by S. E. Smith
Sara nodded somberly. “That’s what Aunt Lana says.”
Kev suddenly remembered the University rumors that when Svetlana Tai was away from the University, doing fieldwork on distant moons and planets where alien civilizations had lived before they died out, she was nothing less than a swashbuckling adventurer and a mercenary scoundrel. Whether to believe such rumors was a different matter. With enemies who were academics with good imaginations and even better vocabularies, Svetlana’s reputation for dishonest derring-do might be greatly exaggerated.
Then again, it was possible that her niece had a streak of dishonesty. Kev hoped not. He’d started to enjoy Sara’s company.
Jerad said, “Why don’t we start at the Grail Arcade?”
Sara nodded. “Good idea. I’ll go buy some more information. Then I’ll meet you there.”
“Likewise,” said Paolo, “if you’ll leave me that guidebook. Let me study it and see what I find.”
They left Paolo poring over the guidebook. The old scholar apparently liked to hang out in the Fool Reversed, listening to Wendisan tongues get looser and more dialectical with strong drink. But in order to stay clearheaded and take good notes, Paolo drank lemonade and limewater.
At the Arcade, with its rows of targets and projectiles with which to hit the targets, Kev and Jerad jostled through a crowd of onlookers to get close enough to watch how it worked.
“The targets move. You have to anticipate the movement of them—find the pattern—and at the same time account for spingravity,” Kev advised Jerad. “It’s like fight practice.”
Jerad was nothing if not an apt student. His well-aimed darts landed squarely in his chosen target, a skittish ball with fluttering fringes, and stuck. He had his choice of prizes from a welter of brightly colored toys and bric-a-brac.
He carefully picked up a shiny cup with elaborate, paired handles.
Lights flashed on the base of the cup.
“Looks like you made the right choice,” Kev said.
Asking for unicorn rumors cost Sara a patronizing grin from the Rumor Monger. But that was all it cost her, since he had none to sell.
So she asked for rumors about the Grail. Remembering something Aunt Lana said about how to deal with the Rumor Monger, she added firmly, “And for my good coin, don’t tell me what’s in the guidebook. I want to know who might want it. Asking for a friend.”
“How much money do you have?”
She shook out half the coins in her purse.
“Oho!” said the Monger. A thin man of indeterminate age, he shared a tent with the Fortune Teller, who ran her business on the other side of a hanging of thick cloth. “The rules say I have to tell you as much as is worth what you pay. So I will. Baron Bloodred would want the Grail, and the Feuding Dukes, plus the Church Prelate and possibly the Sultanate’s Ambassador. Of all those, Bloodred is the one who’d use the least fair means to get it, and most eagerly, as I hear he’s just lost a girl he wanted, so the Grail would be a consolation prize.” The Rumor Monger lowered his voice. “But someone else wants it too—and enough to break rules and bones for it. Tell your friend to settle for a gewgaw Grail.” He eyed the coins in his hand. “You could always try to steal the one in the Feigned Fane.”
Sara wished Lana were here to sort out true rumors from expensive fabrications. Lighter of purse, she made her way to the Entertainment Quarter. It buzzed with games of chance and cards and skill, comedic skits, and performances of ancient musical instruments. At the Grail Arcade, she found Kev and Paolo standing beside Jerad, who proudly held a tall shiny cup. With a sweeping bow, Jerad gave the cup to Sara.
It was flimsy, its shiny surface just thin paint, already marred by a few scratches. “Is it a gewgaw Grail?” she asked Paolo.
“I dare say. The form of it is an artifact called a victory cup, newer than the Grail by a thousand years. But we’re heading uphill to a place called Graal Well.” Paolo pointed to the map and flashed a smile. “I was asked about the etymology of the word ‘grail’ by the Winterfair Committee. I wondered what that was about.”
Sara put the victory cup in her rucksack. “One down,” she said firmly. “Who knows how many to go!”
And maybe, she thought, just maybe, a unicorn too.
