The wardens were rejecting his call.
Inos peered around: Azak, darkly furious . . . the regent even more so . . . the dumbfounded audience . Kalkor showing all his teeth and enjoying the drama . . . the little prince wide-eyed . . . Or was the kid trying to stifle a smirk?
Before the regent could move, the candles over the White Throne of the north throne glimmered and died also.
“Too bad!” a heavy, sepulchral voice said.
The Red Throne of the west remained lit, an ugly monstrosity of granite carved in bas-relief. There was a boy sitting on it.
The regent went around to the back of the Opal Throne and bowed. “Your Omnipotence does me honor.”
“I don’t mean to.”
Not a boy—a young man. One day at Kinvale, Andor had taken Inos to visit the duke’s slate quarry. The dwarves she had seen there had all been very short, with massive shoulders and heads, and complexions like gray sandstone. Despite his youth, Zinixo’s hair was iron gray. He must be shorter even than the goblin, Little Chicken, for his feet looked as if they did not quite reach down to the floor. Although his thick forearms rested on the sides of the throne, the position was awkward for him, hunching his shoulders up near his ears. His toga was the mysterious dark red of iron cooling on a smith’s anvil. He seemed to be wearing no tunic below it, for his right arm and shoulder were bare; so were his overlarge feet.
He bared a mouthful of teeth like white pebbles. “You’re too early, Regent. Too impatient! Try us—” The grating voice stopped, and he cocked his big head, as if listening to something. His eyes were restless, furtive. Inos remembered what Epoxague had said about dwarves being cagey and distrustful. They were also reputed to be mean-spirited and avaricious.
Either the little prince could no longer bear not being able to see the warlock, or else he decided that he should not have his back to him. Whatever his reason, he spun around to face the other way and then went very still again.
Zinixo apparently decided that there was nothing amiss and resumed his smirk. ”Try us again tomorrow, mongrel.”
A sorcerer insulting a mundane that way was rather like a boy torturing an insect. Maybe Olybino was not so bad as Inos had thought.
Ythbane flinched at the gibe, but his voice stayed level. “You will hear the sultan’s petition then?” The dwarf laughed with a sound like millstones. “No! He won’t trouble us. But there will be other problems. In fact, you weren’t even going to ask the right question tonight.”
Ythbane had his back to the watchers, but that taunt made him stiffen visibly. “What should we have been going to ask, your Omnipotence?”
The warlock glanced over the company and then pointed a finger in a gesture that would have poked a hole in an oak door. “Ask him!”
The candles above him flickered out simultaneously and both he and the throne vanished. The throne was still there, though, in the shadows. The dwarf was not.
Everyone was looking where he had pointed. But which one had he meant? One of the two jotnar, or the goblin?
4
Inos awoke as the door opened. She was magically, instantly awake, with her eyes wide to the darkness, knowing that she had been asleep for some hours. A faint gleam from the window showed the dim shape of the intruder. The door closed without a click, but she had already recognized the familiar woolly-blanket feeling of a calming spell on her mind.
“Inos?” the expected whisper said. “Hello, Rap.”
She thought of Azak, waking to find Rap in their bedroom . . .
“The sultan won’t waken,” Rap said, dropping the whisper but keeping his voice soft. “You won’t scream or anything if I—”
“No. There’s a housecoat somewhere, if you can find it. “
He must have removed the spell at once, because her heart started to pound with excitement. She felt him toss the gown on the bed for her. She sat up, realizing that sorcerers could see in the dark; in fact, they could probably see through dwarvish chain mail, so the coat would make no real difference to him. The ritual would make her feel better, though, and it dispelled any last, lingering doubt that this was the genuine Rap.
She climbed out of bed and wrapped herself, shivering slightly with excitement. A faint glow sprang up in a lantern on the mantel. Rap was by the window with his back to her. He turned around, and they gazed at each other across the width of the room.
