Kadolan was a prisoner in all but name. Her questions went unanswered, the doors were locked and guarded. She was attended by taciturn strangers. She would never have claimed to have friends in Arakkaran, but she did have many acquaintances now among the ladies of the palace; persons she could address by name, share tea and chat with, whiling away a gentle hour or two. She had asked for many, with no result.
Especially she had asked for Mistress Zana. Kadolan had a hunch that Zana’s was the most sympathetic ear she was likely to find, but even Zana had failed to return her messages.
Something was horribly wrong. By rights, the palace should be rejoicing. Not only was there a royal wedding and a new Sultana Inosolan to celebrate, but also the death of Rasha. Arakkaran was free of the sorceress who had effectively ruled it for more than a year. That should be a cause for merriment, but instead a miasma of fear filled the air, seeping from marble and tile to cloud the sun’s fierce glare.
It must be all imagination, Kadolan told herself repeatedly as she paced, but an insistent inner voice whispered that she had never been prone to such morbid fancies before. Although no one outside Krasnegar would have known it, and few there, she was almost seventy years old. After so long a life, she should be able to trust her instincts, and her instincts were shouting that something was very, very wrong.
She had left Inosolan at the door of the royal quarters. Two nights and two days had passed since then. The days had been hard, filled with bitter loneliness and worry. The nights had been worse, haunted by dreams of Rasha’s terrible end. Foolish, foolish woman! Again and again Kadolan had wakened from nightmares of that awful burning skeleton, that fearful, tragic corpse raising its arms to the heavens in a final rending cry of, LOVE!—only to vanish in a final roar of flame.
Four words of power made a sorcerer. Five destroyed.
Master Rap had whispered a word in Rasha’s ear, and she had been consumed.
The balcony was high. Over roofs and cloisters Kadolan had a distant view of one of the great courtyards, where brown-clad guards had passed to and fro all day, escorting princes in green or, rarely, groups of black-draped women. Horsemen paraded sometimes. They were too far off for her to make out details, and yet something about the way they all moved had convinced her that they were as troubled as she. She had erred.
So had Inosolan.
A God had warned Inosolan to trust in love, and she had taken that to mean that she must trust in Azak’s love, that in time she would learn to return the love of that giant barbarian she had married.
And then, too late . . .
He was only a stableboy. Kadolan had never even met him until that last night in Krasnegar. She had not exchanged a word with him directly. She did not know him. No one did—he was only a stableboy! Not handsome or charming or educated or cultured, just a commonplace laborer in the palace stables. But he had saved Inosolan from the devious Andor, and when the sorceress had abducted Inosolan, he had shouted, “I am coming!”
How could they have known? Crossing the whole of Pandemia in half a year, fighting his way in through the massed guards of the family men, removing the sorceress by telling her one of his two words of power—even if he had not planned the terrible results.
The God had not meant Azak. The God had meant the stableboy, the childhood friend.
It was all so obvious now. Too late.
And the boy . . . man . . . Rap?
At best he was chained in some awful dungeon somewhere, under peril of the sultan’s jealousy. At worst he was already dead, although she feared that death itself might not be the worst.
Even that last awful night in Krasnegar, Kadolan should have realized that a stableboy who knew a word of power was no ordinary churl. And somewhere on his journey he had learned a second word; he had become an adept, a superman. That was an astounding feat in itself, but even two words of power could not save him now.
To and fro . . . to and fro . . . Kadolan paced and paced.
She had been Inosolan’s chaperon and counselor. She should have given better advice.
She had tried, she recalled. She had been inclined to trust Rasha, where Inosolan had not. What better things might then have happened? Who now could know? Kadolan had warned against the flight into the desert, which had ended so ignominiously, in defeat and forced return. But Kadolan had not been insistent enough.
So Inosolan was doomed to a life of harem captivity, bearing sons in an alien land. Her kingdom was lost, abandoned by the impire and the wardens to the untender mercies of the Nordland thanes.
And the boy Rap was dead or dying, and that guilt tortured Kadolan worse than anything.
Love or mere loyalty, neither should be so cruelly repaid.
She had never put much stock in magic. She was not a very imaginative person, she knew, and she had never quite believed in the occult—not even when she had sensed the death of Inosolan’s mother and gone racing back to Krasnegar, fleeing from Kinvale at three days’ notice to catch the last ship before winter. In retrospect, that had been a miraculous premonition, and yet she had refused to believe, she had never told anyone. Holindarn had accepted that her arrival was a merely a fortunate coincidence. Inosolan had been too young to wonder about it at all.
The balcony had grown insufferably hot below the weltering sun. Reeling with weariness from her endless pacing, Kadolan tottered indoors and sank into a padded chair.
By the palace standards, her new quarters were almost an insult—old and shabby, absurdly overfurnished with ugly statuary in the style of the XIVth Dynasty, which must be loot from some long-forgotten campaign. It was almost as if she had been locked up in a boxroom until someone figured out what to do with her.
Why, oh, why would Inosolan not answer her messages?
Had they ever reached her?
3
Farther down the hillside, in the middle of the city, evening shadows lay cool and blue across Sheik Elkarath’s jeweled garden, and the air was fragrant with jasmine and mimosa. The earliest stars twinkled, fountains tinkled.
Master Skarash was definitely tipsy now. He reached for the wine bottle and discovered that it was empty. He tossed it into a hibiscus. How many did make? What did it matter? What was the cost of a few bottles of wine against the profits to be made from a major business partnership? Opportunities like this came rarely in any merchant’s lifetime, and Grandsire was going to be enormously proud of him. Of course the details were still somewhat obscure and extremely complex, and would have to be worked out very carefully in the morning, when both parties were more alert, but there was no doubt that this evening’s jollity would reap huge wealth in the future for the House of Elkarath. It would be the first coup of a very long and successful career.
Skarash bellowed loudly for one of his cousins to fetch more wine. He peered blearily at his drinking companion.
“You did say exclusive license, sir?”
“Absolutely,” said the visitor. “The Imperial court prefers to deal with a single supplier for each commodity—or even several commodities. It saves superfluous bookkeeping, you understand.”
Skarash nodded wisely, hiccupped, and shouted again for wine. How wise Grandsire had been to leave him in charge until his returnl “How many com-mom-modities would you expect?”
“Many! But enough of tedious business. Let us talk of lighter things. I understand you have only recently returned from Ullacarn?”
“Thatsh absholutely correct. How did you learn that?”
“On the same ship as the sultan?”
Skarash nodded again as a shrouded maiden—a cousin or one of his sisters, perhaps—scurried out from the house with more supplies.
“From Ullacarn?” the stranger inquired, smiling. For an imp, he was extraordinarily handsome. Very cultured and likable. And he had the polished accents of a high-class Hubban. Skarash had been listening carefully to those rounded vowels . . . not lately, though.
“Yesh,” he found himself explaining, “I went directly. By camel. Not that we traders go directly, you unshersand . . . understand . . . because we wander. Right?”
“Of course,” the stranger agreed with another winning smile. ”And the sultan?”
“The sultan and Grandsire made a small detour.”
“Detour?”
“Through Thume!”
“No! The Accursed Land? Now you have really intrigued me!”
A little later Skarash found time to wonder if he had been wise to mention that Grandsire was a mage, and now votary to Warlock Olybino himself, but the imp poured out more wine himself and proposed a toast or two, and the conversation continued without significant interruption.