by Dave Duncan
Now they were in Niolland, the sun shone, the road stretched out level before them, winding between little lakes, fording streams. Niolvale had more water than any other vale, Piol said. Men wearing only turbans were harvesting rice from paddy fields. The villages were blobs of white walls and red tiled roofs against the green and silver landscape. It was very idyllic.
But not too helpful.
Eleal awoke from a wonderful daydream of ... of what? She wasn't sure. Her nights were full of dreams of D'ward, but a strangely changed D'ward—thick and chunky, instead of tall and lean, and wearing a floppy mustache. Lack of sleep seemed to be catching up with her, for the curiously wrong image had started haunting her days too.
A fragment of melody surfaced and then submerged again.... The name escaped her.
"Piol?"
"Mm?"
"Do you know a play called The Poisoned Kiss?"
The old man blinked at her. “No. Who wrote it?"
"I have no idea. Perhaps there isn't one. I just thought it sounded like a good title. Um ... Where does one start looking for a Liberator?"
"Don't know. There is only one road, so we may as well stay on it until it forks. Then we ask someone, I suppose."
"Who will let you near them?"
He chuckled toothlessly. “I can stand downwind."
True. She looked around. Niolwall was retreating behind them. To the east it disappeared completely and the bottom of the sky was flat. Niolvale was the largest of all the Vales, rich and prosperous—as was only to be expected of a vale whose patron god was the Parent. There was a village ahead, with a high-spired temple. It must be Joobiskby, and the road would certainly divide there.
After a few minutes, Piol began to cackle softly to himself. She demanded to know what was so funny.
"Remember the time we were playing The Fall of the House of Kra in Noshinby? Trong was playing Rathmuurd and he went to draw his sword—"
"No!” Eleal said firmly. “I do not remember that and I certainly do not know who had put the molasses in his scabbard. She must have been a real little horror, though!"
They laughed together. They had been doing this for days—reminiscing about the old times, the good times, the plays, the actors, the places, the crowds, the triumphs, the catastrophes.
After a moment, she said, “Do you remember Uthiam doing Ironfaib's Polemic? She won a rose.... That was the year I missed the festival, but I shall never forget her in rehearsal. Oh, she was marvelous!"
"That she was,” Piol agreed sadly. “Do you know it?"
"Most of it, I expect.” Every word!
"Let me hear it."
"Oh, you don't need to suffer through that,” Eleal said hastily. She had just remembered that the reason she had missed seeing Uthiam perform at that festival was because she had been away tending D'ward, which was probably why the lines had come to her mind.
"Look!” she said. Two ancient, harmless-seeming peasants were tottering along the road ahead of them, moving even more slowly than the sloth. “Why don't you go and ask them if they've heard any news of the Liberator?” When she thought Piol might argue, she added, “You can easily catch up with the cart again if you run hard."
This was taking too long! She felt an itchy-scratchy urgency to meet D'ward again.
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23
"'A jug of wine beneath the bough,'...” Julian intoned. “'A loaf of bread and thou/Beside me singing in the Wilderness/Oh, Wilderness were paradise enough!’ That last rhyme needs work! I mean, it looks all right—"
Ursula peered across the table skeptically. “You left out the book of verse."
"Would depend what's it's printed on. Might make good bumf."
She laughed. Ursula's laughter had all the innocent gaiety of a child's, quite out of keeping with her normally gruff manner. “You're impossible!"
"I'm extremely easy, as you well know!” He raised his glass and she clinked hers against it. They sipped in mirror image, smiling the contented smiles of lovers.
The sun had set; the red moon, Eltiana, hung amid the wakening stars. Location? The side of a small, unnamed, and apparently uninhabited valley somewhere south of Niolvale. The air was cooling rapidly, but the campsite lay well below the snow line, and the weather had cooperated splendidly. For several days—Julian was deliberately not keeping count—they had ridden their dragons over glaciers, icefields, ridges, plateaux. They had gone up and down vertical cliffs. It had all been thumping good fun. The days had been thumping good fun, and the nights even more so. Spiffing!
