The Tale of the Five Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  “He’s welcome,” Cillmod said. His eyes rested on Herewiss, cool, and he put out his hand.

  Herewiss drew Khávrinen and leaned on its hilts. He bowed slightly and said, “I greet you, sir. But you will know that I come on the wings of the defiance and declaration of war from my good mistress and lady the Queen. Were there a king here, sir, I would kiss his hand. But the rightful King is elsewhere. Meanwhile, I do my duty to the throne of Arlen, at least.” And here he bowed again.

  Cillmod leaned back a bit in the throne, looking not even slightly put off by Herewiss’s formal courtesy, or calculated insolence. “Prince of the Brightwood, you’re welcome regardless,” he said. “And regardless that it seems you’ve chosen the wrong side in this quarrel.”

  “That the event will prove, sir,” Herewiss said.

  “Doubtless it will,” Cillmod said, “and doubtless the Goddess will adjudicate that decision as she did the previous one, which placed me here. Meanwhile, this is a social occasion. Allow me to introduce my ministers.”

  One by one they came forward. Herewiss bowed to them, exactly as he had bowed to Cillmod—no less deeply, no more—and noted names and faces.

  “And Rian s’Heisarth—” Cillmod said. “My consultant on the royal magics.”

  Herewiss could have choked on that one. A king should need a consultant on the royal magics about as much as he should need one on breathing. He looked as casually as he could at Rian, and reached out to feel his thought.

  And felt nothing, nothing: a void more complete than the cloak of darkness and confusion that had been thrown about the others’ thoughts. He was the source. Herewiss looked up at the man standing near the throne: a man of medium height and build broad across the shoulders, silver around the temples and scattered through the rest of the dark hair. Everything about him was businesslike and restrained, even to the cut and style of the clothes; sober colors, but not somber, everything in good taste; a man you might pass by in any crowd of functionaries. Except that this was the source of the trouble—this rugged face with its assured, kindly, middle-aged look. This was the heart of the evil. And it smiled at him. Not an innocent smile, but not a wicked one either. Thoughtless, unconcerned, settled, secure—utterly calm. Not as if the man saw his destruction coming.

  And how could he not? Herewiss thought. He must know that I know what he’s been doing—

  Rian bowed to him and said, “My lord Herewiss.”

  Herewiss bowed, significantly less deeply than he had to the others, and said, “Sir, I hope you are of use to your lord.”

  “He’s found me so in the past,” Rian said. It was a hearty, friendly voice, warm.

  Herewiss was not to be charmed. When you tried to kill me the other night, and failed, Herewiss said to him in mind as clearly as he could, to see whether he was heard, was I welcome then?

  No answer came back, not that he had been expecting one. Cillmod said, “Leaving political abstractions aside, you bring us two great wonders. One, yourself and your Fire; and another—” He glanced at Sunspark. “What manner of creature is that?”

  Sunspark looked at Rian and said, “His Power constrains me to answer. I am Fire: and he beat me in fair contest, and bound me. So I must be his slave.”

  Herewiss kept his face straight, though the urge to laugh was strong. There was a soft sound of laughter in his mind.

  “His power must be great indeed,” Cillmod said. “Such power would enhance any ruler to which it became attached.”

  “It will not enhance anyone,” Sunspark said, looking coolly from Cillmod to Herewiss. “My servitude is involuntary, bound only by Power. Someday his will slip, and I will be free, though first I will kill him and his folk, and any other who seems to have been party to my binding. There is a great deal hereabouts—” and it smiled— “that will burn.”

  Herewiss lifted his eyebrows. Loved, he thought, what are you saying to these people?!

  Bad enough that one person you love may shortly be within their reach, Sunspark said quietly. Would you have that one, the cold one there, think that he might have two? If they see me as an oppressed slave eager to be free, they will not try to use me against you….

  There was no arguing about that. But its assertiveness on his behalf astonished him. Spark—

  Later, dear heart.

