The imperor had struggled to his feet and was bowing.
“We meet again, Master Rap!” a private thought from the elf said.
“Yes. “ Rap braced himself for attack. Yet if attack was what the warlock planned, he could have caught Rap offguard in the first second after he arrived.
Joyous elvish laughter, like birdsong: “You were only a few minutes late in reaching Arakkaran. I warned you the outcome was too close to call. “
Fury! Despite the gaiety and boyish charm, Rap knew this man to be an unscrupulous prankster. He had bound his daughter to a gnome. He and his fellow wardens played games with Inos as one of the pieces.
To lose one’s temper in any fight was a mistake. To lose one’s temper when dealing with an elvish sorcerer would be rank insanity.
Trouble was, Rap’s temper had not yet cooled down from Gathmor’s death. It simmered still.
Evidently he had masked his feelings, though, for Lith’rian was chuckling. ”I was very much afraid you might arrive in time to stop the wedding. No, do not jump to conclusions! Olybino had reported that Inos was dead, remember. ”
Meanwhile events were creeping along snailishly in the mundane world. ”You honor us with your presence, your Omnipotence,” the imperor said. His haggard face was grim at the thought of dealing with the wardens in his present exhausted state.
“Not exactly, your Majesty,” Lith’rian said from his throne. ”We do not come in answer to your summons. Do all your companions comprehend the significance of that distinction?”
“So East lied?” Rap snarled. “So what?”
In the ambience, summer sky darkened to looming storm. “Can you not see? He lied his way out of a pond and into the sea! He had sent her back to Zark once. Had she then set off for the Impire again, he might have taken drastic steps! That ceremony was a protection for her. You should be grateful to me. All is not lost yet, and it might very well have been. Had you succeeded, you would have failed!”
Trickster! Trickster!
Rap’s fury had struck down Kalkor easily enough. This smirking yellow-bellied elf would not be so easy. It might feel good to try though . . .
Emshandar was scowling, and explaining. “The Council may be summoned at any time by the imperor, or by the warden of the day, which today is his Omnipotence, Warlock Lith’rian.”
“And I have chosen to exercise that privilege,” the elf added, as the spectators all bowed or curtsyed. “There are some serious matters to discuss, involving unauthorized use of sorcery.”
The threat barely penetrated Rap’s spinning head as he tried to restrain his rising anger and also follow the writhing skein of images, the conversations proceeding on two levels. He was certain that the elf was about to make the confusion worse.
“You don’t trust me!” Lith’rian wailed mockingly at Rap. On the throne, the boy waved a languid hand. “Our beloved brother of the west, his Omnipotence, Warlock Zinixo.”
“Watch this one, Master Rap, “ he added privately. “He is immensely powerful, and very dangerous.” The dwarf materialized on the Red Throne and simultaneously in the pale nothingness of the ambience. He was scowling on both planes. On the throne, in a toga like the embers of a stormy sunset, he was too young and too short to be impressive, diminished by the scale of the throne itself, which made him look like a child.
In the ambience, ironically, he did look physically dangerous, his thickness and heavy limbs more than making up for his lack of height. His wide chest glinted with hair like iron fillings, and he seemed as indestructible as a granite pillar. Kalkor’s image in the ambience had been transparent, while Lith’rian looked almost as solid there as he did in the mundane. If density of appearance was a measure of occult power, then Zinixo’s adamantine mass was very ominous.
His mind . . . Instantly Rap understood why elves and dwarves were so notoriously incompatible. Zinixo brought with him images of vast dark caverns, deep winding labyrinths where dangers lurked around every jagged corner. Paradoxically, these mingled with visions of barricades and beetling fortress walls built of gigantic rocks. How much was racial and how much the warlock’s own Rap could not tell, but suspicion blew from those battlements like winter fog.
“We meet again, your Omnipotence,” he said, bowing.
His insolence kindled images of enormous millstones grinding noisily. “I knew I should have killed you while I had the chance. The witch deceived me!”
