Perilous Seas

by Dave Duncan

  But how could one ever deceive a mage and a sorceress?

  Again Inos was back in the forest meadow, and this time Rasha was there also, laughing uproariously. She had rooted Inos's feet to the ground, as she had once done in Krasnegar. She was watching and gloating as the pixies . . . but they were not pixies, now they were goblins.

  A faint glimmer of dawn smiled in through the window. The entire Imperial army seemed to be shoeing its mounts down in the street, but the yearlong night was ending at last.

  And again Inos was back in the forest, and this time the men tormenting her were djinns, and the glowing figure riding up to rescue her on a shining white horse was Rap.

  Rap, who had remained loyal when the imps and jotnar of Krasnegar had turned against their queen.

  Rap, the only man who had ever accepted a kiss from her without expecting more.

  Rap, who had died for her.

  Rap, whose wraith had haunted her the night she left Arakkaran.

  Crazy dreams!

  4

  "Why aren't you sleeping in the bed?" Ugish demanded, nudging Rap with a toe.

  Rap groaned, rubbed his smarting eyes, and sat up. Then he sneezed six times in rapid succession. Faint traces of dawn showed through the eastern window. He was stiff and chilled, and filthy as a gnome.

  "Is that for me?"

  "Uh-huh." Ugish had brought a robe, a fine-looking linen garment whose obvious newness suggested that it had been specially made by his father. Unfortunately Ugish had been dragging it, and that showed also.

  There would be no chance for shaving or washing here. Rap heaved himself to his feet and took the robe. "You can have your loincloth back, thank you very much."

  Ugish shrugged. "Don't want it. Why do I have to get all dressed up just because we have visitors?"

  "Mothers are funny about things like that."

  "Uh-huh. Why didn't you sleep in the bed?"

  Rap ran fingers through his hair and regretted the action. "Because it's full of mice."

  The little gnome's glorious bronze eyes widened. "Babies, too?"

  "Yes," said Rap. "But you'd better save them for later. If you spoil your appetite now, your mother will scold."

  Ugish nodded reluctantly. "Awright—if you promise not to tell the others!"

  As Rap walked out onto the great terrace, the first pinks and peaches of the rising sun were just starting to blossom on a forest of crumbling towers and turrets behind him. Warth Redoubt was ten times vaster than he had even guessed, a sprawling landscape in its own right. Once it must have clasped a whole city within its throbbing heart, but it had long since fallen into ruin. Shattered pillars and broken statuary lay thrown around in weed-strewn rubble.

  Warth perched like an eyrie on the lip of a huge natural arena. On all sides jagged peaks stood dark against the brightening sky.

  Ishist was waiting, with Darad and Gathmor. The two jotnar had been healed and restored, as Rap had been, and they wore white robes like his. Their faces showed great relief when they saw him.

  "I thought you might like to watch the dawn rising," the sorcerer remarked. "We are sheltered here."

  Rap had already registered the occult barrier enclosing the terrace, and he supposed that there would be other spells that he could not sense, for it was not the sun they would be watching rise.

  Far below, the blasted, barren valley was still dark except where awakening dragons were glowing and breathing jets of many-colored fire. Their rumbling anger echoed from the rocky walls. He wondered if the worms themselves could have excavated so enormous a pit, even if they had started before the coming of the Gods.

  "This is Warth Nest, of course," Ishist said, "home of the largest surviving blaze. In its prime it nurtured several times as many as it does now. It was from here that Olis'laine drew the sky army that he used to waste the Cities of the Ambly Pact. From here too came the Legions of Death in the Second Dragon War." He droned on for a while, obviously enjoying having an audience, however unappreciative. Rap did not know much history, and soon concluded that he did not want to.

  Then a dragon spiraled up and up, until it was a dark shape against brightness; and yet the sun flashed brightest on its scales and wings. It was followed rapidly by others, and the sorcerer fell silent. Deadly the monsters undoubtedly were, but their beauty was undeniable, too. Soon the sky was filled with them, a hundred or more, and they danced for the dawn. They soared too high for sight, they swooped like falcons girt in thunder, they spun and rolled in pairs or groups, in wild confusion like schooling fish or in the rigid ranks of geese. Some were as small as ponies, others longer than longships and older than storied cities. Their voices roared and rang like every instrument ever known, reverberating in chorus from the peaks, and Rap thought he also heard some hint of mental song, the secret melody of dragon serenading dragon.

