“You’re a Mage, Chisaad, and one of the best of our age. Your golems alone are an unparalleled master work! When Shimoor finally dies or resigns—and he should have resigned ten years ago—you’ll be Royal Wizard in full and none of this Acting nonsense. If you weren’t locked into this fool limbo by promises made almost two decades ago, you’d have been on the Council by now.”
“I took an oath to King Tollir, Blue. I don’t propose to break it even for a seat on the Council of Colors.” It will take something more attractive than the prospect of sitting around the Rainbow Table with you and the other squabbling relics, Chisaad thought. Something far, far more tempting . . . and I think I’ve found it.
“I’m certainly not asking you to break your oath.” Blue waved his hands in a calming gesture and sat back on the bench. “But please, Royal Wizard, consider my plea. We mages could do so much more for the Kingdom if we weren’t kept half-starved by the Hierarchy.”
“A large point in your favor. But remember what the Priestesses do with all that power.”
“Far less than they could!” Blue scowled. “I’m aware how much power they funnel into healing the sick and injured—and how inefficient they are about it. They can afford to be wasteful, they have a guaranteed supply. Having to put a little thought into their spellcasting, developing more elegance,” he mouthed the syllables lovingly, “Would help everybody, not least themselves.”
“I’m not arguing, Blue. I’m not blind either. To missed opportunities, or to costs. But you’re proposing to pick the biggest fight there could be this side of the Empire. If you want me to join your side in it, I’ll expect to see a great deal more leadership from the Council than it’s shown in decades. Leadership and followership too. I don’t care to step to the head of a campaign only to have it desert behind me. Can you deliver those followers?”
“Yes.”
Blue radiated quiet confidence now, Chisaad noted. No bluster at all. The Acting Royal Wizard decided to set the cat among the pigeons, since word would get out soon enough. “In that case, get ready, because you don’t have as long to wait as you might think. Today the Emperor will send young Prince Terrell to take over the governorship of Silbar.”
Blue blinked, clearly caught by surprise, but he had an agile mind and followed the implications at once. “The Emperor’s making good on his promise at last. Before Osrick takes the Imperial throne. Setting up the halfbreed to try for his mother’s Crown before his jealous brother can interfere.” Blue hesitated, lowered his voice. “Do you think this northern Prince actually has a chance?”
“How would I know?” Chisaad affected a testy demeanor. “Halfblood or not, he’s still indisputably the Queen’s son, and thus has a clear right to try for it. If the Crown chooses him, that settles the question, doesn’t it?”
“And if it rejects him?” Blue speculated. “If it burns him to ash, what then? Will a new minted Emperor Osrick accept another one of the Twenty as his vassal king over Silbar?”
Chisaad shrugged as if the subject bored him. “I’d imagine so. So long as we keep shipping future Emperor Osrick his silver and sulfur and training his mages, and providing him a legion of bureaucrats to administer his territories, why would he care who sits on the Stone Throne? He has more important problems much closer to home.”
“Yes,” Blue nodded, obviously visualizing it. “If the One God chooses to set a half breed King over us, we’ll have to bow to him, but he will need our help to actually rule. And if we get a fullblooded Silbari man of our own on the throne again, why he’ll need our help too.”
The Acting Royal Wizard sent the Council of Colors mage away with a smile on his face. Chisaad wended his way through the sprawling palace to the north side and the Hill Door. Guards gossiped about the Governor’s return.
“Acting Royal Wizard,” the senior man said with a deferential nod. “Are you going out to watch for the Governor?”
That excuse would do nicely. “Yes,” he answered simply, and the man noted it in his log book.
The curse of a literate people, Chisaad reflected sourly, was that they tended to write everything down. In triplicate.
They let him through without further comment—he’d been the Royal Wizard for most of their lives—but he knew they would watch him from their posts. Outside the door a little plaza faced the towering cone of the Hill of Sight. For a moment he gazed up the Five Hundred Steps, tempted to ascend and once again be in the presence of the thing he most yearned for. The Stone Throne at its top looked like a mere speck from here, yet he remembered every detail of it as clearly as he knew his own hands.
