"Agreed," Jason Cullinane said. His voice, while no louder, somehow seemed to gain depth and power. "And second?"
"Second, you'll accept that the rest of us are part of it, too," Bren Adahan said quietly, each word dropping into the silence. "Each in our own way; each and every one of us."
There was a little something of his father in his eyes as Jason nodded and looked from face to face, finding something there that he had not seen before.
And there was more than a little of his father in his voice as he folded his arms across his chest, nodded slowly, and said, "Your terms are agreed to, Bren Adahan."
His mother took Jason's hand. "Then come in and rest. There is much to do tomorrow."
"No." Gently, he pulled away from her. "No," he said. "There is much to do today. Today." His face was emotionless, but his eyes were wet. "Tennetty."
"Right here."
"My swordsmanship needs work. While it's still light." Tears ran down a stern, unmoving face. "There is much work to do, and the day isn't over. Let's get to it."
"Quite right," Tennetty said, with a shrug and a smile. "Walk this way," she said, walking twenty steps away and then drawing her sword, mirroring Jason.
While steel rang on steel, the words seemed to echo: There is much work to do, and the day isn't over.
The crowd dispersed until only Bren Adahan, Thomen Furnael, Doria Perlstein, and the two Cullinane women were left with the dragon.
* * *
*Could that not have waited?* Ellegon looked down at Bren. *You leave him little time for private mourning.*
Perhaps. Bren nodded his head. But I'm not sure he has much time. He is Karl's heir.
*As are we all. The fire burns more brightly each year, doesn't it?*
I don't understand.
*Of course you do.*
Great wings folded tightly against his side, the dragon lowered his saurian head, turning toward Andrea. *I . . . am so sorry, Andrea. I loved him, too.*
Clumsily, her face and her tears buried in her daughter's hair, she reached up to pat a thick scale. "He's dead, Ellegon."
Doria reached out an awkward arm, and Andrea included the younger-seeming woman in her embrace.
At the sound of steel on steel, the dragon looked over at Jason Cullinane and Tennetty, their swords flashing in the daylight. Jason parried a high-line attack, stopped his own lunge just short of Tennetty's torso, then backed up a few feet, saluting before taking an en garde position once again.
Slowly, the majestic head turned to look down at Thomen Furnael, Aeia Cullinane, and finally at Bren Adahan.
Ellegon stretched his neck, the huge head moving slowly from side to side, the eyes, each easily the size of a dinner plate, staring unblinkingly.
*Andrea, the flame burns more brightly, year by year. You say that Karl is dead?* Ellegon unfurled his wings, braced himself against the smooth stones, then leaped into the air. Flame roared into the clear blue sky.
*My dear, dear Andrea, that is entirely a matter of opinion.*
In a House on Faculty Row
Even a sight that spans worlds can be blurred by tears.
Arthur Simpson Deighton sat, half bent over his desk, his head buried in his arms, weeping.
A distant voice seemed to whisper:
Strange. You treat some of them like pieces in a game, but you care about the others. It's most amusing, I suppose, and while I'm used to laws and rules shifting and changing, I never will understand the rules you live by, Arta Myrdhyn.
"I let myself care about him, Titania. About all of them."
You grow soft, old human. Weak. Your caring is distant, pointless. It's not at all amusing.
"It shall be neither distant nor pointless, someday."
Idle threats. Idle promises. You know what is necessary, but you have yet to do it. Coward. Crazy, useless coward. Now, you have another excuse to wait.
Arthur Simpson Deighton wept until his aching eyes were dry of tears.
Later, in Pandathaway: Slavers' Guildhall
"By the time we arrived, they were dead, every one. Before we were driven off, we were able to capture a couple of the Mel whores; they are outside, waiting your pleasure. They didn't see it, but they did report: Cullinane and a handful of his men took on more than a hundred of ours, and won."
"All dead? All?"
