All These Shiny Worlds

by Jefferson Smith

  By this time, the three of them were standing in the shade of a dapple tree, looking out over the riotous color of the fields. Her fields. The old woman sighed.

  “A travel name,” she said. “Since the beginning, it has been my custom to observe each gold-bitten pilgrim unawares, though that is not possible if I am known. So when I sense the flare of a new mark being made, I make haste toward it, and seek to meet the pilgrim on the road, to be encountered just as you did. An old woman in some minor distress.” Even the coarse speech of Gramma Wax was gone, replaced now by the measured cadence and tone of a woman long used to power.

  “So it was a test then.”

  She shrugged. “A necessary one.”

  Karsten was still not sure what to make of the new situation, so he lapsed once again into the silence of his thoughts. Meanwhile the Dowager Empress walked him around the grounds. They took in the hives, the orchards, the brewhouse, the carpentary, even the stables. It was a complex and bustling operation, all centered around the production and distribution of the Dowager’s famous libations. And everywhere they went, the faces of the workers bore her distinctive bird-in-flight mark upon their upper lip. For the most part, green birds, but one or two showed gold.

  “Why necessary?” he asked, picking up the thread of her earlier comment. The tour had concluded and they were seated on a row of low crates behind the coldhouse, where Babette had found an unpillaged stinkberry shrub and was busy nipping its tasty prizes out from between the dagger-like thorns.

  “What do you think the Largesse is for?” the Dowager asked.

  There had been a time not too long past when Karsten would have felt he’d known the answer to that question. An old woman, deprived of the power she’d once enjoyed, had found a way to build an army of servants around her, once again ruling the lives of commoners. Maybe even having a bit of sport at their expense. But now he wasn’t so sure. “Meerah” might not have been a real person, but she’d seemed a fairly earnest one, and his memory of that woman did not match the power-addicted old crone he’d always imagined.

  “Servants?” he guessed.

  The Dowager shook her head. “Independence, to begin with. My son was most generous when I first retired to this place, permitting me a large and capable household.”

  “But they were his servants,” he said, and she nodded.

  “Right, but there’s more to it than just that.” Across from where they sat, a field of blue-green shrubs that Karsten didn’t recognize stretched into the distance. Among them, several heads could be seen bobbing up and down where green-bitten laborers worked their way along the rows. The Dowager waved a hand toward them.

  “What sort of people take up my offer?”

  That was easy. He didn’t know any of the people here at the villa, but he’d seen plenty take the Dowager’s wager over the years. “The desperate and the foolhardy,” he said. “Present company included.”

  The Dowager smiled. “Perhaps it would be more generous to say that my gamble appeals most to those who have the least,” she said. “Only, when they leave here, they do so after having spent a year learning new skills, new techniques, maybe even a new trade. They’ve been clothed and fed, tended if they’re sick, they’ve met new people and been exposed to new ideas. Most return to their homes as very different people from the ones who left. Wiser, I hope. Healthier. Certainly more capable.”

  “Perhaps,” Karsten conceded. “But that’s only the greens. Some never go home.” He meant the golds, of course. Like himself.

  The old woman frowned. “True enough, but who is it who risks the gold?”

  Karsten shrugged. “Adventurers, gamblers, and boasters, so far as I’ve ever heard.”

  “Just so. Most often it’s the ones least inclined to work for their keep or contribute to their fellows. The leeches and wastrels. The cheats and charlatans.” Then she cast a narrower eye over Karsten, taking him in from toes to eyebrows. “But sometimes,” she said, “it’s the brave.”

  Karsten barked a hoarse laugh. “Brave? Not me,” he said. “I took a gamble and lost, simple as dirt. No bravery about it.”

  “You did not do it for brave reasons perhaps, but there is bravery in you. Along with other qualities I have seen. Qualities that I have been seeking, hidden among the foolhardy, for a very long time.”