But he had no excuse for that. Traffic on the road would look like ants from up there and climbing the Hill without obvious need would be severely out of character for him. Instead he followed the east path that curved around the Hill, until he came to a little marble pergola perched atop the wall that encircled the giant cone. Thirty feet below it the city’s cemetery stretched in an even larger arc around the Hill. The pergola faced east over the mausoleums of the nobles to the broad stony swath of the Kings Road. Chisaad took refuge in the shade and deliberately put his back to the Hill. His magesight sensed it anyway, like a banked fire warming his back right through the polished wall and the colorful mosaics.
Queen Shyrill is dying decades before her time, he thought. He knew he should feel sorrow; she was his half-sister, though nobody living knew it save him. But excitement filled him instead.
There will be a new king. I’m still young enough to be a credible candidate, except for the slight problem of my unacknowledged and illegitimate birth. A bastard can’t inherit in Silbar, but does the Crown itself care whether a candidate’s parents were married? Legends say it chooses the best man for the kingship, nothing less.
“Do I have a chance?” He whispered to himself. He knew the official answer would be no. The Temple Hierarchy invested enormous effort in trying to prevent royal bastards and ensure the unquestioned bloodlines of the Royal House. They would never let a surprise bastard join the Twenty. If they knew his real parentage he wouldn’t even be allowed to keep his present post.
“Unless . . . I create a chance for myself?”
The audacity of the idea shook him. He knew a wise man would spurn the temptation. A wise man would be content with the post he already held.
I could be King; he finally formed the dangerous phrase in the privacy of his mind. It coiled there, glittering brighter than gold and seductive as any succubus. I could be King!
Trumpets jarred him out of his introspection. He glanced at the cemetery gate and the thronged road beyond it. He saw commotion out there, so he called up a distance-viewing spell and looked through the cemetery’s grillwork gate at the crowd on the Kings’ Road.
What he saw made him blink.
CHAPTER 4: KIRIN
Kirin’s heart rose as the DiUmbra Troupe’s rented wagons neared Aretzo. Almost home! The trip had been the longest he’d ever done, more than five hundred miles across Lower Silbar, but they had surely made a lot of money. He had even seen Grandfather smile now and then, when the old man thought nobody could see.
Kirin rode with Maia, Sevan, and Pieter on top of the second wagon’s load as the family approached North Gate. Pieter lay on his back a little apart from the younger three, straw hat pulled over his face and occasional snores wafting out. The others were too eager for home to even think of napping.
Maia had picked flowers from the roadside when they stopped for lunch. For the last ten miles she had been plucking off the withering petals and making them dance with her levitation talent. It was her only magical ability; she didn’t even have magesight. She couldn’t lift more than ten pounds, but everyone admired how well she had trained her little talent.
Kirin quivered inside, remembering how they danced together on stage as she sent white silk scarves floating about her. How he would weave his Shadow among them, careful not to break her spells. Audiences swooned.
He smiled in happy memory. Other than
a few unpleasant people, the trip had been wonderful.
Her hand stole into his. “I’ve had enough of travelling,” she told him. “I’m glad to be home.”
The way that she always guessed his thoughts warmed him. He kissed her silently.
A wind blew off the sea as they approached Aretzo’s walls. Kirin wrinkled his nose as the odors of the city met them. Wood smoke, raw sewage, horse manure, fish; strongest of all were the reeking slaughterhouses that lined the downhill side of the King’s Road.
“They’ve grown so big,” he said. “I didn’t think Aretzo folk ate red meat often enough to need all this.”
“It’s become more popular since the Gwythlos conquered us,” Sevan answered as he too gazed on the gory spectacle. “And the Navy buys a lot of salted beef.”
“The stench is horrible,” Maia said, wrinkling her nose.
“Even to our city-raised noses,” Kirin joked as they both looked away.