  They shone in the hues of pearls and dew and the wings of butterflies; they blazed like a Winterfest ball. They were at once the most awesome thing he had ever witnessed and the most glorious. He felt tears run down into his stubble and he did not care. He wished Jalon had been here to see this, or Inos to share it with. And when the blaze had scattered and noise had faded and the last few were vanishing into the distance, he felt both crushed into insignificance and yet strangely uplifted.

  He wiped his cheeks as he looked at the tiny old sorcerer. "Thank you, my lord. Thank you!"

  "You are welcome, lad," the gnome said wryly. "You enjoyed it."

  "It was so beautiful! How many men have seen that?"

  "Very few in these times." Ishist glanced at the stunned horrified expressions on the faces of the two jotnar, and he chuckled. "Not many deserve it. Let us go and have this meal my wife is so excited about."

  Oftentimes the banquet hall had rung to the laughter of famed heroes, Ishist said, and mighty kings. From here Alshth'aer had marched to meet his doom foretold. Olis'laine had feasted here, and the grim Jiel, and their noble companies had cheered them, clashing silver goblets in toast and making sterner metals ring in pledge of honor. Here the brave and the beautiful had trod and sung and sworn historic oaths. Trumpets had brayed to the banners on the hammerbeams, viols had lamented, and many a nimble dancer had been showered with gold. Warlock Thraine of high renown had visited Warth more than once, 'twas said, and had wrought many marvels in this very chamber for Allena the Fair.

  But now the fine-arched windows held no glass and the subtle panels had all fallen from the walls. Now it belonged to the rodents, the birds, and the gnomes. In places the planks had rotted away, and a careless step might drop a man four stories to the cellars.

  But in the center of the dusty, windswept desolation stood a long and shining table. Gold plate glinted on damask, and crystal sparkled. The sorcerer had been at work, Rap saw, and he wondered whether the gold was shielded from the dragons or was merely an illusion that would not deceive them. As the men approached, Athal'rian was adjusting eight children around her, while clutching a baby. Her family seemed to increase each time Rap turned his back. The smaller ones kept pulling off their wraps, and she kept telling Ugish and the older girls to dress them again. Ugish himself was setting a poor example.

  She handed the baby to one of the older children so she could embrace her husband. By the time the long kiss was ended, more than half the children had stripped again and one of me toddlers was heading for a chasm. Rap himself went after it and brought it back. It bit him.

  "Now, are we ready?" Ishist inquired.

  "Chairs, dearest?" Athal'rian said.

  "Chairs of course. Describe them."

  Athal'rian became flustered and made vague gestures. "Blue velvet. Oak. About so high. Backs carved, tall . . ."

  Three chairs appeared at one end of the table, and about a dozen at the other.

  Her greasy face lighted up. "Thank you, my love. Master Adept, perhaps you and your friends would like to sit at that end, where the children will not disturb you?" Such tact was oddly touching in a woman s
o obviously addled.

  Rap seated himself at one end of the long table, with Darad and Gathmor flanking him. Both seemed too overcome by emotion to speak, and from the greenish tinge of their cheeks, Rap suspected that their noses were working at normal efficiency. There was a fair breeze blowing through the ruin, but even so the idea of dining with gnomes was enough to stun anyone.

  For the first time he now saw inhabitants of Warth Redoubt other than the dragonward and his family. He had already sensed them with farsight, and the Mews floor had certainly suggested a large population. A troop of servant gnomes brought in dishes and laid them before the diners, and then mercifully departed.

  The first course was a thin soup. It was cold and greasy, but Rap gulped it down manfully, choking on the gristly lumps and ignoring floating feathers. The others copied him with grim dedication. The wine had a sour flavor but it was drinkable, and probably occult.

