The Summer Palace

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  THE

  SUMMER

  PALACE

  TOR BOOKS BY LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS

  THE OBSIDIAN CHRONICLES

  Dragon Weather

  The Dragon Society

  Dragon Venom

  LEGENDS OF ETHSHAR

  Night of Madness

  Ithanalin’s Restoration

  Touched by the Gods

  Split Heirs (with Esther Friesner)

  THE ANNALS OF THE CHOSEN

  The Wizard Lord

  The Ninth Talisman

  The Summer Palace

  THE

  SUMMER

  PALACE

  VOLUME THREE OF THE

  ANNALS OF THE CHOSEN

  LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE SUMMER PALACE: VOLUME THREE OF THE ANNALS OF THE CHOSEN

  Copyright © 2008 by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Watt-Evans, Lawrence, 1954–

  The summer palace / Lawrence Watt-Evans.—1st ed.

  p. cm.—(the annals of the Chosen ; v. 3)

  “A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1028-6

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-1028-7

  I. Title

  PS3573.A859S86 2008

  813’.54—dc22

  2008005307

  First Edition: June 2008

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To William Sanders,

  for making my life more interesting

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Brian Thomsen, Russell Galen, Kristin Sevick, Deborah Wood, and Terry McGarry for making this series better than it might otherwise have been; and again, my thanks to Timothy S. O’Brien for essential aid in world-building.

  THE

  SUMMER

  PALACE

  [ PROLOGUE ]

  Erren Zal Tuyo, also known as the Chosen Swordsman, or simply Sword, stood in the late afternoon shadows of a Winterhome street, head tilted back, and stared up at the sunlit face of the Eastern Cliffs. He could see a hawk perched on a bit of ledge a few hundred feet up, and a few strands of vine clinging to the rock here and there; rivulets trickled down the stone, leaving streaks of moss and lichen.

  Those gray stone cliffs loomed thousands of feet above the town, blocking out almost half the sky. Although they could be seen for a hundred miles or more, Winterhome was built directly under them, at the foot of the one and only crooked path that led from the sheltered realm of Barokan to the vast, windy Uplands above.

  Millennia ago, a relatively small triangular portion of that immense, almost vertical face had crumbled, and a few centuries later, human beings had managed to make a trail that led up across those hundreds of feet of fallen stone. It zigzagged up the cliff itself and then turned up the wedge-shaped canyon formed by that long-ago collapse.

  That was the only road that connected the warm, wet lowlands of Barokan to the cool, dry plains above, and every year, when the weather turned cold, the several hundred nomadic Uplanders made their way down that narrow path, to spend the winter in the town of Winterhome, in the great guesthouses the Host People maintained for them.

  No one, they said, could survive the harsh winters of the plateau.

  No one ever had, at any rate.

  And when the spring thaw came, the Uplanders journeyed back up to the plateau to resume their normal life, pursuing the great flightless birds called ara across the endless open plain of the highlands.

  For centuries, only Uplanders had ever climbed that trail.

  Only Uplanders had seen the lands above the cliffs.

  But then Artil im Salthir, the Red Wizard, had become the Wizard Lord, the magical protector of Barokan, and he had decided that he wanted to escape the stifling summer heat of Winterhome—heat that had not been so bad under previous Wizard Lords.

  For hundreds of years the Wizard Lords had controlled the weather in Barokan, and had kept the summers tolerable, but Artil im Salthir believed that Barokan’s magic was fading away, and that people needed to learn to live without it. He had relinquished control of the weather, and now allowed the ler of the sky, the spirits that controlled the weather, to do more or less as they pleased; under his reign rain fell in the daytime as often as at night, the winters were colder than his predecessors had permitted them to be, and the summers were hotter than they had ever in mortal memory been before.

  Artil did not even use his magic to cool himself or his court; instead he had ordered the building of a Summer Palace in the Uplands, at the cliff’s edge a few miles to the north of the trailhead. He took refuge from the heat up there, outside the lands he had sworn to defend.

  He did not seem to see anything unreasonable in avoiding the hardships he let befall his fellow Barokanese, or in building one of his palaces in a place where he had no authority and his magic did not operate. Perhaps he felt he had earned this special privilege by the changes he had wrought in Barokan.

  Sword could not see the Summer Palace from his present vantage. It was not visible from Winterhome; nothing atop the cliffs could be seen at this angle. One small corner of one terrace of the palace did project out over the edge, and could be seen from the foot of the cliff a couple of miles to the north, around a curve in the cliffs, but not from Winterhome; the palace was not directly above the town.

  Still, visible or not, Sword knew it was there. He had visited it once, something over a year ago, and he had seen it from below several times, from points west and north of where he now stood.

  The Wizard Lord was not up there now. He had already descended the cliffs for the year and was back at the Winter Palace, in the heart of Winterhome, half a mile north of Sword, at the foot of the trail to the Uplands. The Uplanders would not come down to the guesthouses for at least another two months, but the Wizard Lord did not wait for the snows, only until the worst of the summer heat had passed. He had returned to Barokan a few days ago.

