A Handful of Men: The Complete Series

by Dave Duncan

  “Yshan?”

  The imperor grunted. “Humph?”

  “If we get separated, wait for me at the North Gate.”

  “Humph.”

  “Crushed a couple of dozen yesterday,” a cheerful voice at Ylo’s elbow remarked.

  He glanced around and decided he had never met the young man whose horse was crowding into his. Danger was making normally taciturn strangers talkative. “Should be able to do better than that if we try.”

  The youngster sniggered nervously. “You’re not wearing spurs, are you? Saw a yokel back there with spurs on.”

  “Ought to be a law,” Ylo agreed. One horse pricked unexpectedly could create a disaster. “What’s the delay?”

  “The army tries to limit the numbers getting on the bridge. They don’t have much luck at this time of year.”

  “They close down at sunset?”

  “Uh-huh. Well, usually allow an hour or so longer. Frightened of a riot if they’re too early, my dad says.”

  The crowd edged forward. Ylo urged his horse after Shandie’s. His new friend followed. He was obviously a local, probably an apprentice.

  “Going far?”

  “Mosrace.”

  “You sure won’t make that by Winterfest.”

  “At this rate I won’t make it by Harvesthome,” Ylo agreed, with a mental note to revise his cover story. Mosrace must be farther west than he’d thought.

  Shandie glanced around. “Ylo?”

  “Yes, Yshan?”

  “The bridge here is too narrow. It needs widening. Remind me when we get back to Hub.”

  Ylo sighed. “Yes, Yshan.”

  Shandie set to work chewing another fingernail.

  “Who’s he?” asked the youngster. “Looks familiar.”

  “Sh! He’s very sensitive about it.”

  “Oh.”

  Shandie might have passed through Newbridge a dozen times or so in the last few years. Once or twice he might have been conspicuous at the head of troops, but usually he would have been fast and anonymous, and his was not a memorable face. Almost certainly the boy was mistaking him for someone else altogether. The crowd surged forward a few paces and the talkative youth was detached. In a few moments Ylo found himself trading chaff with a buxom housewife looking out of a carriage window. She had a nice line in innuendos.

  Nothing lasts forever, and eventually the crowd oozed out of the alleyway and onto the approach to the great Emthar II Bridge. There it slowed down. The bridge itself snaked away as a ribbon of darkness across the silvery brightness of water, and the far bank was invisible in the misty winter evening. Ylo was horrified when he saw how many guards there were. Perhaps they were only regulating traffic, but he suspected they were inspecting the travelers, as well. Nothing he could do about it now, though — with Shandie at his side, he was being borne forward by the crowd as irresistibly as a boulder on a glacier.

  “Yyan!” Shandie exclaimed, jerking alert again. “I’ve got it!”

  “Got what?”

  “The real story! Listen to this. It was all the faun’s doing! Why didn’t we see how unlikely it was — that he would turn up on the very evening Grandsire died? That’s got to be more than coincidence!”

  “I don’t see why. You suggesting he assassinated your grandfather?” Personally, Ylo could imagine no less likely murderer than King Rap.

  “Possibly!” Shandie’s eyes were gleaming with excitement. “He used sorcery on Grandsire once before, remember! And got away with it! Then he faked that scene in the Rotunda. That wasn’t Raspnex we saw at all, it was the faun!”

  Ylo groaned at this insanity. “Was he Grunth, as well?”

  “Yes. No. She never spoke, remember? Just bowed. So she was merely a delusion. And so was the destruction of the four thrones. We were made to imagine that!”

  Ylo could recall being hit by a flying rock, but he said nothing as the nonsense poured out —

  “So the wardens knew nothing of what was going on! Rap’s an enormously powerful sorcerer, remember. He lured us away to Sagorn’s house…” Shandie paused, frowning. Then he beamed. “Lured us away with fake memories of a preflecting pool, of course. Obviously that whole business never happened! We were given false memories of it, that’s all. I mean, is it likely? Magic pools just lying around? For half a year we do nothing about those supposed prophecies, and then we manage to track down Sagorn in a couple of hours?”