This was how to rough it. This was how fieldwork should always be. Just the two of them, face-to-face across the little table, sitting on their folding chairs, eating off china with tableware that was a very good imitation of sterling silver. The wine was chilled. The turkey-shaped thing that T'lin had run down had been expertly fricasseed by the indomitable Dommi. The campfire crackled and blazed cheerfully nearby, its smoke drifting upward in a breeze so gentle that the flames above the candlesticks hardly wavered. Doubtless there would be cheese and coffee in a few minutes, as soon as Dommi finished erecting the tent. T'lin was a few hundred yards off, still polishing his precious dragons.
Meanwhile, a man and the woman he loved, the stars, the jagged peaks, the trees ... Odd sort of trees, not quite conifers. They looked pinelike at a distance, but their needles were tiny stars and the fragrance they put out smelled more like incense than pine. No matter, they would do.
Wary of tearing their frills, dragons shunned forest, but T'lin had found a convenient avalanche path down from the icy highlands to a meadow beside the little river. Ursula had fretted that the woods might be inhabited by the nasty cat things called jugulars. Julian refused to worry about them, on the grounds that if you had to worry about a jugular, it was already too late.
She looked up and caught him studying her. Her chin was too square to be classically feminine, yet it suited her. She wore her hair shorter than he usually liked to see, but that, too, suited her, and it shone like jewels in the firelight. Her eyes were very large and all womanly mystery. She was more Venus de Milo than Mona Lisa, but beautiful in a way all her own. And she was a herd of tigers at lovemaking. Tigresses?
He thought of Euphemia and wondered for the thousandth time what he'd ever seen in the slut. It wasn't just that she fulked with Carrots—she just wasn't good for anything else. His Omar Khayyam joke would have floated clear over her pretty head, whereas Ursula knew a hawk from a handsaw and probably what act and scene they came from. She understood that John of Gaunt wasn't necessarily very thin....
"Happy?"
He jumped and glanced around. “Ecstatically. Night is my favorite time of day. I'm ready for my coffee now, though."
Dommi was still tightening the tent ropes. He wouldn't be long.
"Perhaps we should have coffee in the lounge?"
Julian frowned at the dark mass of the trees around them. “I think we forgot to pack the lounge. How about the palm court? Or the croquet lawn? I'm sure Dommi brought the hoops and mallets."
"It's the Service makes it possible, love,” Ursula said softly.
"Makes what possible?"
"All this. Dragon rides and servants. A touch of civilization in the bush—lady and gentleman on safari. Without the Service and its mana, you and I would be hacking our way through jungle and eating roots and sleeping under bushes."
Wanting to talk business, were we?
"If it wasn't for the Service,” he countered, “we wouldn't be here at all, my little turtledove. Would we?"
"But we mustn't let Edward Exeter mess it all up, must we?"
He sighed. The moment was too precious to spoil with reality. He did not want any pikes in his millpond tonight.
"Is that the nub? ‘I say, old man, you've got to put a sock in this Liberator prank, you're queering our pitch with the natives!’ Is that what we tell him?"
Ursula placed her glass down carefully on the spotless white
tablecloth. “Yes, that is part of it for me. We live well, I admit. But we work hard for it. You know how bloody rough the missionary cycle can be at times—rough and dangerous, too. You know how boring it can be, studying the language, learning all those sermons, spouting them. You know what homesickness is. We do good, dammit! We don't get paid in pound notes, but we are entitled to compensation, and I don't feel one damned bit guilty about it. So, yes, that's a consideration for me. Isn't it for you?"
Julian shrugged and evaded the question with a mental image of a toreador and his cape. “I don't think that argument will impress Exeter."
"Which one will?"
"Dunno. I'll decide when we've talked with him and I know how his wheels are turning. Do we have to discuss it now, when I'm halfway through composing a sonnet to your eyelashes?"
