“I couldn’t climb those trees!” Rap protested loudly. Changing direction and trudging toward the nearest palms, Little Chicken ostentatiously flexed his thick shoulders and spat on his hands. He welcomed any chance to demonstrate Rap’s inferiority—which was what Rap had expected.
“Quick!” he said, grabbing Thinal’s bony shoulder to stop him following. “Tell me! Little Chicken insists he’s my trash, but—”
“Oh? You’re a slaveowner’7”
Rap felt his face grow hot. “Not my idea! He thinks it’s his duty to look after me—feed me, and even dress me. Not much else. I know he’ll defend me in a fight.”
Thinal peered at him slyly. “Who wiped the imp?”
Rap’s stomach heaved at the memory. “He did. Yggingi drew his sword and threatened me. He ignored Little Chicken, I suppose because he knew that goblins aren’t dangerous.” Little Chicken had taken the proconsul from behind, body-slammed him, applied a brutal headlock, and then slowly sawn through his neck with the stone dagger. Even while that had been happening, though, Yggingi had been trying to reach his fallen sword and Rap had kicked it out of the way. So he had been an accomplice.
After a couple of hard gulps, he added, “But I don’t know if he was defending me then, or avenging all the goblins Yggingi killed. He won’t run errands.”
Thinal nodded, frowning at the sand. “He wasn’t gentle with Darad. That hurt—I know! All this because you wouldn’t torture-—”
“Yes. Darad has goblin tattoos—”
“Don’t tell me!” Thinal pulled a face.
“But he must know! Little Chicken’s waiting for some signal or other, from the Gods. When he gets that, then he’s released from bondage and free to kill me, as slowly and painfully as he can.”
“They’re a gruesome pack.” Thinal picked his nose for a while in silence. “I ought to know, Rap . . . but I don’t. Darad wasn’t interested in the slave thing.”
“He enjoyed the alternative?”
Thinal shuddered. “Yes. Gods! I still dream about what he did to that boy. Trouble with Darad, he’s been banged on the head so often a lot of his details are fuzzy to me. To him, too.” He pondered a while longer. “I think . . . it may be something like saving your life. Yeah! Never let the goblin save your life.”
Rap started to laugh. The little thief looked at him in surprise, realized what he had said, and grinned ruefully, again showing his irregular teeth.
The conversation was cut off by a yell from Little Chicken. Faun and imp ran across to where he was sitting in the sand at the base of a tree, cursing intently. He had badly scraped his belly and one thigh, and seemed also to have twisted an ankle when he landed. His opinions on palm trees were fortunately being expressed in dialect so broad as to be unintelligible even to Rap.
Thinal walked along to another tree nearby and flowed up it like a squirrel. In seconds he had reached the top and was twisting off coconuts. Little Chicken’s tirade died away and he glared up disbelievingly at the despicably weedy imp. Then he glared even harder at Rap’s smirk.
Burglars had their uses.
4
In the more than eighty years since Sagorn had visited Faerie, Thinal’s memories of the event had become vague. He was fairly sure that Milflor lay somewhere on this eastern coast, but he had no idea whether the castaways were right to head north.
The jungle contained nothing any of them recognized as edible, but they chewed coconut and drank the milk until they were nauseated, longing for fresh water. Even under the palms there was little shade, and already the sun was brutal.
The goblin had an old pair of moccasins that old Hononin had found for him two days before, but he limped and he had lost his smug air of unworried superiority. Maybe his twisted ankle was more painful than he would admit, or he was suffering from the tropical climate, or the unfamiliar surroundings frightened him—or all three. He was no longer the skilled woodsman who had shielded Rap in the taiga.
Rap limped, also, being pinched by his borrowed boots. Faun half-breeds were not as heat resistant as he would have hoped. Thinal was in worse shape than either of the other two. Andor’s silver-buckled shoes would have been too large for his brother even when new and they had been split apart by Darad’s enormous feet. Thinal soon threw them away and struggled along barefoot over the sand, his skinny legs laboring harder than they had done in a hundred years.
The headland seemed to withdraw as they advanced. It was hours before the beach had turned to face south and Rap began to notice the jungle narrowing. His farsight told him there was only more sand beyond the cape, but farsight’s range was limited. At last the jungle faded away and there were only palms left. Soon his eyes could see through them, to another wide bay, as vast and deserted as the first. He had not known there was so much sand in the world.
On the point itself, sand gave way to rock. Rap and the goblin sank down and leaned back against boulders. Thinal was trailing, several hundred paces back, already looking boiled and mashed, as Rap’s mother would have said.
“We should leave him!”
Rap smiled, for that had been a credible attempt at impish, although spoken with a heavy goblin accent. “We mustn’t!”
“Why? Him . . . he . . . worse trash than me.”
“Because he might give up and call Darad.”
Little Chicken scowled, then nodded understanding. Darad’s arm would still be bleeding from the bites of Rap’s dog, his back burned raw, and his eye bruised by the goblin’s finger. Even in a good mood, the giant would not be a welcome companion. Mad, he would be literal murder.
Thinal arrived and sank wearily to the ground. He slumped back against a palm, and yelped when it scraped him.
Rap let him rest for a while before he spoke. “There are mountains. ”
Thinal twisted around to stare at the peaks now visible over the jungle. ”So?”
“You can’t recall seeing those from Milflor?”
“No.” Thinal wiped his brow with a bony arm and brooded in sulky silence.
So Milflor was some way off yet. North or south? There seemed to be no way of telling. Rap’s feet hurt already and the thought of retracing all those steps was unbearable. He decided to continue north. If the coast swung westward, then he would know they had made the wrong choice.
Offshore lay a reef, and from the headland he could hear the surf quite clearly and see pillars of spray walking along it as the waves advanced. Faerie would be a glorious place, he thought, with proper water and food and shelter. For a moment he let himself sink into a fantasy of this beach and those warm waves and a picnic with . . . with a beautiful girl. God of Lovers! How she would enjoy this place!
His head lolled sideways. He jerked it upright. “Come on, then!” He rose.
Thinal had also been dozing. He snarled. “What’s the piddling hurry?”
“I have to find Inos.”
Thinal patted the sand. “Siddown, Rap. Listen. I know you won’t trow this, but you’re potty. She’s in the hands of a sorceress, and an all-fired, real, four-word sorceress at that! She’s somewhere on the far side of Pandemia—east or north, an’ you don’t know. An’ you find her, if you ever, she’ll be a grannie, and you’ll be older’n Sagorn. Come on, Rap! Lay off!”
“I am going to find Inos!”
Thinal stared up at him balefully. “I know you’re stubborn, but that’s screwball! You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Coming?” Rap said. “Or will you stay here and starve?” For a moment it seemed that Thinal was not coming. Then Little Chicken rose and stretched.
“You try better now, imp,” he said, spooning out his words with care. “More later I carry you.”
Glaring, Thinal heaved himself to his feet and began hobbling over the sand.
They headed north. They had hours of daylight left yet. Waves marched in to die upon the beach—wave after wave after wave . . .
Behind the veil:
When you and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As the Sea’s self should heed a pebble cast.
— Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (§47, 1879)
TWO
This day’s madness
1
Sunlight gleaming along marble wakened Inos. For a moment she stared up blankly at gauzy draperies, striving to separate out their soft reality from bitter dreams of the tent she had shared with Kade in the long weeks of trek through the forest. Then awareness returned with a rush—death and sorcery; betrayal and bereavement.