The Summer Palace

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Those soldiers had died, killed by Bow and Sword in retaliation, but the man who sent them, the Wizard Lord himself, still reigned down in Barokan.

  “Are you all right?” Fist asked him, seeing his grimace.

  “Ah,” Sword said, remembering himself. “Yes. Perhaps still a little thirsty.”

  “There’s a jug,” Gnaw Gnaw said, pointing. “And the river’s a mile that way.”

  Sword glanced at the far-off cistern that the others had pointed out while explaining its construction to him. It stood some distance to the southwest; it was hard to judge exactly how far on the vast level plain of the plateau. “Could I get water there instead?” he asked.

  “No!” Fist barked, shocked.

  Gnaw Gnaw held up a calming hand. “He doesn’t know any better,” she told Fist. Then she turned to Sword. “No. The cisterns are too precious to be used when the rivers are flowing and nearby. It’s a mile to the river, five or six to the cistern. Use the river.”

  Sword nodded. “Of course,” he said. He took a jug from the row standing alongside one of the tents, then glanced around, unsure whether he was expected to find the river on his own, and whether there was anything more he needed to know—any dangers he might encounter, biting animals or poisonous plants to avoid. In Barokan he would have been concerned about hostile ler when venturing outside the settlement, but that didn’t seem to be an issue here.

  “I’ll show you,” said Whistler, picking up another jug. “Come on.”

  Whistler had said nothing up to this point, and Sword glanced at the others, to see their reactions to the man’s breaking his silence. They didn’t seem to think anything of it.

  “Thank you,” Sword said.

  The two of them ambled southeastward out of the camp, leaving Sword’s other five instructors behind. For a few minutes they walked in companionable silence; then Whistler asked, “Why did you come here?”

  Sword threw him a quick glance. “You didn’t hear what I told the Patriarch?”

  “You didn’t tell him why,” Whistler said. “You told him that you were planning to kill the Wizard Lord, but you didn’t tell him why you came to the Uplands, instead of staying in Barokan.”

  “The Wizard Lord has ordered that I be killed,” Sword said. “Isn’t that reason enough to leave Barokan?”

  Whistler shook his head. “No, it isn’t. The Chosen have fought Dark Lords before—I don’t know how many times, but it’s happened. None of them has ever before come to the Uplands. They have always found ways to remain in the Lowlands until they could reach their foe and slay him.”

  Sword did not answer immediately. They walked perhaps a dozen paces before he said, “You’re right. There’s something different this time. This time, the people of Barokan support the Wizard Lord.”

  Whistler frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, you’ve been down in Barokan for the winter,” Sword said. “Have you talked to any of the Host People lately? Have you been to the market in Winterhome?”

  “Well, not very much,” Whistler said. “I mostly stay in the guesthouse, where it’s warm, or walk in the woods behind it. But I’ve seen the market, and spoken to a few people. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You’re old enough to remember back before the current Wizard Lord, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” Whistler frowned again. “Are you talking about how the markets are more crowded now?”

  “That’s part of it,” Sword said. He sighed. “This Wizard Lord isn’t like any we’ve had before, not in all the seven hundred years we’ve had Wizard Lords. All the others seem to have been interested in magic more than anything else—that was why they became wizards in the first place. This one, though, doesn’t care about magic for its own sake. He wants to make everything better, for everyone in Barokan.”

  “That sounds like a good thing,” Whistler said, puzzled. “Why do you say he’s a Dark Lord, then?”

  “I didn’t,” Sword said. “Not at first. He was doing things no one had done before, building roads and canals, and clearing away monsters, and so on, and really, it seemed as if he was making everything better. Traders and merchants could travel freely and bring their goods everywhere the roads went. Everyone loved the Wizard Lord. I liked what he was doing. Some of it made me nervous—building a Summer Palace in the Uplands, for example, didn’t seem like a good idea—but all in all, I thought it was wonderful.”