"We'll be in Niolvale tomorrow."
"And he may still be in Joalland. Or he may be bloody dead already."
She nodded. Domini materialized in the firelight like a ghost. At some point during his preparation of dinner, he had contrived to change into his white livery. He removed the plates.
"That was delicious,” Ursula murmured, although she kept her eyes on Julian.
"Thank you, Entyika!"
"Listen,” Julian said. “Let's not argue. Let's not even talk about it until we find out more facts. When we've heard Exeter's reasons, then we can see whether or not we agree with them. If we don't, then I'll try to talk him out of the whole business, I promise you.” Offhand, he could think of no one less likely to be talked out of anything once he had made up his mind than Edward Exeter, Esquire.
"And if you don't succeed?"
"You're jumping to hypothetical conclusions."
"Answer me.” Her voice was soft, but there was a lot of power behind it. All sorts of power.
"Then what I think won't matter, will it?"
"No, it won't."
And what Exeter thought wouldn't matter either. That was a skin-crawly idea—using mana to change a man's mind. Nasty. Not nice. It was more or less what he himself had done to the troopers at Seven Stones, of course, but that had been self-defense. He didn't like to think of Ursula doing it to Edward ... or to any man, of course. He wondered what it would feel like, and whether the victim would even know it had happened.
Domini laid out cheese and biscuits and butter, poured coffee. When he left, the silence seemed to remain, hanging over the table like a mist. The night was cooling rapidly.
Julian said, “Darling? What exactly happens in a battle of mana?” He saw her mouth tighten and went on quickly, “I mean, if Exeter does go up against Zath, one-on-one—"
"Then he dies! Zath's been at the business for years. Whatever scheme Exeter may have concocted to gather mana, he can't possibly match what Zath has collected from those thousands of human sacrifices. It would be like you taking on the German army single-handed, armed with a penknife."
"I realize that,” Julian said, knowing that Exeter must think otherwise, “but in the general case? Forget Zath. If two strangers have a magical donnybrook, what actually happens?"
Ursula drank coffee. Eventually she said, “They almost never do, because it would be a leap in the dark. You can't tell the flyweights from the heavyweights in that league without actually throwing a punch and seeing what comes back. That's why the Five play the Great Game with human chessmen. They never go for one another."
Julian hacked savagely at a piece of cheese. She was being evasive. The Service must know the answer. Prof Rawlinson would have investigated, even if no one else had. The library had been burned when Zath's thugs sacked Olympus, of course; that was frequently offered as an excuse when the new boy asked too many questions.
The stars were coming out in thousands now, but the romantic aura had faded. “So you don't know?"
"No."
"I bet Exeter does."
"What?” Ursula looked startled, surprisingly so.
"He's very chummy with Prylis, the so-called god of knowledge. Didn't you know that?"
She stared hard at Julian while she dabbed invisible crumbs from her lips. “No, I didn't.” She was narked at being caught offside.
He felt oddly smug and annoyed with himself because of it. “Read his report on his first two years here—oh, I suppose that got burned? Pity. He told me about it before we came over. He spent two or three days with Prylis. He may very well have gone back there when he left Olympus. I'm sure Exeter knows what a mana battle would be like."
Ursula had her demon-tennis-player look on. “I think I can handle Edward Exeter, no matter what he's been up to these last two years."
"You can certainly handle me all you want,” he said happily. “You ready to start now? We ought to let Domini get on with the dishes."
"You never stop, do you?"
"You want me to?"
She laughed. “No. It's what I like about you."
He jumped up and went around the table to her. “Then let's go, lover!"
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24
They are no gods, they are imposters! All that lets them act like gods is that fools worship them. I tell you that they are mere enchanters, fakes, evil people masquerading in the guise of gods..."
D'ward was nearing the end of his evening sermon, building to the usual climax where he would promise to bring death to Death and invite his listeners to join the Free and follow him.
Dosh had heard it all before. “Time to take up your stations, sisters and brothers!” His helpers looked around in surprise, some of them seeming to start out of a trance. Then they scrambled to their feet and moved off in pairs.