Across the road from the slaughterhouses sprawled Aretzo’s enormous cemetery behind its guardian wall. From the top of the loaded wagon Kirin could look right over at the elaborate tombs of the nobility. Those fretted mausoleums shrank the farther one went from the gate, fading towards the crowded plots of ordinary folk and eventually, around the curve of the towering Hill of Sight, into the Poor Field. Kirin made the sign of reverence for his mother, buried there in a grave marked with a stone so plain it didn’t even have her name, only a number and her date of death.
Maia snuggled against him. Her own family’s graves were crammed into their caste’s part of the huge cemetery, near the Poor Field but not in it. “Do you remember her?” She asked him, knowing why he made the sign.
“Some. I was only seven when she died. She didn’t talk much. Most of the time while I grew up she walked in a dream, not there with me.” His forehead creased as he strained to remember. “I guess something had hurt her mind. Or somebody. She had only started to wake up from it when she died.”
Maia looked pensive. “I wish I had been able to meet her, to get to know her.” She lowered her voice and whispered in his ear: “She would be a grandmother to our child.”
“Your own mother will be grandmother enough,” he whispered back. Carmella had chattered at breakfast about seeing her first granddaughter again the instant they got home.
Kirin glanced at his brother-in-law and tried not to grin. From the gleam in Sevan’s eye as he gazed at the approaching city, and the envious looks he had thrown at Kirin and Maia throughout the trip, he missed his own wife badly. Carlai had stayed home nursing their firstborn instead of risking the trip with a baby.
Kirin looked up at the huge cone of the Hill of Sight where it loomed over Aretzo. From this side the Palace and the Five Hundred Steps were not visible, only the smooth grassy slope. It rose sharply behind the thirty-foot retaining wall along the back edge of the cemetery. A decorative little stone pergola perched on the wall and looked over the noble tombs toward the road. The Stone Throne on the hill’s peak could barely be seen from the wagon, but he couldn’t miss the latent glow of the sleeping magic that wrapped the whole cone.
“What does it look like?” Sevan asked. He knew that Kirin’s magesight let him see more than anyone else in the troupe.
Kirin suspected that Sevan’s own talent was no stronger than Maia’s. He’d never seen Sevan do more than move enough air to sway curtains or blow out a candle from across the room. It wasn’t anything they talked about much.
For a moment a familiar pang ran through Kirin’s heart. He didn’t have a single real mage talent, just the ability to see magic and to move his hungry Shadow. Or restrain it rather; it moved with a mind of its own that did not always heed him.
He groped for words and told Sevan, “It looks like a blue and purple bonfire a thousand feet tall, if you can imagine such a thing.”
“A thousand? Uncle Pieter said the Hill’s only four hundred feet tall.” Sevan looked intrigued, while his eyes squinted as if he wondered whether Kirin teased him.
Kirin shrugged. “All right, I don’t know how big it is, I’m just guessing. The spells run down into the world farther than I can see.” He waved a hand at the immense construct, and at that moment his Shadow shifted away from it inside him. That surprised him; his Shadow usually wanted to reach toward magic. If he let it, the cursed creature would try to drink down any spell he touched or even got too near. But it shied away from the Hill.
He puzzled over that for a moment before deciding that it had probably been cowed by the sheer power of the giant artifact brooding over the city. It heartened him to think that there might be something his burden feared. “It’s the King’s business anyway.”
“Or will be,” Sevan nodded sagely. “When we have a King again.”
“The One God grant it,” Pieter said, pushing his hat back and looking around.
Kirin turned to look behind them at the sound of hoof beats. “What’s that?”
A horseman trotted toward the city on the long strip of greensward flanking the eastern edge of the King’s Road. “Make way!” the rider shouted. “The Governor comes! Make way!”
“Uh-oh,” Kirin said. “Do you think we can get inside before he gets here?”
Aretzo’s North Gate lay straight ahead. The towering triple-peaked roof loomed over a fanged bastion thrust forward out of the city wall. Two immense gates pierced it, served by two huge drawbridges over the dry moat that fronted the wall. It loomed barely three hundred yards ahead of the troupe’s lead horses, frustratingly close.
“No,” Pieter answered crisply. Grandfather had already begun to guide the lead wagon onto the narrow western verge. They had less than ten feet of churned-up dirt between the paved King’s Road and the cemetery wall. “Kirin, Sevan, get ready to help with the horses.”