"Every one. The beach was scattered with rotting bodies. It was clear that many of them had died in some sort of gunfight, some in some kind of explosion. But the rest . . . there were those who had been killed by strangling, some with an axe, and some with a sword. I was trying to investigate further when the Mel attacked—yes, with guns."
"Captured from Ahrmin's party?"
"I don't know if it was our powder or that accursed Cullinane powder."
"Ahrmin and a score of good guildsmen and a hundred mercenaries were killed, the Mel have guns—and you say that there is worse?"
"There is. I know there's no word of Karl Cullinane returning to Holtun-Bieme—they seem to think that he's dead."
"You say that he isn't?"
"I say that nobody else has seen this. We found it nailed to the chest of one of our men; he had been hung by the heels and slaughtered like a goat. We were meant to find it; the Mel didn't attack until after we discovered it.
"The symbols on the very bottom seem to be the signatures. There are three of them. Three: an axe, a knife, and a sword. I think the writing on top is that accursed Englits of his, but you can see what's written in Erendra."
He held up a piece of sun-bleached leather, on which were written, in dark, dried blood, some English words that they couldn't understand.
And below the words they couldn't understand, also written in blood, were three Erendra words that they could:
the warrior lives
The Warrior Lives
Vol. 5 of
The Guardians
of the Flame
For Sprague and Catherine,
role models
Acknowledgments
I'd like to thank the people who helped: Will Shetterly and Emma Bull, who found me the place to finish this book; Pamela Dean and Nate Bucklin, for the last-minute proofreading; the rest of the Minneapolis SF crowd, for reasons both trivial and profound; Mark J. McGarry, who made it better, again; Felix Tang and John Jaser and the other good folks at Logix Microcomputer; Scott Raun, who quibbled a bit; Harry Leonard, who quibbled a lot; my editor, John Silbersack; my wife, Felicia; and always, particularly, my agent, Eleanor Wood.
PRELUDE
Laheran
Every man is like the company he is wont to keep.
—Euripides
"You have to find him," said Slavers' Guildmaster Yryn. "You have to stop him."
Yryn looked old, and stoop-shouldered. His neck seemed to have trouble holding up his massive head, and his eyes were more of a dull gray than the sharp, piercing slate-gray that Laheran remembered from his apprenticeship in the guild.
As they walked through the garden, Yryn fondled the piece of sun-bleached leather, his nail-bitten fingers stroking it as if it were a magical talisman, which it wasn't.
There was little enough in the world to be sure of, Laheran thought, but the leather wasn't magical. It had been carefully examined by a competent wizard, a master in Pandathaway's Wizards' Guild, and while the wizards couldn't always be relied on—they were notorious cowards, for one thing—they could be trusted to know if something was magical.
The inner courtyard of Slavers' Guildhall was a quiet place, one for reflection. Marble benches surrounded a lawn that was always ankle-height, the garden guarded by cornered hedges, the precision of it all maintained each night by scissor-wielding slaves working under smoky torchlight.
Except for the flowers. A gardener, fealty-bound to the guild, had the responsibility for their care. Flowers were different, Laheran thought, as he bent to sniff the rich fragrance of a blood-red rose. They required loving attention, not just fearful care.
Lah
eran liked the garden. It was the one quiet place in the city, the only place he could get completely away from the noise and the bustle and the smells of Pandathaway.
"You have to stop Karl Cullinane," the guildmaster said, as though Laheran hadn't heard him.
"You said that." Laheran held up an admonishing finger, hoping that Yryn would slap him down for his insolence, silently begging the guildmaster to assert his authority.
But the older man just nodded.
Laheran could have cried. The guildmaster was losing his grip on himself. Could his grip on the guild be far behind?
It was a bad time to be leaving Pandathaway. Perhaps Laheran oughtn't have any delusions about having a chance at the guildmastership—there had never been a guildmaster in his twenties, and damned few in their thirties—but as the youngest full master in the guild, it wasn't at all impossible that he could have some impact on the outcome of the contention.