  “We saw Rap and Raspnex there together,” Ylo said wearily. “You suggesting that the dwarf was a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy?”

  He should have known that logic wouldn’t work.

  “Certainly!” Shandie shouted. “I hadn’t thought of that. Brilliant!” He went on to explain how the faun was trying to lure him away to Krasnegar — for reasons he had not worked out yet — and how the wardens were trying to cover for him, hiding his disappearance with the help of Cousin Emthoro and Duchess Ashia, of course, and there was no Usurper Zinixo, it was all just a story the faun had made up…

  When he ran down at last like a dried-out water clock and said, “Well, what do you think?” Ylo realized that they were in the middle of the river, halfway across the bridge, and had safely passed the guards.

  In a spasm of relief, he threw caution to the crows. “I’ve seen lots more attractive stuff on barn floors,” he sneered, and took the rest of the crossing to tear the imperor’s absurd fantasy to fragments.

  * * *

  Shandie went into a sulk after that. For an hour he said nothing at all, just trailed after Ylo as he scoured the northern half of Newbridge for a vacant bed. When the search at last turned up a grubby little inn, he did not comment on it. The stable was already crowded, and no grooms were available to attend to the horses. Still Shandie said nothing. He dismounted in silence, handed his reins to Ylo, and began pacing up and down, brooding.

  Normally Ylo enjoyed horses, but he was weary and hungry, and would have appreciated some help. The change in his companion frightened him, but it also annoyed him. He detested being thrust into leadership over a man he had followed so faithfully. He had not expected this responsibility, or asked for it, and he resented it strongly. He placed himself in Shandie’s path.

  “Here!” he said, waving the key. “You’d better take possession of the room, or we may find half a cohort asleep in our bed when we get there. Take the packs. Number seven.”

  He stopped in horror, realizing he had just given orders to the imperor. Yet Shandie did not protest. He wandered off, trailing the saddlebags. Snorting with either relief or disgust — he was not sure which — Ylo grabbed up some straw and went back to polishing sweaty horsehide.

  * * *

  The sun set. When he finally plodded up the creaky stairs, he discovered the key in the door, and the room empty. To be exact, he found no imperors in it. The one bed nearly filled the tiny space, the only other furniture being a very spotty mirror bolted to the wall and a large china chamber pot, equally unprepossessing.

  For a moment he almost panicked. Shandie could not have gone anywhere without the horses, and he had not come out to the yard to use the privy. Could he have been kidnapped?

  The saddlebags had been stuffed down between the bed and the far wall. Underneath them was Shandie’s satchel, containing the king’s letters to Krasnegar and the supply of gold. Obviously Shandie had taken leave of his senses altogether if he had left the gold unguarded. If that was ever lost, everything would be lost.

  After locking the door and looping the satchel over his shoulder, Ylo went clattering back downstairs. The saloon was crammed, noisy, and dim. There were no spare seats, and so many men standing that there was barely room to move. He hunted around, with no success. He went outside and searched the stables, the privies, the yard, even the street. With any other man, he would have suspected a girl and a bed, but not Shandie.

  Now what was he supposed to do? Rouse the city guard to hunt for a missing imperor?

  Fatigue forgotten and fear a bitter tas
te in his mouth, Ylo went back to the bedroom and began all over again. When he reached the saloon, he set out to quarter it methodically, squeezing around crowded tables and between loud huddles of men locked in argument. Eventually he found his quarry slumped on a solitary stool in a corner, gazing solidly at the wall. He clutched a tankard of bad-smelling beer with both hands. It had to be bad-smelling beer if it was the same stuff that made the room stink as it did.

  Ylo managed to ease in beside him and kneel down, almost leaning on him.

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded. “You sick?”

  The imperor looked around slowly and stared at him with an expression of distaste. He muttered, “Uomaya!” and took a leisurely draft from his tankard.

  “What about her?”