  “And what, you think you’ve found them in this ribbon-winning specimen?” Karsten thumped his chest to emphasize his point, but he was still coated in dust from the road, and it rose up in clouds around him, making him cough. It was a deep, painful sound. An old man’s cough. When it had passed, it took a moment for him to catch his breath, which left him feeling humiliated as well as old.

  The Dowager, however, seemed undeterred. “Disbelieve me if you will, but I have taken your measure these past days and I believe you to be the man that all of this”—she waved her hand at the entire villa around them—“was created to find.” Her eyes shone with the thrill of a long-awaited accomplishment.

  “Once found, I had always meant to charge that man with a particular task, and by that mark on your lip you are mine to command…” Then the thrill in her eyes softened. “But having known you a little, I find myself uncertain. I must know that you will honor the task once I give it. I need more than simple coerced obedience. I would like your word.”

  Karsten had never wanted to spit more intensely in his life than he did now. Truth was, she was beginning to sound like a tinkerman pitching ill-gotten wares under a shine of talk. A man who tells you how special you are usually believes the opposite, and that probably served doubly for empresses. Still, how do you cry false on the Emperor’s own mother? So Karsten kept his skepticism to himself. And his spit.

  “What task would that be, my Zah?”

  It was the first time he had referred to her by her proper form of address, and she frowned at the sudden change. “Actually, it is not so very much different from your chosen profession,” she said. “Let us say that I would have you ride circuit in my name.”

  Karsten looked at her evenly. “Never heard of it.”

  The Dowager nodded. “There is no reason you might have. Not by that name. It is a very old custom. From the earliest days of the Empire. A singular honor for the courageous and the just. In those days, a few such men were appointed to ride about the land, empowered by the Emperor to hear disputes in his stead and to settle them, to seek out perfidies and abuses and stop them, to mete out imperial justice to any and all who deserved it, wherever they be found. Any place. Any person.” She’d emphasized that last bit, but then her face grew somber. “Sadly, that tradition has fallen into ill repute in modern days, and for good reason.”

  “Yet now you think the Emperor would vest such power in me? On your word alone?”

  The Dowager shook her head. “No. He would not. Although you’ve seen for yourself how badly it goes for the common man. They have no recourse, no court, no champion. It is I who would have you change that.”

  “Just without the Emperor’s patent or power.”

  “Now that is an interesting point,” she said. “Even as a young woman newly married to the throne, I had some talent for magery, and with little else to do between imperial beddings, I bent my curiosity to its study in my husband’s private library. There I learned much that has stood me well in the years that followed, but there was one particular record that told of the founding magics of the Empire itself, from which even the Emperor’s own powers flow, and in that record I discovered a most curious wrinkle.”

  The former Empress paused and looked up at Karsten, fixing him with her gaze as though peering into his secret self. After a long moment, she nodded to herself.

  “You see, the mageries needed to consecrate a… ‘circuit rider,’ are granted only to one who sits the throne.” Then her eyes began to sparkle and she leaned in close to whisper.

  “It seems, however, that they are not rescinded when one steps down from it.”

  She might have said more
, but at that point, the young woman who had greeted them when they’d first arrived came scampering around the corner.

  “There you are, my Zah! Come quickly! There are visitors approaching up the avenue.”

  The Dowager frowned in irritation. “Not now, Seelia! This is impor—”

  To his surprise, the younger woman actually interrupted her.

  “I know that, my Zah, but the visitor… It’s an Advocate!”

  The Dowager’s face ran cold. “What? Now? How could he possibly know?” She sat there for a moment, her gaze darting about as a hundred thoughts seemed to race through her mind. After a moment, she drew a deep breath, settling herself, and then she climbed to her feet.

  “No,” she said. “I will not be denied. Not after waiting for so long.” She turned her defiant gaze on Karsten. “Choose now. Will you take this task if I give it? Once the bolt is loosed, my son and his mages will move quickly to smooth out the wrinkle that permits it. There will be no second chances.”

  “I hardly…” Karsten began, but the Dowager shook her head.

  “Tell me yes or tell me no. Right now.” Her voice was steel. The Empress herself. Ayini Zah, accustomed to unquestioning obedience. But there was something else. In her eyes. There he saw the Meerah he knew.