  He stopped, and the two walked on in silence for a few steps until Whistler said, “Wonderful—but? . . .”

  “But there were two things, two related things, that went wrong,” Sword said. “Is that the river, then?” He pointed.

  “That’s it. What two things?”

  Sword stared at the “river.” It was visible as a wiggling break in the grassy plain, rather than as a body of water. He suddenly felt much less foolish about missing it in the dark the night before.

  “What two things?” Whistler repeated.

  “Oh. Yes. Well, one thing was that he was obsessed with the idea that the Chosen were going to depose him,” Sword explained. “I mean, I can see why he would worry about it, since that’s what the Chosen are for, but he didn’t just worry, he was convinced that sooner or later we would come after him just because he was doing new and different things and not following the traditional patterns.”

  “Would you?”

  Sword shrugged. “I don’t think so, no—but I’m just the Swordsman; the Leader might have talked us all into it if she decided not to trust him.”

  “Could . . .she ? She? The Leader is a woman?”

  “Not much more than a girl, really,” Sword said, remembering. “Younger than I am, and no taller than my shoulder. The old Leader, the man who picked her for the job, was trying to make a joke of the role.” He threw Whistler a glance and saw the youth’s baffled expression. “It’s a long story,” he said. “The old Leader was not happy with how things went when we confronted the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills, so he tried to pass the title to the most inappropriate person he could find. Some powerful ler must have intervened, though, because she was actually a very good Leader, much better than the one who chose her had ever been.”

  “Was? Not is?”

  Sword nodded. “She’s a prisoner in the Wizard Lord’s dungeon now.”

  “But she still lives?”

  “So far as I know, yes.” They were nearing the river now, and the ground underfoot was getting soft.

  “The hole’s over here,” Whistler said, pointing off to the left.

  “Hole?”

  “Yes.”

  Sword decided to wait and see what the lad was talking about, rather than asking more questions; he followed along, and it soon became clear what the “hole” was.

  The river was little more than a muddy ditch with a trickle in the bottom, perhaps six inches deep and two or three feet across, with no sharp edge. The rivulet at the bottom was not much more than an inch deep, and the only way Sword could see to get water out of it into the jug was with a straw.

  But a few feet downstream, someone had dug a hole in the middle of the ditch. If Sword laced his fingers and formed his arms into a circle, that would just about be the size of the hole. The yellow dirt that had been displaced was piled up to one side, several feet away, where it would not easily wash back in.

  The water in the hole looked surprisingly clean. A thin streak of brown flowed in on the upstream side, but most of it was clear enough for Sword to see that the hole was roughly waist-deep.

  “Fill your jug on the downstream side,” Whistler said, stooping to demonstrate.

  Sword followed his example, and a moment later both jugs were full.

  “If we were sent to fetch water, we’d be expected to use the big vessels, and carry two apiece,” Whistler said as Sword lifted his jug out of the pool.

  “Of course,” Sword said as he set the jug aside and looked at the water. “Is it safe to drink this, straight from the stream? Does it n
eed to be blessed or boiled?”

  “We don’t bless anything,” Whistler said. “We have no priests, and we do not speak to ler. Our clothes are all made from ara so that the ler cannot trouble us.”

  “I see.” Sword was well aware of the magic-blocking properties of ara feathers, and the Uplanders used them everywhere; every man and woman in the Clan of the Golden Spear walked around wearing what would have been a fortune in ara feathers down in Barokan. “Do you boil it?”

  “Sometimes, but if you’re healthy, drinking it shouldn’t hurt you.”

  Sword nodded, then bent down and scooped up water with his hands. He still felt dry from his long walk across the plateau, and drank thirstily.

  Whistler watched him for a moment, then asked, “What was the other thing?”

  Sword looked up and blinked. “What?”

  “You said there were two problems with the Wizard Lord. One was that he thought the Chosen would turn on him. What was the other?”