  “In the meantime, sir,” Cillmod said, “your presence here and that of the sword you carry, and that which flows from it, are what we’re here to celebrate. I appreciate your desire not to stand on compliment, but to say what’s in your mind. I too will say it, so that we may start clean. This fight will doubtless go to the stronger. But I stood my ground, and worked, while the one you support ran, and stole. I’ll say no more about it than that for now; we’ll talk again in coming days. Meantime, pray partake of the entertainment.”

  ***

  It actually only went on for several hours, though it seemed like much more. Herewiss had never been good at meeting large numbers of people all together, even though now he had the Fire to burn faces and names into his memory. And despite the Fire, many of the minds felt alike—either afraid, or intrigued, or angry, or wearing a barely-managed combination of all three. But Herewiss ate and drank as casually as he could, and chatted as politely as possible, sometimes literally about the weather, because there was frequently nothing else these people could discuss without becoming too angry or afraid for him to bear. And the food was good, as Andaethen had promised: the wild boar in rowan brandy almost made him ruin his manners. And the wine was very good indeed… but there was no Brightwood white.

  He smiled slightly at that thought on his third trip to the table full of decanters. He looked up and down it for something new to try. The courtier with whom he had been chatting, a small man named Sowan, pointed at one and said, “That red from Lahain, that’s very nice…. ”

  Herewiss looked at it and wondered if the grapes tasted of their plowed-in lord. But he said, “Yes, thank you,” and held the cup out to be filled. It was a particularly dark, rich, toothsome-looking red; the resemblance to blood was certainly accidental. As he drank, the taste warmed him. What came as rather more of a shock was the poison.

  Ah, heaven, he thought, it had to happen, didn’t it? Well, now what? For there were all kinds of reactions available to him, from the blatant to the subtle. At the moment, the state of his nerves inclined him to the blatant. Should the cup become a serpent and crawl away shouting accusations? Should the wine in it boil over? But it really was good-tasting wine, and it was a shame to waste. So Herewiss drank the rest of it, thoughtfully and with pleasure, while Sowan looked at it.

  “Very nice,” Herewiss said to the poisoner. “Another, please?”

  Sowan filled the cup again, finishing the decanter. He had seemed a nervous man to begin with; now the nervousness began to grow worse. While Herewiss stood and chatted with him about the crops up north, and various other small, inconsequential matters, Sowan watched him, and watched him, and developed a tic next to his right eye.

  Herewiss meanwhile had some of his attention elsewhere. At least no one else will get any of that wine by accident. Now then— It was slow poison, naturally. It would have been impolitic to kill the new Darthene attaché actually at such a gathering. But two or three days later, a flux that turned to a gripe that turned to a shakiness and paralysis in the limbs, and finally the lungs and heart—that would have been permissible. After all, everyone knew that there were numerous factions active against Lorn’s cause. No one would connect such a deed to Cillmod: not openly—not if they were wise.

  And who knows who poor Sowan here is acting for? I need more time to find out. … But now he’s afraid I might overdose, Herewiss thought, and keel over too early. Poor man! His main concern now was the manner in which he should handle the poison. Probably the best approach was to poison the poison itself. A moment with closed eyes, “savoring” the bouquet of the cup, let him slip down into his Fire and go questing down through his gut and into the blood-v
essels that were carrying the substance away through him. It was fortunately not one of those corrosive electuaries that ate one away from inside, which would have meant a lot of tedious repair work, but rather one of the poisons with an affinity for the nerves, that blocked their life-fire from running along them. Each tiniest particle of the poison had a sort of handle at the end of it, that was meant to push into the gaps at the ends of the nerves, and would block them. With the Fire, Herewiss pulled off those handles from a few hundred or thousand of the particles, then turned them loose to subvert their fellows into dropping their handles themselves. It was all done in a few seconds. He opened his eyes to see Sowan looking at him with growing horror.

  There were more eyes on him than just one pair. He could feel it, that itch, as if on the skin, but actually of the mind: someone noticing with annoyance, with ill intent, the use of Fire. He smiled politely to Sowan, and said, “Dinner sometime perhaps, sir? We can discuss—” he smiled much more sweetly— “politics.”