Four
Team Grail
The fields adjoining the village had a number of stages set up where performers demonstrated fighting or acrobatic skills. Nothing much was happening farther away from the village right now. Fairgoers walked here and there in ones and twos, enjoying the greatest warmth of the day. Otherwise the lanes and byways were empty.
“Graal is an old word that means grail?” Jerad asked.
Paolo nodded. “But say, let’s not walk to the well like a university fact-finding committee. That might attract attention. Several different ways lead there.”
Kev nodded. With the good luck to have a crafty old Wendisan in their party, he intended to listen to that person.
Directed by Paolo, they split up. Kev’s route was a narrow lane through an orchard. These trees looked mature enough to bear fruit in the summer, although now they were dormant. Kev idly wondered just how much knowledge about terraforming and other sciences, including agronomy, was hidden away in Wendis. Its face to the outside universe was entertaining—the interstellar amusement park and fairs—but every colleague Kev had at the University who wasn’t brand-new to Wendis believed that the old star city knew far, far more than it ever let on.
Kev found himself eager to rejoin Sara at the well. To look at her again. And he wondered about that. He thought of himself as a solitary scholar. He was no loner: he had friends among his academic colleagues and, in Jerad, a teaching assistant who took an equal interest in his hobby of ancient fighting. What Kev lacked was a lover. It had been years since his last love affair ended. To be exact, it ran aground on his scholarship, which had led him to historical conclusions at odds with her Faxen nationalism. He didn’t miss their superheated arguments. But perhaps he was lonelier than he’d realized. Sara Tai had, in just a few hours, raised his sexual interest to a level he’d not felt in years.
Being from the planet Goya, Sara was a semi-outsider in Wendis, and a scholarly thinker, like him. That made solid reason for the attraction he felt to be mutual. But it might be wishful thinking to hope she would be attracted to him. He knew he ought to steel himself for that possibility.
From different directions, Kev and Sara got to the well almost at the same time. Their eyes met. And no, he wasn’t indulging in wishful thinking. She was delighted to see him again. If she had any of her aunt’s rumored dishonesty, it wasn’t in her expressive face.
Jerad arrived next. “I didn’t see anything special on the way,” he announced. He looked into the well, with its waist-high ring of faux stones under a small steep roof that held a windlass coiled with rope and a pail that could be let down to bring water up. “I only see water.”
Kev probed the water with his spear. “Deeper than this.” The water that dripped off the spear was chilly. “And cold.”
Sara leaned down over the water while Kev admired the view of her afforded by that position. He concluded that she was very much as attractive from behind as from the front. “Odd.” Her voice sounded hollow from inside the well.
“What might be odd?” asked Paolo, walking through a gap in the hedge around the well.
“There are wells on Goya. It doesn’t smell like those. This isn’t a planet, so maybe it wouldn’t—but the smell of it reminds me of a cistern. A container where water is stored between uses.”
“Do say!” Paolo waved toward the way they’d come. As the oldest and slowest, Paolo had taken the most direct route uphill from the village. “I just passed by a mechanism that looked like a valve. It was above an empty channel. I expect that if the water in the well were released, it would be channeled downhill.”
“And I noticed fields with irrigation channels,” Sara said. “It doesn’t rain in Wendis enough to water some of the crops th
ey grow here.”
They all looked at each other speculatively. Jerad said, “Let’s see if it works!”
Paolo was right. It did look like a kind of valve, but very big and hard to reach, positioned above the empty channel. It would take a long, strong stick to turn it.
“Or this.” Kev extended the butt of his spear.
“Don’t break your weapon!” Sara said quickly.
Her concern pleased Kev. “I’ve seen replica weapons turned to matchsticks in hard fights. So I bought one that’s unbreakable.” Putting all his strength into a hard pull, Kev made the valve turn with a coarse rasp.
Water trickled out. The trickle increased until water cascaded into the channel to swirl downhill.
“We won’t get charged with vandalism, will we?” Jerad asked.
“Knowing Wendis, they probably have a release scheduled for now and they’re seeing if any Winterfair players figure it out,” Sara said practically.