  Then the gruesome company of ragged footman returned with the second course. And departed.

  "This was . . . is . . . fish," Rap remarked cheerfully. "Her ladyship tells me that she uses freshly ensorceled supplies, prepared according to famed elvish recipes." He gave each companion in turn a steely look, and each groaned softly and grudgingly addressed his high-piled plate. The fish was a sort of pike, mostly bones, and smothered in sickly caramel sauce.

  At the other end of the table the children were having great difficulty adjusting to the idea of chairs, and reasonably so, for the small ones could not see the fare even if they stood on the seats. Ignoring their mother's ineffectual protests, some of them settled on the floor as usual, but most crawled up to sit on the table itself, eating out of the serving dishes. The food at that end was traditional gnomish cuisine, and Rap wished his farsight was not so efficient. Sweat prickled on his forehead as he tried to force sticky, bony pike down his throat.

  Ishist himself had magicked his own chair to a suitable height and was eating in rather moody silence, using both hands, seeming to be balanced somewhere between annoyance at this folly and tolerant affection for his wife's odd notions.

  "This fish is most delicious, ma'am," Rap said.

  Athal'rian flashed him a smile of relief and thanked him for the compliment.

  He nagged his mind to give him something else to say. He knew how formal affairs should go, because he had watched Holindarn entertain guests at the high table in Krasnegar. Gentlefolk chatted while they ate. They made jokes, and laughed.

  Jokes about what, though?

  Darad must have the right sort of experience in his multiple memory, but his wits were too dim to use it or even see the need. Gathmor's idea of dinner conversation was planning the brawl to follow.

  Inspiration came to Rap like a pardon to a felon. "I have never seen so magnificent a chamber, my lady! The king's hall in Krasnegar would fit in here a dozen times."

  "Oh, do tell me about it, Master Adept!"

  So Rap described the palace in Krasnegar, and if the dragonward's lady somehow assumed that the raised dais was where he had sat and the servants' end was not, well, that was what she expected, not what he said. Then he asked about dining halls in Hub, and she became quite animated in describing them, ignoring her ironically smiling husband and the chaos of children squabbling amid the gold plate. As daughter of the warden of the south, she had moved in the highest levels of society. At fifteen, she had been presented to the imperor. She knew the Opal Palace itself.

  "I hardly think of Hub anymore," she asserted, smiling at her husband, "and I would never dream of going back." They kissed on that.

  She could not have been very old when she left, Rap decided, unless her age had been occultly altered. Mentally she was a small child. Was that the reason she now lived as a gnome, or had she been sane when she came here?

  Something was licking his toes . . .

  Rap slid his plate unobtrusively from me table and laid it on his lap. Soon he could hear satisfying sounds of pike bones crunching. When he brought it up again, it had been polished. The two jotnar at his side were chewing grimly, their faces running sweat.

  The servants came trooping in again with another course, and Rap found himself facing a stag's head with antlers gilded and a potato in its mouth. He was expected to carve from this, apparently, but the cooks had neglected to skin it before boiling it, and it looked rather too rare, anyway. There was still a reproachful look in its eyes.

  In an attempt to seem busy, he ladled out generous heaps of vegetables, comprising unwashed tubers and soft-boiled lemons. The other two nibbled listlessly at them while he prepared to do battle with the stag. He must also continue the insane conversation with the girl-woman at the far end of the table.

  Yelling over the rioting children between them, she asked about his travels. Rap told a vague tale of being kidnapped by jotunnish raiders, and of shipwreck. Eventually he mentioned that he had visited Faerie and had been a guest of the proconsul. That convenient euphemism caused Ishist's globular eyes to twinkle like cabochons of jet. He must have ransacked all of Rap's memories by now, and probably the others' also.

  "I have always wanted to visit Faerie," Athal'rian remarked wistfully, "but of course my husband's duties make it so difficult for us to get away."

  Rap thrust his fork into the stag's head, and one of its soggy eyes winked at him. He recoiled and then glared reproachfully at the sorcerer, who seemed to be totally engrossed in biting lumps out of a shapeless mass that might have been a bird's nest. Ishist, Rap suspected, had a dangerous sense of humor.