  “What about her?” Shandie mumbled. “What sort of man deserts his child and runs away just because a dwarf says to, huh?”

  “Whileboth’s faster,” said a harsh military voice at Ylo’s back.

  “Poor little Maya!” Shandie moaned. “I left my baby!”

  “Whileboth and the Ister valley and then Mosrace.”

  Mosrace? That was where Ylo had been telling people he was heading. He choked off what he had been about to say so he could listen. In the clamor of voices all around, he did not make out an answer, but then the nearest man spoke again.

  “Naw, too hilly. And not Lipash township neither. Roads’ll be waist-deep in mud this time of year.”

  Ylo relaxed. Nothing to do with him, just a party of legionaries heading home on Winterfest leave, obviously. Mosrace was a largish place, so its mention was merely coincidence. He returned his attention to Shandie and the wild, bitter look in the coal-black eyes.

  “You left the baggage unattended!”

  “Should have stayed in Qoble, stayed with the legion. Deserted my post. Not fit to be an imperor.”

  “Tell me what I can do to help.”

  Shandie raised his stein to drink. Ylo thought he was not going to get a reply, then if came. “Tell me what you’ve done so far.”

  “Huh?”

  The dark eyes narrowed. “What’s in this for you, Signifer? You’ve never been an idealist before. You only care about the itch in your crotch. Why should you suddenly start acting hero?”

  For a moment Ylo wanted to make a stupid retort about being the only man in the army entitled to wear a white wolfskin. Then he remembered that he had earned that honor by accident, and Shandie knew that. All right, so he wasn’t a hero. He’d never said he was.

  And Shandie went on. “Who bought you, Signifer? What were you promised?”

  “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about!”

  “Don’t you? You expect me to believe all this puke about covins and almighty sorcerers?”

  “You don’t?”

  Shandie smiled slyly into his tankard. “No, I don’t! Not now. Oh, they fooled me to start with, that dwarf, that faun. Now I see it was all a plot! They’ve stolen me away from my throne with their feathery tales of millennia and votaries! And I don’t think you believe it, either — I think you’re one of them!”

  God of Madness! The Covin was winning, distance had not helped.

  “Er, your wife believed in it.”

  “Ha! What do women know of politics, huh?”

  Plenty, in Ylo’s extensive experience of pillow talk, and they were usually a great deal more astute at judging men. For him to bring Eshiala into the conversation with Shandie in his present mood might provoke all sorts of unfounded suspicions. So —

  “Maybe you’re right! What do you think we ought to do?”

  Shandie blinked at this sudden capitulation. Odd twitches of expression flickered uncertainty over his face. Then he drained his tankard and lowered it with a gasp. He wiped his lips on his sleeve. “Go home, of course! Go back to Hub and do my duty. Catch all the liars and hang ’em from the flagpole.”

  Ylo needed a sorcerer, quickly. He needed help and he certainly needed advice. If Shandie persisted in these delusions, he might take off back along the Hub road like a madman. He might do worse — he might just give himself up to the local authorities. Why had the faun or the warlock not foreseen that this might happen? Just as it had in inventing the imposter imperor now reigning in Hub, the Covin had pulled a trick the godly had not anticipated. What evilish honor might it play next?

  If Shandie could be taken into a shielded refuge like White Impress, then he might recover. Maybe. But a mundane like Ylo had no means to locate such shielding. If he could lay his hands on the magic scrolls he could ask the sorcerers for advice, but the scrolls were in Shandie’s pocket. To ask for them would only fan the madman’s suspicions — perhaps he could try to steal them in the night. A reply might not come for days, though.

  “Can’t go anywhere tonight,” Ylo said, smitten with sudden inspiration. “They close the bridge at sunset.”

  Shandie grunted. He was still staring at his companion with undisguised suspicion. The legionaries’ geographical dispute was growing louder in the background.

  “I don’t think we’ll get any food here,” Ylo continued. “And it would be old and ill-treated if we could. We’ve still got some apples and stuff in the packs. Why don’t we go and have a snack and then make an early night of it?” He was talking too fast, almost babbling.