The bedchamber was grand enough by most folk’s standards, but it was definitely not what a palace should offer a visiting king. The furniture was an odd assortment, the wall frescoes were peeling and faded, and an old-fashioned fustiness suggested everything had been inadvertently left behind by the previous dynasty. Such pettiness might be intended to show Ythbane’s anger at the humiliation Azak had brought him, or perhaps it represented some household flunky’s contempt for djinns. Who cared?
The bed had been big enough, and that had been all that mattered. On the far side of a protective bolster, Sultan Azak slept soundly.
She raised a hand to her face. “Thank you for this, Rap.”
He shrugged. “It was easy. Bones take time, but skin is easy.”
“Thank you anyway.”
He was still wearing very plain workman’s clothes, and they were wet. His hair was soaked, although even that wouldn’t make it lie down completely. Rap had always had very stubborn hair. He spoke first, smiling sadly at her.
“Magic can make you as you were, but even sorcery could never make you any more beautiful.”
Well! That was new! And he wasn’t even blushing as he said it.
“Thank you for that, also, kind sir. You are a sight for sore eyes yourself.” She sat on the edge of the bed, glancing across at Azak. He had one brawny arm outside the covers, and his hair was a red puddle on the pillow. No, he was not going to waken.
Rap was staring at Azak also, squinting in an odd way. “I can’t do anything about his curse, I’m afraid. I can sort of see it, though.”
Inos was in no immediate hurry to have Azak relieved of his curse, but to say so at the moment would not be in the best of taste. “See it? What does a curse look like?”
Rap scratched his head. “Hard to describe. Like there’s a glass cloth on him, a fuzziness. It kind of shimmers . . . I can’t put it into words. I wouldn’t know what it did if your aunt hadn’t told me, but I’d know he had a sorcery on him.”
“Rap, sit down! I want to hear all about your adventures, and how you escaped from the tower, and how you met the dragon, and—”
“Your aunt can tell you all that. We may not have time for it right now. It wasn’t easy—finding you.” He glanced around; she suppressed the unnerving thought that he was looking through the walls and ceiling instead of at them. “There’s a big dark blank over the palace. A silence. What I mean is, no one else’s using magic in it. I don’t want to give myself away to the wardens.”
“Wardens? Rap, Ythbane tried to summon them tonight, and they wouldn’t come. Only the dwarf.” Rap’s eyes widened. He walked over to a chair and sat down. “Tell me, please!”
So she told him what had happened. He listened solemnly, his face giving away nothing at all. His woodenness was beginning to unnerve her. Rap had always been so transparent!
“Zinixo’s a little horror,” he muttered, when she had done. ”He’s terrified of the others ganging up against him. He expects everyone else to be as mean as he is.”
“You know him?” And he knew Lith’rian, of course. Truly, Rap was full of surprises now. Had she ever been asked to judge her childhood friends for the one Least Likely to Consort with Warlocks, Rap would have won hands down.
“I haven’t met Olybino,” he said, “but I did meet the other three. You met Olybino, your aunt says.”
“He wasn’t very chummy, either.”
Rap pulled a face. “It’s what sorcery does to people. Sagorn knew. It makes them unhuman, somehow; in the end.”
She grinned. “But you’re still all right? So far?” He shrugged. ”I hope so.”
She still couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Was that the start of it? Rap had always been as readable as a signpost, but he certainly wasn’t readable now. She sensed a worry in him, though.
“All right, I’ll ask Kade when I get the chance. Oh, Rap! I am so madly happy you’re alive! I thought the imps had killed you, and when I saw you in the desert I thought you were a wraith! I thought your ghost had come back to haunt me! You have to explain that to me, too. And then you turned up alive again, and I was so happy—then Azak told me you’d died in jail after we left. He told me a terrible story about you being beaten to death . . . I’m afraid I believed him, Rap. I’m sorry. I thought it would be in character for him to have let that happen to you, so I thought he was telling the truth. But you’re all right! That’s wonderful, Rap! Do just tell me how you escaped and rescued Kade?”