  And she was afraid.

  Karsten nodded. “Then I will serve,” he said. What choice did he have?

  ***

  “The candidate may approach.”

  After the Dowager’s sudden departure the previous day, things had taken an unexpected turn. No sooner had she stormed off on the arm of her house-woman than a burly yard foreman had arrived in their wake to take Karsten under charge, putting him to work in what had seemed to be a series of pointless chores. Nothing more had been said about riding circuit or indeed about any official duties, so Karsten had simply held his tongue and done as he was told.

  He did so again now and took a cautious step forward into the great hall, his eyes sweeping the scene around him. The Dowager was at the center of the room, lounging on a low divan, although this was an older, more severe-looking version of the woman Karsten knew. At the end of her bench, a fiercely orange-red cockatrice screeched once and then began to pick at a gobbet of meat gripped firmly between its talons. This was certain to be Vagesh, the Dowager’s famed familiar and the model for her bird-in-flight crest. Of all the magical creatures that a mage could bind with to gain access to the mageries, the cockatrice was said to be the most powerful. Yet in all the Empire, Vagesh was the only one of his kind ever to have allowed himself to be bound.

  If there was a focal point of the scenario however, it was neither the Dowager nor her familiar. Instead, it was the tall figure standing before them, dressed in robes of silk. He had been gesturing to punctuate some flowery pronouncement or other when Karsten had been marched in, but at the Dowager’s interruption, the man’s arms had folded curiously over his chest as he’d turned to see who it was she had summoned. Now his dark eyes locked onto the bounty hunter, like those of a raptor onto a hare, and a sinuous head covered in bright blue scales peered out from behind him with exactly the same expression. A wyvern, which signified that the man was powerful in the blood as well. The newly arrived Advocate, perhaps?

  “I’d heard rumors that a pilgrim of gold had been seen upon the High Way,” the man said with a sniff. “He doesn’t look like much.” The wyvern punctuated his declaration with a hiss of its own.

  “You think not?” the Dowager replied casually from her divan. “I thought I might make a gift of him to Marghul. He’s always going on about the constant drain of deserters in his army. Would an experienced bounty hunter not be of some use there?”

  Karsten blinked. That sounded a long way from circuit rider, but he held his tongue.

  “Bounty hunter?” the man brayed. “This one?” His face creased into a sneer of contempt as he peered more closely at Karsten. Then he turned back to the divan. “He looks a bit long in the lobes to be bringing trained soldiers to heel. Even runaways and cowards.”

  The Dowager smirked. “Is it really so hard to imagine, Xihara Baj? I’m more than twice your age and I brought you to heel.” Beside her, Vagesh puffed out his chest and ruffled his feathers in defiance.

  So, it was the Advocate. “Baj” was a title given only to those twelve powerful men appointed by the Emperor himself. And the crazy old woman was actually baiting one like he was some kind of carnival bear. If the man took offense though, he hid it well.

  “Come now, Ayini Zah. We both know that with your mageries, this is not an apt comparison.”

  “Ah, but it is,” she replied. “For I have sensed some small bloodtalent in the pilgrim as well.” The Advocate raised an eyebrow at that, but Karsten went one better.

  “That’s poxing ridiculous,” he muttered. Him? With mageblood?

  Unfortunately, the Advocate must have heard, because the man whirled in a sudden fury, reaching back toward the wyvern with one hand and forward toward Karsten with the other.

  “Silence!” he roared as a rope of brilliant light leapt from his outstretched hand. The end uncoiled in the air and wrapped itself tight around Karsten’s throat.

  Instinctively, the bounty hunter reached for the noose that now pulled tight around his neck, but his hands passed through it as though it weren’t even there. The smell of lightning and singed leather enveloped him. Karsten quickly sagged to his knees, feigning weakness as he reached around to the back of his belt. The foreman had confiscated the Sisters of course, but he hadn’t spotted the Cousins. Finding one of his steely teeth with a fingertip, Karsten plucked it from its slumber and drew back his arm, ready to let fly. Maybe he could cut the rope at its source.