  It was hard for Sword to remember just how recently that had been. So much had happened in those few days!

  The Leader of the Chosen and the Chosen Scholar—Boss and Lore, as Sword called them—had gone to speak to the Wizard Lord regarding his recent actions, his defiance of tradition, his killing of certain wizards.

  Both of them had been taken prisoner, in violation of law and custom.

  The Wizard Lord had had no right to do that. The Chosen had simply been doing their job, defending Barokan. It was what the Chosen had been chosen for.

  Centuries ago wizards had run wild across Barokan, raping and pillaging, fighting each other in staggeringly destructive magical duels, terrorizing the population at every turn. Their magic had enabled them to ignore all restraints.

  Some of them, however, had taken it upon themselves to place restraints on their brethren, restraints that could not be ignored. They had formed the grandiosely and inaccurately named Council of Immortals, and chosen one of their number to become the first Wizard Lord. That role brought with it the most powerful magic that the Council could bestow, which the Wizard Lord was charged with using to bring rogue wizards to order; any wizard who refused to cooperate with the Council, any wizard
who killed or raped or stole, the Wizard Lord was expected to kill. Other criminals who fled into the wilderness, away from the isolated towns that composed Barokanese civilization, were also considered the Wizard Lord’s legitimate prey.

  There was no appeal, no refuge, from the Wizard Lord. The Council had deliberately made him too powerful for any other wizard to control.

  But they had realized that this power could lead to tyranny. While a single uncontrollable Wizard Lord was preferable to hundreds of lesser wizards running amok, it was still not desirable.

  So they had created the Chosen, a band of heroes given limited and specific magic that would permit them, in theory, to kill the Wizard Lord. Originally there had been only three, taking roles now known as the Leader, the Seer, and the Swordsman, but over the centuries others had been added: the Beauty, whose role was to distract any males who might interfere; the Thief, who could pick any lock and find his way into any fortress; the Scholar, who remembered flawlessly every true thing he had ever heard or read; the Archer, who was to missile weapons what the Swordsman was to handheld ones; and the Speaker, who could hear and understand all the ler of Barokan.

  Ordinarily, the Chosen were to do nothing with their abilities; they were expected to go about their lives, minding their own business. But if a Wizard Lord turned to evil, or went mad, thereby becoming a Dark Lord, the Chosen were to gather and remove him from power, through either abdication or death.

  Most Wizard Lords behaved themselves.

  Most of the Chosen lived out their lives without ever being called upon to dispose of a Dark Lord.

  In seven centuries Barokan had suffered only nine Dark Lords, three of whom surrendered their role peacefully when confronted by the Chosen.

  Six Dark Lords, though, had had to be killed. Most recently, a mere four or five years ago, Sword himself had slain the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills. He had managed this despite the treachery of the then-Leader of the Chosen, Farash inith Kerra; despite the failure of the then-Chosen Thief to play her role; and despite the last-minute cowardice of the then-Chosen Seer.

  He had killed the Dark Lord, and he had demanded that the Council replace the Leader, the Thief, and the Seer, but he had not explained why; he had considered the business finished.

  He had thought, when that was done, that he was done with his service. He had thought that Artil im Salthir would be a sensible and harmless Wizard Lord.

  The Red Wizard, however, had proved to be a very untraditional Wizard Lord. Rather than passively reacting to threats to the peace, as his predecessors had, he had set about actively improving his domain. Where most Wizard Lords avoided contact with the Chosen, he had taken on Farash inith Kerra, the former Leader, as his chief advisor, and had asked Lore, the Chosen Scholar, for advice, as well. He had recruited soldiers—not the two or three dozen guards at most who had sufficed for previous Wizard Lords, but hundreds of eager young men. He had hired builders, and he had set them to work, building a network of roads and canals that were gradually connecting all the heretofore isolated communities that made up Barokan. He had done everything he could to promote trade, and had made the land vastly richer by doing so.

  The wild places between towns had been home to various hazards and monsters—soul-eating trees, wild beasts, and semi-sentient man-traps of one sort or another. Artil im Salthir had removed as many of these as he could locate. After all, he was charged with removing criminals from the wilderness; why limit that to humans?

  The custom had been for each Wizard Lord to build himself a mansion or tower, using his magic, to demonstrate his mastery of his power. Artil had instead used his construction gangs to build his two immense, elaborate palaces, in Winterhome and atop the cliffs.

  That was all to the good, really. This Wizard Lord had made Barokan a richer, safer place, and most of the population idolized him for it; he was a hero, the man who had transformed his society.

  The Chosen had observed it all with interest, but somewhat less enthusiasm. The roads and canals seemed an unadulterated good, and no one had any problem with removing hazards. The Summer Palace and Artil’s extended stays there were a little worrisome, since it was outside Barokan’s borders, but all in all, acceptable.

  But then the Chosen learned that Artil had sent his soldiers to find and kill the remaining members of the Council of Immortals.