If there was to be a contention. Perhaps what the guild needed now was stability, even if that meant that somebody would have to be the power behind the throne.
Laheran held out his hand to accept the piece of leather. It was about two handbreadths across, not of terribly high quality, probably cut from a leather food sack of some sort.
There was writing on the rough surface; Laheran recognized it as dried blood. He couldn't make out most of the writing, although he suspected it was in that Englits that Karl Cullinane and his friends were turning into a common trade language throughout the Eren regions and beyond.
But below the scratchings that he couldn't decipher, there were the words he could:
The warrior lives, they said. Beneath were three crude drawings: a sword, an ax, and a knife—a threat that Cullinane would kill them with whatever was handy.
It was the third such piece of leather Laheran had seen. The first he himself had brought back from Melawei; it had been pinned to the corpse of a brother slaver, a man who had been split with an ax from his brow almost to his waist.
The second had been discovered in Ehvenor, tied to the hilt of a sword that had been struck through three bodies; the killers had either discovered the slavers in a dark alley or drawn them into it, leaving them behind dead, dead, and dead.
This third one had been found in Lundeyll, in a rented room at an inn there, again pinned to the corpse of a slaver, this time by a knife that projected from the dead man's open mouth like a bloodied metal tongue. Nimyn was his name; Laheran knew him slightly. He was a journeyman on a routine trading mission, traveling down the coast toward Ehvenor with a string of a dozen well-tamed male slaves, most of whom were born into servitude. There were two other slavers with Nimyn, but they were left alone.
The guildmaster finally put it as a question. "Will you find him? Stop him?"
"Yes," Laheran said, stooping to pick a rose, twisting the stem loose from the bush with deft fingers that managed to avoid the thorns. He fixed it to the collar of his cloak with a long silver pin.
He wished he had a mirror with him; he was pleased with the way he looked. He knew what he would have seen: a tall, slim, elegant young man in blue and gray, his hair the color of autumn flax, his short, neatly trimmed beard only a few shades darker. A light, crimson cloak—more of a cape, really—fastened with a braided silver rope, hung elegantly from his right shoulder, the cut of his tunic and mid-calf breeches more elegant, more careful than was usual among guildsmen.
He rested his palm for a moment on the hilt of his sword, striking a pose. He knew he looked somewhat younger than his twenty-five years, and knew that his age and his foppishness tempted others to either underrate or overrate him. That suited him.
"I believe that I will," he said finally. "What resources do I have?"
"Come with me," the guildmaster said.
The two of them passed into the dark cool of the marble halls.
The walls were spotless and the floors only barely dirtied by the day's traffic, but there was a strange smell in the halls—beyond the usual stink of human sweat, of pain and fear—that never could be scrubbed out of the tiles. Whip a slave to death—although with the economics of slavery these days, that was the luxury of a bygone era—and he would leave his smell not only on the rough stone walls where you chained him, but throughout the rest of the hall.
But there was something else. As the two slavers passed by an open door, the scribes working at their desks in the room looked up, a quick flash of panic passing across their faces.
This was Slavers' Guildhall; there should have been no trace of fear on the face of a guildsman.
But there was: the place also stank of slaver's fear.
It somehow smelled different than the fear of a slave.
They all feared that Karl Cullinane would come for them, and not just outside, somewhere in the field. That would have been different. That was frightening, but acceptable. You had to learn to look over your shoulder when you were away. Raiding or trading, you had to sleep lightly, listening for the quiet patter of unshod feet on deck, the muffled whisper of a sword leaving its scabbard, the snick of a cocked hammer.
No, it wasn't only an assault in the field they feared now, but one in the guildhall itself.
Laheran followed Yryn upstairs into the master's meeting room, where ten men sat around the wide oak table.