  Athal'rian had noticed his hesitation. "Is that knife not sharp enough, Master Adept?"

  "Quite sharp enough, ma'am! I am letting the pleasures of your conversation distract me from my duties."

  "Oo, flattery! But Daddy always says that wit is the finest sauce, and a meal without discourse has no flavor. Let me see . . . Who is proconsul of Faerie at present?"

  "Lady Oothiana, ma'am."

  "Oh!" Athal'rian seemed taken aback. She glanced uneasily at Ishist, then her eyes wandered briefly over the children. "Don't do that on the table, Shuth. Go to the Mews. Dear Oothie and I took viol lessons together. How is she?"

  Rap cursed under his breath, feeling he had chosen to ride at a dangerous fence. "She is very well, ma'am."

  "I forget if . . . Did she finally marry that musclebound soldier? What was his name? Yodello?"

  Tricky takeoff, landing unseen . . ."Yes, she did, ma'am."

  Athal'rian bit her lip and seemed to slip away into a memory. "He was very pretty. Too pretty for a man, you know."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  The glorious opal eyes came up to stare along the table at him, and their fires nickered through a mist of tears. "He wanted me to marry him, but Daddy had promised me to Consul Uppinoli's youngest."

  Ishist frowned. "My dear—"

  "How furious he was when I told him I would rather wed a gnome!" She looked hesitantly down at Ishist, and seemed suddenly aghast at what she had said. Then she smiled. "And I was right!" She bent for another lass.

  The conversation ended when two of the smaller boys began to fight over the last rat and than pulled it apart in a tug of war. Darad leaned sideways in his chair and threw up everything, triggering Gathmor's reflexes also. That was bad. Even worse was the way the children all rushed over to clean it up.

  5

  The visitors stood while Athal'rian departed with her brood, sent away by an angry-looking Ishist. The table vanished abruptly, and so did all the chairs except the sorcerer's.

  Obviously the time had come to talk business. Rap walked forward, aware that his two companions were following closely and leaving everything to him. He was an adept, and they were relying on him to save them. But he was also the cause of their danger, for he had used power against a dragon. He had violated the Protocol that had ruled Pandemia for three thousand years.

  He stopped before the foul little sorcerer, who was lounging back in his high chair and picking his teeth with a slender bone. The s
eat was so much too big for him that his muck-laden bare feet stuck straight out. His bulging black eyes were unreadable.

  Gruffly the gnome said, "Thank you. Master Rap. I'm grateful."

  That made no sense at all! Rap had done nothing to earn the sorcerer's gratitude—it must be a trick. Yet why should a sorcerer need to use tricks?

  "For what, my lord?" Then Rap remembered that he was not supposed to give the gnome titles. But apparently it did not matter, for Ishist just shrugged inscrutably and switched his gaze to the two sullen jotnar.

  Rap knew how hard this must be for them. They had grown up around gnomes. All the towns and cities in the Impire had gnomes to keep down the vermin and deal with the garbage, and all large ships carried one or two, but there had been none in Krasnegar. He had not met gnomes until he was an adult, and then he had merely filed them away in his mind as another race of people new to him, like fairies or trolls. Gathmor and Darad, humbly waiting to hear their fate from this squat and squalid old ragamuffin, must be feeling as if a mongrel dog had suddenly ascended the Opal Throne and started barking orders. Come to think of it, Ishist did rather resemble a pug dog, with his pop eyes and upturned nose, with the bloodstained cake of hair around his mouth and all those teeth he was picking.

  With a shiver of fear, Rap realized that the sorcerer might still be reading his thoughts.

  The ugly old man flipped his toothpick away and scratched reflectively at the hairy bulge protruding above his belt. "Sailor, you are an innocent mundane caught up in occult matters that do not concern you. You are free to go."

  Gathmor scowled, shot a glance at Rap, and said, "I'll wait for my shipmate."

  "As you wish."

  "No!" Rap said. "For the Gods' sake, Cap'n—"