  After centuries of restrictions and poor reputations, wizards were already few, and all of them belonged to the Council; none were considered rogues. That had not stopped Artil’s men; apparently innocent wizards were burned, beheaded, or hanged. Still, killing troublesome wizards was the very essence of the Wizard Lord’s role, so the Chosen were not certain that they were required to do anything to stop these murders, or to interfere with whatever the Wizard Lord was doing.

  Until, that is, it became clear that the wizards were being killed solely because Artil im Salthir believed those wizards had created a ninth member of the Chosen, and were refusing to tell him who this ninth person was.

  Although it was indeed true that it was customary to add another member to the Chosen any time a Dark Lord was executed, none of the eight traditional members of the Chosen knew anything about a ninth. Even if Artil was correct, this hardly seemed to justify slaughtering a dozen wizards. In fact, interfering with the Chosen in any way was one of the few things the Wizard Lord was forbidden to do.

  So Boss and Lore had gone to discuss the situation—to discuss it, nothing more—and had been taken prisoner.

  They had, in fact, walked into a trap. The Wizard Lord had been expecting the Chosen to attack him, and had been waiting for it, with troops specially chosen and trained to handle the specific magic of the eight Chosen. His personal guards had had their ears plugged, so they could not hear the Leader’s attempts to persuade them. The moment Boss and Lore were captured, orders had gone out to kill the rest of the Chosen, including Sword—archers to fight the Swordsman, pikemen and swordsmen to fight the Archer, women to kill the Beauty, and so on.

  These troops Artil had so diligently recruited and trained had indeed killed the Seer and the Speaker, had cut them to pieces in the street not a mile from where Sword now stood. He had seen the whole thing, and he and the Archer had done what they could to avenge those deaths before fleeing.

  The others had scattered, and Sword had no idea what had happened to the Archer, the Beauty, and the Thief. He hoped they were still alive, but he did not know.

  He had fled as far as the town of Morning Calm, where the Wizard Lord’s troops had found him. He had used the magic of the local ler to escape unharmed, but realized that he would never be safe anywhere in Barokan, so long as the Wizard Lord, Artil im Salthir, lived. Flight was pointless.

  So he had retraced his steps.

  When he had decided to return to Winterhome, he hoped he might catch sight of the other free Chosen, but as yet he had seen no sign of them anywhere. He had listened to a few conversations, hoping for news, but heard nothing relevant, and as a fugitive himself, he did not dare speak directly to anyone to ask. He wore the garb of a man of the Host People, and had done everything he could to match his appearance to that of a Hostman, so he could wander the streets unmolested as long as he kept the sword hidden and let no one see his face clearly enough to recognize him, but he knew he still spoke with the harsher accent of his native Longvale. Anyone who heard him talk would know he was not from Winterhome, and the chances were depressingly good that his face would be recognized. Even if a passing Hostman or foreigner had never seen him in person before, the Wizard Lord’s men had been circulating pictures, with captions labeling him a traitor and murderer.

  Not so very long ago, being recognized as the Chosen Swordsman would have been a good thing, as almost everyone in Barokan had considered the Chosen to be their protectors, their allies. No more. The Wizard Lord had done a good job of winning the loyalty of his people, and casting the Chosen as outdated relics who wanted to destroy everything Barokan had built in the pas
t few years.

  And Sword, in particular, had been labeled a bloodthirsty monster, the man who had slaughtered a dozen innocents in the streets of Winterhome.

  Sword regretted now that he had been quite so eager to kill those soldiers, but he still did not consider his victims innocent. All of them had aided in killing the Seer and the Speaker, two harmless, unarmed women.

  But hardly anyone knew that, and no one cared. He had seen that when he tried to take refuge in Morning Calm. The townspeople had done nothing to help him when the Wizard Lord’s soldiers came looking for him; most of them seemed to take at face value the captain’s claim that Sword had butchered the Wizard Lord’s troops without cause. No one had asked for his side of the story; they simply wanted him gone.

  He had no reason to think that matters would be any different anywhere in Barokan.

  And that was why he was here, back in Winterhome, staring up at the cliffs and waiting for dusk. He could not live in Barokan. He knew of no refuge, no place where he could find shelter while he planned how to kill the Wizard Lord—and there was no doubt that he did intend to kill Artil im Salthir; whether he had served Barokan as a whole good or ill, the Wizard Lord had killed Sword’s friends, Azir and Babble, the Seer and the Speaker, and Sword intended to see that the Red Wizard paid for it with his own life.

  But there was nowhere in Barokan he could find safety, and that meant he must leave Barokan.

  [ 1 ]

  The only land route out of Barokan was that path up the cliff to the Uplands. Escape by sea might be possible, but Sword was no sailor, and knew nothing of where he might find a ship, or where it might take him; he preferred to stay on solid ground. He had doubled back to Winterhome because it was the last place the Wizard Lord’s men would expect to find him, and because it was the only way to the Uplands.