  Sowan stammered, and hurriedly took himself and his tic away.For another hour or so he wandered the gathering, greeting people, putting faces to names he had heard. He was back at the wine table again when he became aware of a slight silence around him, just a change in the way people were talking nearby. He looked up and around for the reason of it, and saw Cillmod next to him, eying the decanter Herewiss was holding. He offered his own empty cup.

  “Sir,” Herewiss said, surprised. “This wine?”

  “Of your courtesy.”

  Herewiss filled Cillmod’s cup, raised his own—and stopped, looking at the cup, seeing and feeling the image-flash: night, the walls of Darthen, the shoulder touching his. He glanced at Cillmod.

  “Your health, at least,” Cillmod said, with just a touch of irony.

  “If nothing else,” Herewiss said, “yours.” He drank.

  They looked at each other. Cillmod glanced over to one side of the table, away from the people watching them. Herewiss went with him as Cillmod stepped aside, out of the press.

  “Sir,” Herewiss said, quietly, when they were private enough, “again I’ll presume on your hospitality and speak plain, seeing you say you prefer it. I wonder much that you desire to be seen being friendly to me.” He did not say, You know I’m against you. Though he was tempted to, and that temptation was born of nothing more certain than a slight peculiar sense of liking for the man. And is it a true sense?—or am I just being betrayed by his likeness to Lorn?—

  “True,” Cillmod said, with the slightest shrug. He headed over toward the terrace doors on the east side of the room. “Will you walk?”

  “Certainly.”

  They came out onto the terrace. It was as Herewiss remembered it from his youth, long and wide, with a marble balustrade on the east side; the view was eastward, looking out toward the way the Great Road ran from the city gates, off toward the hills, and Darthen beyond the river, all growing indistinct in the blue dusk.

  “It’s intrigue they expect,” Cillmod said quietly, as they walked up the length of the terrace, “so we may give them the appearance of it, at least. A fine mare’s nest of it you’ve fallen into. I wonder that you can bear it, a man like you; after being out in the solitudes for such a long while, seemingly dealing with more important matters.” He looked sideways at Khávrinen.

  Herewiss was taken aback by this annoyingly acute reading of what had been in his mind. “It’s not the business of one with Power,” he said, “to hide away. The business of Power is to be in the world, working in it, being of use. A man who can’t do that—” He shrugged. “—might as well never have gone looking for it at all.”

  “You say that so easily,” Cillmod said. They turned and started back down the terrace. “‘A man who has it.’ All other things aside, does it not ride hard on you to be the only one?”

  “If things go the way I intend, I won’t be the only one for long. I have other business than kingmaking.”

  Cillmod nodded slowly. “To spread the Fire, then.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But for the moment, kingmaking… is of a higher priority, I take it.”

  “How should it be otherwise?” Herewiss said. “Saving your honor.”

  It was pointedly not the honorific one used with royalty. Cillmod smiled thinly and said, “Don’t think I don’t hear that tone from my own. If you think to nettle me by it, you’ll have to do better.” He shook his head and looked at Herewiss, and for a moment the look in his eyes was so much Freelorn’s that he was brought up short. “How could it be otherwise for me?” Cillmod said. “Knowing I was who I was?”

  “You’ll say now,” Herewiss said, “that they pressed the job on you. That you had no choice.”

  “Indeed they pressed it!” Cillmod said, angry, though his face stayed smooth. “Of course I had no choice. A half- king is at least better than none. And we had none when your friend—” there was less twist of anger on the word than there might have been— “refused to come back home after the old King died.”

  “Quite a few of the Four Hundred wanted him dead,” Herewiss said.