  “Oh,” Sword said. He took one more drink, then shook the water from his hands and got to his feet. “You said that you have no priests up here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you have wizards?” He bent down to retrieve his now-full jug.

  “No. Our ancestors came up here partly to escape Lowland magic.”

  “Ah. That’s very much why the Wizard Lord built himself the Summer Palace,” Sword said. He turned back toward the Golden Spear camp and started walking. “He believes that Barokan’s magic is fading, and that we must learn to live without it.”

  “That’s the other thing? The problem?” Whistler walked alongside him, and the two ambled along at a casual pace.

  “Oh, not that he thought magic was fading,” Sword said. “It was what he did about it.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Several things. He built the Summer Palace, for one. His magic doesn’t work there; did you know that?”

  Whistler threw a glance to the west, past the camp toward the distant cliffs. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t think any of us did.”

  Sword nodded. “Well, it doesn’t. Which meant that when he was living there, he had no direct control over events in Barokan. The weather misbehaved a little, and there was some concern that he wouldn’t be able to protect everything effectively.”

  “I can see how that would be something to worry about,” Whistler said.

  “Most people didn’t worry about it, though,” Sword said. “Not really. They were too pleased with the roads and canals and the rest.”

  “But . . .”

  “But building the Summer Palace was only part of it,” Sword said. “Because he didn’t just want his magic gone; he wanted all of it gone. So he started killing all the other wizards—or rather, sending his men to kill them, so that the Seer wouldn’t know what was happening. He gave the orders while he was up in the Summer Palace, where the Seer couldn’t sense what was happening.”

  “Killing the other wizards?”

  Sword nodded again. “He intended to kill all of them, but a few escaped—at least, so far. He may find them eventually.”

  “But didn’t . . . I mean, I know he’s allowed to kill wizards who break the law, but didn’t anyone . . . he tried to kill them all?”

  “He came up with an excuse, so the soldiers wouldn’t question his orders—at least, I think that’s why he did it the way he did,” Sword explained. “I told you he was convinced the Chosen would turn on him eventually. Well, he found out that the other wizards had added a ninth member to the Chosen—or at least, he claims they did—and he told his men to kill any wizard who refused to tell him who the ninth Chosen is.”

  “But then, why didn’t the wizards tell him?”

  “They couldn’t,” Sword replied bitterly. “They had put themselves under a spell that prevented them from saying anything about the ninth member of the Chosen. It was deliberate murder, killing them that way.”

  Whistler nodded, and they walked several paces in silence before the Uplander asked, “Is there a ninth member of the Chosen? I mean, I only ever heard of eight—the Swordsman and the Leader and the Beauty and the Seer and the Thief, and . . . uh . . .”

  “The Archer, the Scholar, and the Speaker.” Sword completed the list for him. “That’s all I know of, too. But in the past, whenever the Chosen have killed a Dark Lord, another member has been added. The last one was the Speaker of All Tongues, added after the Dark Lord of Goln Vleys was removed. Well, eight years ago I slew the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills, so a ninth one should have been added.”

  “Wouldn’t they . . . would it have been kept secret? So secret, they used magic to keep themselves from talking about it?”

  Sword shrugged. “Who knows? Lore—that’s the Scholar, we call him Lore—said that the usual system is to tell the Leader of the Chosen, and no one else, but keeping it completely secret has never been required. The present Leader wasn’t told anything, but she took over from the old Leader right about the time news would have reached him, so it may be they told him, and he didn’t pass the news on to her.”

  “Or—would she have kept it secret from the rest of you?”

  “I don’t think so, but I don’t really know,” Sword admitted. “I haven’t known her very long. She certainly seems trustworthy, but that’s her role.”

  “So you don’t know whether there really is a ninth?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m still not sure I see how this led to you coming to the Uplands, though.”

  Sword sighed, and shifted his jug to his other hand.