They bounced through ruts and over rocks as the wagons left the pavement. The wall left barely enough room to get the heavy drays out of the traffic way. The first wagon managed to pull into the broader area at the cemetery entrance. While Uncle Ger guided the second wagon as close to the wall as the horses would go, Kirin looked over the left side.
“Left wheels are still on the road,” he reported.
Pieter leaped down, followed by Kirin and Sevan. They grabbed the horse’s bridles and did their best to urge the beasts forward a few more steps. The left front wheel eased off the road; the rear wheel didn’t.
“Good enough?” Kirin asked nervously. The rising sound of steel-shod hooves came up the road behind them. Cadoc Ap Marn, Silbar’s Imperial Governor, wasn’t famous for being even tempered.
“Maybe.” Pieter went forward to see if he could move the lead wagon to give the second more room.
Most of the family had climbed down and gathered in the pocket of space between the wagons and the recessed cemetery gates. Uncle Ger joined Sevan and Kirin at the bridles of the horses, gentling them with soft words and his touch of beast-magic. His eldest son did the same for the lead wagon. Kirin admired their talents; beast-magic looked so useful. Carmella and the other women had gathered the children between the lead wagon and the wall. Maia stayed atop the rear wagon and shouted down to the family through the growing racket.
“It’s a whole cavalry troop!”
The lead horses swept past in a glitter of finery. Governor Cadoc Ap Marn rode haughty in front between a banner bearer and a herald. His pale northern face had been burnt red by a decade under the southern suns. His pointed ears were even more sunburned where they poked out of his flowing yellow hair. At a gesture from him, trumpets rang and the whole mass of horses dropped from a trot to a slow walk, preparing to enter the confined gate.
The DiUmbra family all bowed as the Governor passed. Even though he gave them less attention than the dung on the road, it was the safe thing to do.
The Gwythlo soldiers following their lord rode four abreast. Kirin guessed they must be the troops usually posted to the Grey Fort inside Aretzo’s North Gate. More weathered than the Governor, the
Imperial troops were all big powerful men who spent enough time outdoors to get sun browned, but still were obviously not Silbaris. They looked and sounded eager to get back to their barracks after long days in the hostile desert. Kirin heard jests and abuse traded freely in their language, of which he’d picked up enough to follow. He tensed as a few soldiers cursed the troupe’s rental wagon for forcing the outer rank to squeeze past. The cursing got more frequent as the long line began to back up from the gate.
One soldier did more than curse.
Maia shrieked as a trooper stood in his stirrups and dragged her off the wagon.
“Look boys!” He shouted in Gwythlo. “I’ve found some fun to welcome us back!”
“Maia!” Kirin rushed forward. “Put my wife down!”
The soldier in front of the one who’d grabbed Maia lashed out with a boot. The kick to his chest knocked Kirin staggering. He bounced off Uncle Ger to fall against the cemetery gate. His head banged iron and the world swayed.
“Easy, darkie.” Kirin heard the man’s laugh through his dizziness. “You’ll get her back when we’re done.”
Maia struggled in the grip of the leering Gwythlo soldier. She screamed abuse at the man as his free hand roved and pinched.
Kirin’s Shadow bolted out from beneath his heart in one clean lunge. It flew at the Imperial troopers on wings wider than any wagon.
The one who’d kicked him swore and drew a sword. The one holding Maia tried to draw and lost his grip on her. She slid off his horse and landed on the edge of the road dangerously near the beast’s stamping hooves. Sevan grabbed her and pulled her back among the family.
“Plethy’s Tits!” swore the soldier who’d kicked him. The other managed to get his sword out and they both stabbed at Kirin’s Shadow. It loomed over them like an avenging hawk, a churning opaque darkness that blotted out the suns. The tips of the blades passed through the black cloud and it closed instantly behind the steel. The horses, trapped amid the press of their fellows, began to stamp and neigh. Both men’s faces paled as the nightmare grew black teeth and gaped at them. It strained against Kirin’s no-kill stricture and breathed out cold death.
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