The Free had come to Niolvale. The sun was setting behind the ragged summits of Niolwall, painting the sky in lurid reds and orange, turning the leafless trees into arabesques of shadow and silhouetting the tall figure of the Liberator. He stood on one dominant rock with a thousand people huddled together on the grass below him, all spellbound. As he so often did, he had chosen a curious place to camp, a boulder-strewn slope. There was a much better site half a mile away, a level meadow alongside a river. Perhaps he had thought the noise of the water would drown out his preaching or that he would be less visible there.
As soon as he finished, Dosh's helpers would start moving through the throng, taking up the collection. Dosh had selected them all with care and always sent them out in pairs to keep watch on each other. He believed that nine tenths of the money the pilgrims contributed was being turned in as it should be. Set a thief to catch a thief! Tonight's take should be better than usual, for a large part of the congregation were newcomers, Niolians who had heard of this latter-day legend and wanted to see him with their own eyes.
Yes, the crowd had grown during the day. Just from where he stood, Dosh could tell that it was also becoming more varied. The ragtag poor were still there in droves—the old, the crippled, the penniless, women with too many babies, convicts snatched from the Rinoovale mines—but he could see sturdy, healthy farmers. He could see artisans and merchants from the city, escorting plump, well-dressed wives. Some had come by carriage or on rabbits. Mingled among them, of course, were the weird. Always the weird: the lost, the dreamers, the lonely, the failures, unworldly intellectuals, fanatics. Especially fanatics. At least ten members of the Free claimed to be reformed reapers who had been sent to collect the Liberator's soul for Zath but had changed their minds when they came into his presence. In Dosh's view those were the weirdest of the lot.
Or perhaps the Niolian soldiers were. Of the troop that had so dramatically failed to stop the Free entering Rinoovale, almost half had then enlisted in it themselves. Most of them were more fanatic than anyone, even the Warband. At least the Warband mostly demonstrated its loyalty with actions, not floods of words, while the Niolian deserters went around all day babbling their wonderful new vision of life and the universe to anyone who would listen. They seemed to have a need to justify their change of allegiance to every mortal in the Vales. Or were they just
trying to convince themselves?
Most interesting at the moment was a nearby dozen or so men and women wearing the gold earring of the Church of the Undivided. They were taking a risk in flaunting their allegiance here in Niolland, but perhaps they felt safe within this multitude of heretics. Huddled in a circle on the grass, they were arguing in fierce whispers, and Dosh could guess why—the Liberator had his own brand of heresy. His theology was not Undivided orthodoxy. It was still all heresy to Dosh, though. He was D'ward's friend and a senior helper, but he was not a believer, and if D'ward chose to change his dodge and start touting Gramma Oriilee's homemade herbal impotence potion, that would be all the same to Dosh.
"Now you have heard!” the Liberator proclaimed. “You have heard the truth, you have heard the call. Now is the moment when you must decide..."
This was the finale. Many of the listeners would hurry home now, but some would adhere. More followers would need more to eat, and that also was Dosh's responsibility. It was a sign of the Liberator's continuing success that Dosh now needed assistants, and the Warband was run off its feet trying to keep so large a throng organized. Prat'han had begun enlisting locals to help with the crowd control. Niolvale was large and heavily populated; the numbers could only continue to grow in the next few days.
Unless the queen intervened. Monarchs did not approve of mass gatherings raised by anyone but themselves. The court in Niol must be hearing tales of invasion and uprising, which it could never tolerate, and D'ward had not only spurned Elvanife's warrant, he had subverted half her army. No official welcoming party had graced the mouth of Thadrilpass this morning as the Liberator led his band into Niolvale. There had been no phalanx of warriors, either. Possibly the military had learned its lesson, but more likely it just needed time to muster larger forces.
The sharp swords shall drink, spilling blood into the sands. Young men leave their bones where the Liberator has passed.
