escaped to lap at the edges of their domains. Once across, Prospero praised Hurricane and stopped to give the horse water and a nosebag of oats.
As Hurricane ground up his oats, his master stood on a low dune-rise with his eyes closed, turning through a half-circle, seeking and sensitizing himself to the Stone that stood on faraway Morven. The thin trailing lines of its untapped power were few here; he observed their strengths and their locations relative to his and then sat down with a Map of Phesaotois and other tools to place himself in the universe he had now entered.
That took but an hour, and then he packed, mounted Hurricane, and nudged him to trot away into the monotonous dunes, following a meager Ley of the Stone. Hurricane went mortally slowly at first, until Prospero began drawing the Stone’s power through the horse, and then he tossed his head and picked up his feet and cantered with something of his usual vigor.
Four rests were necessary before Prospero reached his goal, and he rested again just before crossing what he judged was a threshold of awareness of sorts—another’s, not his own. He repaired his travel-stained condition in a dark stone inn whose patrons were taller than he with sinewy, dark limbs and mottled long-nosed faces. Hurricane bore him onward after a few hours’ sleep. Prospero carried now a blue tortoise in a sack behind him, and he stopped at a certain wide, flat place on a road that wound up and down through eroded sandstone hills to array its carapace and certain of its internal organs in the pattern prescribed by his Phesaotois Ephemeris.
Hurricane bore him on again, but now the hills to either side, ahead, and behind were indistinct to Prospero; he had joined the Road and stayed a few hours on it before leaving at a pair of giant white stone half-man half-lions who reared up on their hind legs, facing one another, to form an arch. Prospero rode under the arch to a Ley, which brought him after a few more hours of hard riding to a brook. On this side, where he sat a moment letting Hurricane drink, there was nothing of great interest; the landscape was gently rolling, overgrown with trees and bushes, fallen into neglect. Collections of disorganized stones marked quondam dwellings here and there in the forest.
On the other side of the brook were green, neatly-kept fields and velvety lawns separated by low walls or hedges, adorned with prettily-distributed copses. Animals could be seen grazing in the fields or among the trees, and over all lay the warm light of late afternoon.
After fording the brook, Hurricane lifted his head and laid his ears back.
“Easy, my friend,” Prospero whispered to him, and laid his palm on the horse’s head. He drew on the Stone and the horse tossed his head again, snorting, as the Stone surged through him. Prospero nudged Hurricane, and Hurricane went forward at a walk.
Meanwhile, the beasts grazing had taken notice of the intruders, one head after another lifting from the blossom-spattered sward as the alarm spread. Cattle, swine, horses, goats, and sheep came charging from all directions and pressed around Hurricane and his rider, pushing them toward the brook again.
“Back!” Prospero cried. “I have an errand here. I am duly grateful for your efforts to deter me, but I cannot gladden you by departing.”
The beasts milled about. Eyes rolled; nostrils flared. Among the bluish trees of the nearest copse slunk a low, grey shape: perhaps a dog or wolf.
“I pray ye permit me free passage; I would not harm ye, but I must go on,” Prospero addressed the animals around him again.
Reluctantly they fell back and gradually dispersed again among the fields and trees.
Hurricane tossed his head again haughtily and cantered toward a narrow track which Prospero saw some distance away over the fields. Attaining it, they followed it for several miles through the lush and pleasant hills, all dotted with animals who lifted their heads to watch Prospero’s passing mournfully or phlegmatically, and at last crested a long rise to see, on a high, symmetrical hill before them, a great black pillar-porched temple.
White and black birds decorated the temple’s steps with hyperbolic curves of long-feathered tails. Prospero dismounted, took off Hurricane’s bridle that he might graze, and stood for a moment murmuring a warding spell over the horse. Then he slung one of the saddlebags across his chest beneath his cloak. The cloak concealed the bag, but did not conceal the black hilt of a sword at Prospero’s left side.
He climbed the steps slowly, deliberately. Though the sun had lain on it all day, the stone was without warmth. The birds scattered unhurriedly before him, and a few went inside the shadowed porch.