  “What, no wench tonight?”

  “Same argument as the food.”

  “It’s never stopped you before.” Shandie was not so far out of his mind that he had lost his shrewdness. If anything, his crazy suspicions would make him even harder to deceive than usual, and marble was malleable compared to Shandie.

  “I’ll have two tomorrow to make up,” Ylo said, wishing he could wipe the sweat off his face without drawing attention to it. “Come on. This place makes me ill.”

  Shandie reluctantly put his tankard down among the boots around him and rose to his feet. He swayed, steadying himself with a hand on the wall. “You’re right,” he muttered. “Hard day.”

  It had not been a hard day at all. They had covered less than fifteen leagues, which was as much as they dare ask of the horses on these roads. Shandie had been known to ride three times that far in a day, often.

  Then he sat down again, heavily. “Get me ’nother beer.”

  This unshaven, unkempt wastrel was a far cry from the dapper prince Ylo had served so long. He was either a very sick man or he was drunk. The idea of Shandie drunk was unthinkable, but then this whole experience was unthinkable.

  “You’ve had enough beer, Yshan.”

  “Am not Yshan!” Shandie roared, coloring. “I’m done with your stupid games! From now on I’m not hiding who I am, and I’m going back to my palace, and I’m not going to Mosrace, and I’ll not believe all that evilish nonsense about threats to the Impire!”

  God of Mercy! What was Ylo to do? The fate of the world had suddenly been dumped in his unwilling hands. He didn’t want it. He didn’t know what to do with it. He could still think of no solution except to get Shandie as far away from Hub as quickly as possible, in the hope that the sorcery might yet weaken with distance and let him recover his wits.

  For a moment he considered taking the imperor along by force, but that was obviously impossible. Tie him to the saddle? Shandie was probably as strong as he was, and could shout for help. Get him up to the room and stun him with the chamber pot? Stun the imperor? Keep him stunned for weeks? Ylo had seen too many men crippled by head wounds to consider that fantastic solution.

  Then he realized that a local cloud of silence had settled over the table at his back. He looked around, and up, into the inquisitive stare of the man he had heard earlier. Beyond him, behind a forest of tankards, his three companions were watching.

  They had heard Shandie shouting about Mosrace, and other things, dangerous things.

  They wore civilian clothes. They were all about the same age, old to be soldiers, and yet their steady gaze held the unmistakable look of legionaries — tough, hardened, self-reliant.
The nearest one bore a jagged old scar across his nose. Four men in their middle forties… Without a doubt, these were veterans, legionaries who had completed their twenty-five-year stint and were heading home with their requital in their pockets to find themselves wives and farms. They might be honest, or they might not. They might cherish a virulent dislike for aristocrats like the officers who had ordered them around for a generation, or they might hold to the instinctive respect and obedience that had been hammered into them so painfully in their youth and reinforced every day of their manhood.

  Ylo was still staring up at the scarred man staring down at him, and he seemed to be the leader. He was not unlike Hardgraa in appearance. In fact, he had centurion written all over him.

  A sudden germ of an idea…

  “Perhaps you can tell us,” Ylo said, “how many days’ ride to Mosrace?”

  “Too Evilish many. What of it?”

  Shandie registered the conversation and twisted around on his stool to see. He scowled. “I told you we’re not going to Mosrace. We’re going back to the palace!”

  Four pairs of eyes blinked.

  Ylo rose to the occasion. “My name’s Yyan — cohort signifer with the XIVth.” He indicated Shandie. “Tribune Yshan. We’re on our way to Mosrace —”

  “I am not a tribune! I’m the imperor.”

  The four faces inspected one another and then came back to their previous direction.

  “Had a little too much, has he?” the centurion inquired.

  “It’s worse than that, I’m afraid,” Ylo said sadly. “He’s been prone to these attacks ever since Nefer Moor. I’m his brother. I’m trying to get him home, you see. He was all right when we started out, but —”