  “He was killing wizards because, he said, they wouldn’t tell him who was the ninth member of the Chosen. The Leader and the Scholar went to talk to him about why he was killing wizards, and to ask him to stop. Because he was so certain that sooner or later the Chosen would turn on him, he assumed their request for an audience was the start of a campaign against him, and he determined to strike first. He turned it into a trap. He had soldiers whose ears were plugged, so they couldn’t be swayed by the Leader’s words or magic, and he took the Leader and the Scholar prisoner and had them thrown into his dungeons. Then he sent more soldiers to kill the rest of us—swordswomen to kill the Beauty, archers to kill me, swordsmen and spearmen to kill the Archer, and so on. They killed the Speaker and the Seer, but I escaped, and I think the Thief, the Beauty, and the Archer may have survived, but we were separated, and without the Seer we have no way to find one another, so I’m alone.”

  “But why are you here?”

  “Because all of Barokan is siding with him, with the Wizard Lord. Everywhere in the Lowlands I’m a fugitive, a criminal. He’s sent drawings of me to all the nearby towns, and soldiers are hunting for me, and I realized the only place I could go where he would never find me would be here, to the Uplands. So here I am.”

  Whistler nodded. “I see,” he said. “And what will you do next?”

  Sword grimaced, and shifted the jug again.

  “I wish I knew,” he said.

  [ 4 ]

  Sword was not permitted to hunt at first; the birds belonged to the clan, and he was not a member of the clan. He was given a fair share of the meat at supper, but not allowed to join the young men in obtaining it. Instead he was kept in or near the camp, where he earned his keep by hauling water, cleaning ara leather, and doing various other unpleasant but necessary jobs.

  In fact, he quickly realized that it was exactly the work he would have done as a slave. The only real differences in how he spent his days were that he was permitted to keep his sword, he was never chained, and his instructions were usually in the form of polite requests rather than brusque orders.

  Those differences were appreciated, though, and his evenings were his own—by the Patriarch’s orders, his assigned tasks stopped when the sun sank below the cliffs, where a slave might have found himself working well into the night. He decided to use part of this free time to make himself clothing in the Uplander styl
e—he planned ara leather pants, a woven-feather shirt, and a long leather vest, and perhaps, if he had the time and materials, a pair of the soft leather boots the Uplanders wore. A proper Uplander vest would be adorned with elaborate patterns of feathers, but Sword did not expect to have the time needed to do that, and intended to leave his plain.

  There were plenty of other things he hoped to do with his evenings, as well—planning his revenge on the Wizard Lord was high on the list. Learning more about the Clan of the Golden Spear, perhaps picking up a little of their language, getting to know some of the young women—he hoped to find time for all of those.

  First and foremost, though, he intended to stay in shape. Although he no longer had any magical compulsion requiring him to do so, Sword still had his habits, and he therefore spent the first hour of his free evening every day, beginning almost the moment the sun dropped below the horizon, practicing his swordplay. His ability with a blade was no longer superhuman, but all those years of practice had not vanished with his magic, and his skills were still sufficient to impress the Clan of the Golden Spear. By the fourth day his practice sessions were drawing a crowd—mostly young men and children, but a few women and older men watched, as well. Sword was not entirely sure at first just what they thought of his actions, since most of their conversation was in their own Uplander tongue rather than anything he could understand, but eventually a few began to comment in Barokanese.

  “I think I’m glad the Patriarch didn’t tell us to take your sword away,” one hunter remarked as he watched Sword slice a drifting feather to shreds without seeming to move anything but his wrist. “It wouldn’t have been easy.”

  “I’m glad of it, too,” Sword replied, without taking his eye off his target. “I wouldn’t want to harm anyone here.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” the hunter asked. “But your role is to kill people, isn’t it?”

  “My role,” Sword said as he split the remaining bit of quill lengthwise, “is to see that the Wizard Lord does no great harm to the people of Barokan.” He flicked a floating shred of feather upward to provide a fresh target.