Inside the well, the water level was dropping almost as fast as someone could climb down the rough stones inside. Not that it looked like an easy climb or particularly safe. “I’ll go,” Kev decided.
Sara said, “Look, this windlass is sturdy, and the rope is strong—it’s not rotten fiber. Take the pail down with you while we hold onto the windlass. If you lose your footing, we’ll keep you from falling in.”
Kev took her advice, and the pail. She released some of her drone motes to go down with him too. The motes circled around Kev, lighting the walls of the well. He was able to fit his fingers and the toes of his boots into recesses in the rough faux-stone wall just well enough to clamber down. The top of the well dwindled to a pale circle with his friends’ heads silhouetted against the sea-green sky. Kev became aware of low-frequency sounds. That would be evidence of underground air blowers, water pipes, and other sleepless mechanisms of Wendis, he thought.
“How goes it?” Sara called down.
“Easy!” he lied. In point of fact it was a hard climb, several degrees of difficulty beyond recreational. He was glad he’d trained hard for the fighting in Warway.
And he was surprised at just how much he wanted to find this Grail, if any. Maybe he didn’t want the thing itself so much as to show Sara that he could do it. How had that happened? He was scholar long since confirmed in the ways of aloneness. An expatriate whose academic work about the history of Faxe would have been marginalized if published at all on Faxe. He was tolerated at social gatherings that included Faxen diplomats—but more and more often not invited at all. Without ever admitting as much to anyone, including himself, maybe he was angry enough at his situation to seek release in ancient martial arts. . . .
Thanks to the light of the motes, Kev noticed a stone different from the rest. It was more rectangular than round and stuck out from the other stones in the wall. And had writing on it.
Kev braced his feet and shoulders against the well’s walls to use both hands to pull on the special stone. When it came out, something clicked behind it, a sharp vibration came through the walls of the well, and the water below his feet started rising.
The well was booby-trapped against anybody who took the special stone.
The water came up fast.
Kev yelled, “Pull the rope!” His friends took up the slack. He tossed the stone into the pail and started up with one hand gripping the rope just above the pail. His boot slipped. Only his grip on the rope kept him from plunging into the water. It swirled around his feet.
Sara called, “Hang on, Kev! Jerad, pull!”
Trusting Jerad and the rope, he hung onto it with both hands, using his feet for all the traction he could get.
Finally he reached the rim of the well. Paolo scooped the stone out of the pail, Jerad stayed braced against the wall of the well to support Kev’s weight with the windlass, and Sara hauled him out of the well by his sturdy belt. Panting, he staggered into a hug from her. It made him feel such a burst of a warmth in his middle that his wet feet didn’t matter.
Luckily he hadn’t gone underwater; but he might be nearly over his head in love.
Finally, Paolo held out the stone. All four of them stared at it, waiting for it to light up like the shiny cup had. Nothing of the sort happened.
Sara said, “I just remembered something I heard about once. Check your coin purse.”
“Still attached,” Kev grunted.
“I mean open it.”
Kev poured his coins into his hand. “What the—?!”
Sara grinned. “You got the right stone!”
Kev’s coins, which had been silver, meaning the mid-value Fair coin, had all turned gold.
Paolo sat in the sun to study the writing on the stone. Kev took off his boots and socks. The boots were waterproof and the material of his socks rejected the water as soon as they got outside of his boots. He’d soon have dry feet again. Sara looked at the skin thus exposed, his tendons and toes, and felt fascinated.
Paolo said, “This is written in a dialect of Ancient Romance, imperfectly—someone was working from a dictionary—and says, ‘This Stone is not the True Grail.’ May I keep it for a souvenir?”
“Sure,” the other three said together.
Sara said, “While the rest of you were at the Arcade, I asked the Rumor Monger about the Grail.”
“Oho!” said Paolo. “What did that impeachable source have to tell you?”
“That a Grail worth finding is in the Feigned Fane, whatever that is.”
