So Rap had a good pair of boots at last, and a fine cotton shirt. Little Chicken wore nothing at all except a soft and frilly pair of silk pants. He was extremely proud of those, not having realized that they were actually a woman’s undergarment, as Thinal had sniggeringly confided to Rap.
Now Thinal himself squeezed cautiously through a canebrake and gulped at the sight of the corpse. “By the Powers!” He looked at the goblin. “How’d you manage. . .” He shot a scared glance at Rap, who knew what he was thinking, although none of them had ever yet put it into words.
“Little Chicken is a skilled wrestler.”
“Skilled?” Thinal shook his head in wonder. “That’s a fullblooded troll!”
“He’s big.”
“Big? They’re just about indestructible. Even the halfbreeds . . . Listen, officially there’s no such things as gladiator contests anymore, right? But some of the big houses round Hub . . . Darad’s made money fighting at them.”
Little Chicken looked interested. “They wrestle?”
“Not usually.” Thinal shoveled more of the paste into his mouth. ”But a troll with a club against men armed like legionaries—that’s a popular match. Big stakes.”
“How many imps?”
“All together, usually three. One at a time, it may take five or six to wear him out, sometimes more. And you just knocked off a troll singlehanded?”
The goblin chuckled. With a lightning snatch he relieved Thinal of the bucket, then held it out to Rap. “Eat!”
“I don’t want any.”
“Eat, Flat Nose!”
“No!”
“I will stuff it down your throat. Have to keep your strength up, faun.”
He was mostly just mocking, Rap thought, flaunting his superiority; but perhaps he still regarded himself as Rap’s trash, who must care for his master. Either way, Rap had no doubt that he had best do as he was told, for clearly Little Chicken’s blood had been roused by the fight, and he would love an excuse for another tussle.
So Rap took the bucket and stepped back from the huge corpse. Flies were buzzing around it already.
“Let’s go somewhere better, then. None of this poor guy’s stuff will fit any of us.” In fact, only the troll’s boots were worth a second glance. He had pretty well stripped himself naked coming through the undergrowth, ripping even his leather breeches in a dozen places. His fungus-colored hide was barely scuffed.
“Let’s get well away!” Thinal said, wiping his mouth and then licking his hand. “Someone’ll come looking soon . . .” He gaped at Rap in sudden horror. “Hounds! When they find his body, they’ll put hounds on us!”
“Leave hounds to me,” Rap said, gagging at the sour taste of the slave’s mash. “But they may have more trolls, and this one was following our scent.”
Thinal nodded with disgust. “I’ll remember in the future.” A city thief had not expected a victim to trail him that way, nor thought to check wind direction. Even an occult genius was not infallible.
“Leave trolls to me,” said the goblin, with another satisfied gloat at the dead one.
Destiny with men:
’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
— Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (§49, 1859)
FIVE
Slave and sultan
1
The moon was all wrong in Zark. It rode much too high in the sky and it seemed to have been tilted sideways, so its face was strange and unfamiliar. Not that Kadolan was looking at the moon, out she was aware of its beams shining on the floor below the windows, and those bright patches were much smaller than they could ever be in Krasnegar. Such unleaded windows would be unthinkable there at any time, while here even in the middle of a spring night, the wind was no worse than cool. Reflections of moonlight on marble gave ample light.
She huddled on the edge of her bed in her flounced robe, a frilly night-cap pulled down low to hide her curlers, and her feet snug inside goatswool slippers. Her niece was pacing the chamber as the cheetah in Duke Angilki’s zoological garden paced its cage. Just as the cheetah made a sort of half rear at the end of each length to start its turn, so Inosolan swept her train around in a swish of samite before retracing her steps.
She was on the third or fourth telling now, still very upset, understandably. ”Aghast” might be a more exact word. Kadolan had not even grasped the enormity of it all herself and had not experienced the terror of it firsthand, as Inosolan had. Small wonder that now she need talk herself down from an emotional high that had flown perilously near hysteria. “. . . so here’s my choice except that I don’t even get to choose but apparently I’m either to be married off to a goblin or else the imps and the jotnar will fight each other to the death and the goblins move in to finish up the survivors and everyone I know’ll be dead and there won’t be a kingdom left to rule anyway and as for me I’ll probably end up entertaining important guests down on the waterfront . . . ”
The windows opened on a balcony overlooking one of the many moonstruck gardens of the palace. Kadolan worried that many ears were listening, but Inosolan had ignored all suggestions that she lower her voice. The sorceress certainly wasn’t listening, she said; she was occupied otherwise. That bit had not been explained yet.
What Inosolan really needed was a good, long, motherly hug, but Kadolan was not skilled at such intimacies. Her strong point had never been children, and she had not known Inosolan as a child. By the time she had reached Krasnegar after Evanaire’s death, the chance for closeness had gone. They had not shared more than two or three hugs, ever.
“. . . maybe should be glad I don’t get to choose! I mean, suppose they line up a dozen or two bristle-faced goblins and . . .”
Kadolan had never borne children of her own, or she might have learned better how to cope with them. Adolescents were her specialty. She knew by instinct how to deal with adolescent girls, or at least she could never remember when she did not have a knack for them. There was no great magic involved, only clear rules and endless patience. One had to set an example as best one could, for those quick young eyes spied out hypocrisy at once; so one stood up honestly for one’s principles, like a lighthouse at the end of a difficult strait. One encouraged, one explained, one kept one’s temper, and in the end, usually without much warning, the strait had been traversed, the ship was in the harbor, and another young lady was available for matchmaking. Very distant cousins, or just friends . . . Inosolan had been merely the last of many, many girls who had called Kadolan “Aunt” at Kinvale. Kadolan had failed none of them, but none had been a keener or a more gratifying pupil than her own niece. None had met with more success, or less good fortune.
Inos was still wayward and impetuous, of course, but those traits were part of her jotunn heritage, and she would not likely ever outgrow them. They cropped up frequently in the family.
“A goblin? Can you imagine? A goblin king in Krasnegar? What do you think—would he amuse the guests by carving up the servants or entertain the servants by cooking up the guests?”
That was better. Murderously unfunny humor, but humor. Inosolan’s voice was steadying, too.
And she had seen that lost kingdoms were not returned like misplaced parasols, that there must be a price to pay—perhaps not as much as marriage to a goblin, but a price. What price would Inosolan be willing to pay? Would she be given the choice?
The irony of it all was that Kadolan, having guided her niece through to womanhood, should now feel so completely useless as an adult confidante. She was too old for this wild adventuring. Her life had been much too sheltered for her to know anything at all about women like Rasha—who, despite her incredible occult power, was still only a woman, a hard, twisted, bitter woman, a woman who had fought for every crust shed ever eaten, a woman abused and maltreated by men in ways Kadolan could not imagine and did not want to.
Inosolan was younger and stronger and had been coping amazingly well, considering how very little room she had to move at all. Now came this latest outrage—warlocks and warfare. No one could be expected to cope with this. Kadolan was out of her depth. She felt she was being left behind. That was old age, she supposed.