  “Hold!” the Dowager said, calmly, as Vagesh pierced the great hall with his cry, underscoring the authority of her command. The air of the room crackled with barely restrained power and Karsten felt his arm lock rigidly in place.

  The Dowager turned to the Baj. “Release him, Xihara.”

  Feigning deference, the Advocate turned to face her, but Karsten couldn’t help noticing that the magerope was still in place. Worse, the scene was beginning to sparkle with flashes of light and dark bubbles around the edges of his vision.

  “But Ayini Zah,” the Advocate implored, “this filthy pilgrim has dared impugn the House of the Emperor! He must die! And judging by the mark on his brow, it is a job long in need of completion.”

  The Dowager laughed. “He does no harm by expressing his surprise, Xihara Baj. After all, I had not yet told even him of what I had sensed.”

  Still the Advocate held his arm stretched out, fingers wrapped tightly around his rope of light.

  The Dowager continued. “Imagine it, Xihara. See how resourceful he is. How determined. Even when facing those with power. Imagine what he will become when he is bonded to a creature of power. And how much more terrifying for that mark of the gallows he bears. Not just a Truant Hunter, nor even a Truant Hunter mage, but a Truant Hunter mage reclaimed from the gallows. An agent of Death himself! My gift to the Emperor. To be delivered to him by his most loyal Advocate of course.”

  At that, the Advocate’s expression shifted, and the wrinkles of his fury narrowed into cold calculation.

  “That would indeed be a gift of a different station,” he said thoughtfully.

  Karsten could actually feel the cold blackness seeping into him now, as well as see it, and he was glad he was already down on his knees. His hands kept clawing at the light around his throat, but he still could catch hold of nothing. Neither rope nor air.

  Then suddenly, the one was gone, and Karsten felt the other screaming its way back into him. He heaved his lungs wider than he had ever stretched them before and pitched forward onto all fours, sucking air like a newborn babe first pressed to mother’s milk.

  Ignoring him, the Advocate lowered his arms and turned back to the woman on the divan, stroking the head of the wyvern at his side. “How soon will he be ready to travel?”

/>   The Dowager gave a dry laugh. “So quickly you change your song, Xihara. No doubt the pilgrim would say he is ready to travel this very day, but we cannot send a mage to the palace unbound, can we? If he is to be my gift, he must bear a familiar of suitable breeding. Can you picture a mage at my son’s Court with a hedge-pixie on his shoulder? Or dragging some mange-inflicted brownie behind on a length of rope?”

  The Advocate’s face blanched at the very thought. “N-no. Of course not, my Zah.”

  “Good. Then it is agreed. The pilgrim will be taken to my menagerie where he will bind a familiar appropriate to my House—a creature of suitable magic and stature for Court. Once it is done, you will then go to the palace, as my ambassador, and present him as a gift to my son.”

  “It will be done this very hour, my Zah.”

  The Dowager frowned. “You would have him face the menagerie so soon, Xihara? After nearly killing him? Do you really value the Emperor’s property so poorly that you would let it die in the pens before the Emperor has even seen it?”

  “No, my Zah.”

  “Good. Then let’s give him till high sun to recover, shall we?”

  “As you say, Ayini Zah.” The Advocate bowed then, touching his brow to his fists in the formal manner. The wyvern, however, reared up behind him, as though to claim back any stature the Advocate might have lost by the gesture.

  The Dowager chose to ignore the haughty familiar and addressed herself to the man. “Now that we have concluded our business, Xihara Baj, allow me to show you my private cellars. We have produced a most delicious arak that I believe you will enjoy.”

  With that, she stood up from her divan and hung a hand in the air, which the Advocate took in his own, and the two of them went out of the room together, chatting like old friends, each of them followed by their creatures, both magical and human.

  Karsten felt a tugging at his elbow as the foreman tried to pull him to his feet, but he responded only sluggishly, still light headed and more than a little bewildered.