“I know what and where. There.” Paolo gestured spinward, where a tall, pointed structure rose over thick trees. “I wondered about that—fane is an ancient word for a temple or church, where it would be logical for a Grail to be, but there are six or eight such buildings around, and I’d no way to identify one as more likely than another.”
“There are eight or ten if you count two in Warway. When I last saw one of those, it had fighters swarming around and in it.” Kev looked at the spire with narrowed eyes.
Sara said, “The Rumor Monger also told me we’re not the only ones interested in grails and some of the interested parties might take them by force. Let’s not split up this time. But let’s be inconspicuous getting there.”
“Good idea.” Kev pulled on his shoes and socks, while Sara watched, amazed at just how fascinating the process was, just because she was so attracted to him it made her head spin.
In a loose line, they furtively followed a narrow lane between high hedgerows, turned aside into the forest, and stole from one tree to another keeping tree trunks between them and the Fane as they angled toward it. Finally they hid behind ragged bushes near a window made of panes of colored glass.
Paolo stood on tiptoe to look through a corner of the window. “It’s like an old European church. High nave, stairs both broad and narrow to higher levels and to underlevels. Its main door is wide open and it looks deserted. Unfortunately, it’s a big place. It could be like a needle in a haystack. We’d be looking for a grail in a stonestack.”
Jerad drooped.
“But it’s so like an ancient church, that I expect there’s a side door which might lead us to exactly what we want.”
Paolo was right. Around the corner of the building there was a narrow side door. It opened easily.
Kev made a warning gesture. “The well was booby-trapped. This place may be too.” He told Jerad to stay outside, find a good view of the surrounding countryside—climb a tree if that best served the purpose—and be their lookout. Sara went through the doorway first with her motes and her scimitar out of its sheath. Kev came just behind her, protective and alert. Which thrilled her.
The room inside the door was small and very dusty. Pieces of colored cloth hung on hooks on the wall, and gold dishes and utensils lined a shelf there. Sara’s pulse quickened. “This may be the right place.”
Paolo quickly stepped through the door.
They all pondered the dusty dishware.
A broken ceramic cup lay under the end of a shelf that had come loose an
d fallen down. “I don’t think the Grail would be in that many pieces,” Sara said. “Then there’s this.” A deep, jeweled bowl rested on the tilted shelf. With a wave, she sent a few motes around the bowl. The motelight shone through the apparent jewels tellingly. “Just cut glass.” She tapped the bowl. “Set in tin.” She studied the shelf under the bowl. Interestingly, when this shelf’s anchor points failed at one end and it tilted, falling on the ceramic cup, the bowl hadn’t slid as far as she would have expected. It had left a short and very clear track in the dust on the rough faux wood.
Jerad, running to the door and leaning in, interrupted her thoughts. “Two parties of knights are heading this way from different directions. They could be looking for the Grail!”
Kev snapped his fingers. “And looking to fight each other for it. Now I know what this place reminds me of. It’s a stage set for a melee. Out!”
On impulse, Sara took the bowl. Just as its slide track had suggested, it was surprisingly heavy, but this was no time to investigate that. Kev quietly closed the narrow door behind them. “Follow me!” They wove through the bushes and darted through the forest—Kev in the lead, Sara and Paolo next, and Jerad bringing up the rear, often turning to look behind them with his sword unsheathed.
Sara realized that she was having fun. The next time she messaged or saw Aunt Lana in person, she was definitely going to thank her for this. It was even better than an adventure with new friends. She followed right behind Kev, where she could admire his sculpted shoulders and strongly built hips. She began to think she’d enjoy following him almost anywhere.
By the time they reached the village, Paolo was tired and out of breath. They located an out-of-the way bench against a sun-warmed wall. It was the end of the day: the sunball in the spar had traveled through the axis of Wendis most of the way from east to west. Its rays slanted across the mountain.
Sara studied the bowl. Turning it over, and blowing dust off, she found a thin slot. The tip of her scimitar fit into it. With a careful twisting motion, the slot turned—and the tin bowl fell apart. It left a smaller, crystal bowl that refracted the sunlight when she held it up.