Prospero followed them. The shade was cold and very dark.
Before him was a door as tall as the temple itself, a double door with tarnished, unworn cross-shaped brass handles at chest height in the center of each half. The doors were carved in bas-relief, but exactly what was carved on them was not visible in the darkness of the porch.
Turning the left-hand handle and pushing gently on the door, Prospero entered.
The door swung lightly away from him, and lightly swung closed at his heels with a dull echoing bang.
The interior of the temple was thick with black columns as the exterior had been thick with darkness. However, it was possible to see, because the roof extended only halfway over on all sides, leaving unroofed in the middle a wide, square black dais raised eight low, shallow steps above the floor. The sun was past the central opening in the temple’s roof, but that central open square was bright; the darkness among the interior columns was less oppressive than that around those outside.
On the dais were four tall black torchères, a transparent flame shimmering in the pan of each one, and in the center of the dais was a seated woman. She wore black, a soft, velvety black, veils and layers of it draped around her, clouding the shape of her body, a stark setting for the paleness of her long throat and face and arms and hands.
Three of the white birds clustered around her feet, their tails trailing gracefully down the stairs.
Prospero’s mouth twitched a little. He walked without haste to the dais and stopped at the bottom step.
“Odile.”
“I knew you must return sooner,” said she, “or later,” and smiled.
Prospero set one foot on the step and leaned forward, hand on his knee. “Which am I, then? Soon or late?”
Odile shrugged. Her eyes were half-closed, her expression distant, amused.
Prospero shrugged also. “I am here now. I will give, gratis, three guesses as to what the reason be.”
“I would not demean myself by doing so,” Odile said. “What is your errand, sorcerer?”
“I come to assay the risk of a certain business before me,” Prospero said. “A green journeyman hath challenged me. I have reason to believe you’d raise arms to avenge the challenger when I drub him and kill him. My Art so far exceedeth his that I’ve all confidence that I’ll do so; he’s a gadfly, a most peremptory nuisance, who hath hired himself out in a war.”
Odile said nothing. Her eyes never moved; her face changed not a muscle.
“The challenger’s name is Dewar, and he claimeth descent in the most immediate degree from you, madame.”
“Interesting,” she said.
“I’ve no desire to be at odds with you,” Prospero went on. “If indeed he be your blood, I’d not kill him but confine him, a salutary lesson but not fatal.”
“He is my son,” Odile said. “Confine him; and if you would have my goodwill, hither return him, that I may undertake to remedy certain lacunae in his educatio
n which resulted from his premature, willful termination of his apprenticeship.”
“He seemeth a rash boy,” said Prospero.
“He is headstrong and treacherous. I rue his introduction to the Art, for his temperament is ill-suited to it.”
“ ’Tis a regrettable, but a natural, error of affection,” Prospero said.
A brief silence passed, during which Prospero studied Odile, smiling slightly, and Odile studied Prospero without moving in the smallest degree.
“So you are at war,” she said.
“Still.”
“This is a long war you are about. Or is it a different one?”
“A battle in the same, though mine own goal hath altered.”
“I am surprised to hear that. Unswerving devotion to purpose hath ever been a pillar of your character.”
“You flatter me, madame,” Prospero said, and bowed from the waist, not deeply but elegantly.
“You flatter me yourself, for I know you are not so easily flattered.”
Prospero laughed quietly. “Alas, Countess, the courtier’s arts are wasted here; sorcery discards them as a child’s paper dolls, vain trash. But, madame, I have a further doubt regarding my challenge now, one which you may allay.”
“What is that?”
“What will his father say to my prisoning the upstart? I am sure you understand me when I say I’ve no intention of avoiding one offense and committing another unwittingly.”
“Bring him here, and I shall deal with the … ancillary issues,” Odile said.
“Ah,” said Prospero. “Then there shall be difficulties.”
“I think not.”
“I prefer certainty to best approximation, madame. Let us inform his father of his son’s activities.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Plainly, no.”
“You have heard me correctly.”
A Sorcerer and a Gentleman Page 22