“I bear you no ill will,” Rap insisted, knowing he would not be believed.
A prickly hedge of lavender sparks had sprung up between elf and dwarf, seeming to originate about equally from both of them. It wavered as each tried to get Rap on his own side of it. He rejected it, staying neutral, and it withered away. He wondered what he looked like to the warlocks. He did not feel very solid, certainly, and he had no experience at concealing his thoughts.
Imperor and courtiers had turned expectantly to the north.
“Her Omnipotence, Witch Bright Water,” the elf said.
On the throne she was small and almost beautiful, clad in flowing draperies that shone like the dazzle of sunshine on fresh snow. Her arms were bare, and not as greenish as a goblin ought to be in this light. The dark hair coiled high on her head was surmounted by a tiara of twinkling diamonds. Little Chicken should be impressed by this vision of goblin maidenhood.
Rap had seen her naked once before, as an ancient crone, and had been appalled. The scrawny little relic that appeared before him in the ambience was immeasurably older, and so little human that he felt no emotion except horror. Almost nothing there was original. He had known that she was centuries old, but now he could see that she must have been patching herself with sorcery all those years as organ after organ wore out. She was tiny as a child, and hideous.
Hideous did not begin to describe the mental baggage that came with her. Boys writhing in torment, sailors drowning, brutal gang rapes . . . death! Galaxies of dying faces, multitudes of rotting corpses. Three centuries of death—plague and rout, bloodshed and sickness and lonely old age. Bright Water was obsessed by the fate she had evaded so long. This was the secret of her madness. How much death could one witness in three hundred years?
Fortunately Rap was rapidly gaining some control over his susceptibility, and he could fade out the nauseating images almost completely.
And even as her youthful public image nodded to acknowledge the homage of the assembly, a shrill goblin cackle rang out for Rap in the ambience. “And we also meet again, faun! The first time I saw you, I foretold your great destiny, did I not?”
“Huh? No, you didn’t! You said you couldn’t foresee me! “
The mummified green monkey in the ambience waved arms that seemed too long for her, while the air overhead whirled a blizzard of corpses. “But we knew why I couldn’t, didn’t we, eh? Not knowing means knowing if you know why you don’t know! Leaves only one explanation, eh?” She peered closer, so that he recoiled, although there was no real movement or closeness involved. —”And you have retained your tattoos! That surprises me!”
It also pleased her, and her favor might be much safer than her disapproval in whatever was about to happen. He bowed. “Goblinhood is no small honor,” he said, hoping that sounded gracious. “I am several times in your debt, ma am. “
The tiny form sank down and genuflected to him in mockery. “You certainly are! And you will remember that when the time comes?” Then she jerked up her head, a shriveled brown coconut. “And my dear brother of the west, also?”
If that was intended as a joke, it failed to amuse Zinixo, who scowled even harder, eyes flickering everywhere. His battlements were just as high on Bright Water’s side as anywhere else. Claws scratched on rock in the underworld.
“And his Omnipotence, Warlock Olybino,” Lith’rian proclaimed to the mundane audience.
The imp who appeared on the eastern throne wore a sumptuous uniform decorated with gold and jewels. Even his cloak and the horsehair crest on his helmet shone like spun gold. He looked young, and handsome, and virile.
His image in the ambience was elderly, bald, and paunchy; and also fainter than any of the others. He was short, even for an imp. Olybino was the only one who had never met Rap, and he pouted disagreeably up at him as if he had never wanted to. Oothiana had called him the weakest of the Four, and Lith’rian despised him—although the elf probably despised a great many people.
He certainly did not look impressive. He might even be pathetic, were he not so dangerous—for the flabby little man stood within scenes of bugles and floating pennants, of godlike warriors clashing swords in noble combat and shining armies locked in battle. This was idealized war, war as a sport for warlocks, with none of the mud and stink and pain of real war. In a way it was even worse than Bright Water’s obsession with death, because the people in it were completely unreal. At least the goblin’s visions were capable of suffering.