None of them were master slavers, but they were all reliable journeymen, most of them well scarred: tough and blooded, men who made their business as raiders and tamers, not just as sellers.
The guildmaster introduced him around the table; Laheran exchanged guild grips with each man in turn. And each man in turn gripped Laheran's hand just a bit too hard, as though grabbing for reassurance, not simply confirming Laheran's guild membership, or returning his courtesy.
"I can have a hundred more men for you in two tendays," the guildmaster said.
Laheran shook his head. "No. The guild has tried that before. A small group this time, with a small, fast ship. We'll go quietly from Pandathaway, not loudly announcing who we are. We take his trail, find him, and kill him." There was no great rush. If it was possible to catch Cullinane—and it had to be possible to catch Cullinane—then Cullinane was headed north.
Possibly by way of Pandathaway and the guildhall? No, that was unlikely. There were too many defenses, both physical and magical, at Slavers' Guildhall. Cullinane wouldn't be able to get in here.
But, conceivably, he would stop off in Pandathaway and kill a slaver or two, hunt them down outside the guildhall. And that could work to Laheran's advantage: the larger the monster, the larger the reward for killing it.
Laheran eyed them all levelly. "We will find Karl Cullinane, and we will kill him."
The warrior lives, indeed. Perhaps Laheran was younger than all previous guildmasters, but perhaps that wouldn't matter if Laheran killed Karl Cullinane.
He smiled at Guildmaster Yryn.
"Leave it all in my hands," he said.
PART ONE
Holtun-Bieme
CHAPTER 1
It ain't over till it's over—and maybe not then, either.
—Walter Slovotsky
Wearing only a faded pair of Home denim jeans, Jason Cullinane bent over the washbowl beneath the mirror, scrubbing gingerly at his face. The early morning water was even icier than it should have been.
As he dried his face on a fresh-smelling towel—royalty hath its privileges, it occurred to him for not the first time—he felt at his chin. It was a bit stubbly, although he had shaved the day before. He tossed the towel aside and reached for the bone handle of the straight razor sitting on the sideboard, but as he eyed himself in the mottled mirror he decided that the faint stubbling made him look older. He let his fingers drop to his side.
A distant laugh sounded in his head.
*Take on a few responsibilities and your beard starts growing, eh?*
He didn't smile.
*Your father would have laughed at that.*
"Perhaps he would have." But he wasn't h
is father. He looked into the mirror. Through the mottled glass—Empire glassmaking wasn't even up to Home standards, and Home standards weren't high to begin with—under a shock of dark brown hair, two dark brown eyes looked back at him. Just the other day, U'len had told him that he was looking more and more like the Emperor. In particular, there was something about his eyes, she said.
I can't see it, he thought. They were just brown. He shook his head as he stared at himself in the mirror. He couldn't see it at all. He wasn't the giant that Karl Cullinane had been; Jason's jaw didn't even seem to have the firm resolve that his father's had had; there wasn't that I-can-handle-anything-that-comes-along look.
He shrugged. Maybe he didn't look so different, but everything else did. Things seemed so changed since his return to Biemestren. His room on the third floor of the residence tower felt smaller. Hell, even the castle seemed to have shrunk in his absence, although he couldn't quite figure out how or where.
His fingers reached up to his neck, the familiar feel of the leather thong and the small crystal amulet comforting. It wasn't that it prevented him from being magically located; he didn't have to hide in Biemestren, and if trouble came looking for Jason here, it would have the House Guard to deal with. The comfort came from its familiarity. The leather and crystal hadn't changed.
*They're waiting for you. Hurry down.*
Give me a second.
He took a fresh soft cotton tunic from where Elarrah had laid it out on top of his bureau late the night before and pulled it over his head, then padded barefoot across the rug to where he'd left his boots by the door. He considered the rising scratch marks in the age-darkened oak of the door jamb, from the cluster of six or so that were about chest-high, to the one that was on the same level as his eye, and the two close together a bit above.
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