  “Some of them did,” said Cillmod. “Others—” He shook his head. “Even now I’m not sure. Those other lords were the first to jeer at my failures, though they did it secretly. The name, Uncraeft, that was their doing: do you think it didn’t bite, reading it daubed on walls, while I thrashed around hunting for solutions, and watched the country people starve? Even now, when things are working better, I look at those lords and great ones and wonder if they truly support me. Something else is behind their eyes: and you know it. That’s why you’re here.”There was no dissembling with such directness. Herewiss said nothing.

  “So off goes your friend, flying about the Kingdoms and making my job more difficult,” Cillmod said, in a tone more aggrieved than angry. “If he shows his face here, it’s only to steal my money—”

  “Your money?”

  “The money that I was supposed to be using to buy seed and food from Darthen, and to feed my people, and the army standing to protect them!”

  That thought had occurred to Herewiss in the middle of one uncomfortable night—that Lorn’s raid on the treasuries at Osta had itself triggered the Arlene mercenaries’ raids on Darthene land. It would seem to some a clever ploy to force Darthen to move against Cillmod, Herewiss thought. Not that it was, of course. I only wish that Lorn could actually think that far ahead….

  But in any case, some people here at court certainly were glad enough to be given excuse enough to attack the Darthenes at Bluepeak. It still takes two to make a fight…. “Leaving armies out of it,” Herewiss said, “it’s not money that feeds people. It’s the royal magics.”

  “We have not been entirely unsuccessful at that.”

  “We,” Herewiss said. “The royal magics are no plural business… save when two rulers wed.”

  “Once, perhaps. But armies, once bought, have to be fed as well: and they have an annoying tendency to take what they like when they see it close to hand.”

  “You’re going to tell me now that the raid on the Darthene granaries was the army’s doing, not yours. That you didn’t order it. Or sanction it.”

  Cillmod looked at Herewiss. “I did not order it,” he said, “but who would believe that? And I had no choice but to sanction it, afterwards, otherwise the army would have unseated me. Arlen with a non-king, but one with some slight experience, is just managing to struggle along. Arlen without some scion of royal blood would fail in three seasons.” Cillmod shook his head. “And the army cares too little about the issue, or about anything but their own stomachs. Too many of them are from out of country—Steldenes and such, who hold the royal magics to be a myth, a legend outlived. Others—” He glanced at Herewiss with an odd expression. “They would not have your friend instead, you know. He has an old name of cowardice among them, and they could never accept him. But there are rumors of another child of his blood, or Ferrant’s, somewhere in the land, in hiding. One
that could be brought here, and hand-raised by a regent to rule to order. Their order.”

  Herewiss held himself utterly still, face and mind; and Khávrinen abruptly flamed searing blue, as something struck at it, and him, from outside. Not Cillmod, but another mind, here in the palace, eavesdropping, and now reaching out to strike with awful precision at the truth of something it wanted to know. The bolt was held away from him by the Fire caging Herewiss’s thoughts, but not by much. There was terrible force behind it, and the force transmitted itself straight into Herewiss through the protective structure of his Fire and knocked the breath out of him, as if someone had punched him hard in the gut.

  Or so it would do in a moment, for he was busy reacting. Now then, Herewiss thought, and in his mind he swiftly reached out and grasped the weapon that had struck him. It had felt, still felt, like a spear trying to punch through mail. As a spear he treated it, then, grabbed it under the head with hands mailed in Fire, moved sidewise out of its path, and yanked, hard, pulling the one who wielded it off balance and toward him, close enough to see faces and come to grips. What he held twisted in his hands, like a spear made of lightning, burning and writhing and trying to get away. Herewiss hung on grimly, pulling. He got a better grip on the shaft of sorcery that had struck at him, and pulled it closer, dragging the internal balance of the spell out of its worker’s control and closer to ruin.

  He recognized the structure of it through the burning and the strain. What he held was the probe end, the weapon end, of a spell meant to drag some one fact from his mind and then burn away the fact itself and the path of the spell as well, leaving no trace. As if such a thing would work against the Fire— But that was the problem. It had almost worked. There was horrible strength behind the thrust of the spell, anchoring it, now trying to pull it out of Herewiss’s grip before he could work his will on it. And it was succeeding—