Rap’s farsight picked up the newcomer at the same moment as hers did. He wheeled around. The road was flanked here by a grassy bank smothered in pale-blue flowers. On the top of it stood a dwarf, who had certainly not been there a second earlier.
He had chosen a vantage point where he could look down on them. On level ground he would not have reached to Rap’s shoulder, but he was thick and broad, with the oversize head and hands of his race. His hair and beard were a metallic gray shade, curled like turnings from a lathe, and his face had the color and texture of rock.
But if dwarves aged like the races Rap knew, then this one was in his sixties and therefore could not be Zinixo himself; moreover a warlock would not wear such obviously shabby work clothes and heavy boots.
“Raspnex?” Oothiana said coldly. “I thought you were keeping watch.”
“Change of orders.” He gestured over his shoulder with an oversize thumb. “He wants you. Now.”
Oothiana stiffened and drew a nervous breath. “In the Gazebo?”
“In Hub. You have some explaining to do.”
Instantly all expression left the lady’s face. That had to be magic, Rap thought.
“I—yes,” she said calmly. “All right. This is one of the intrud—”
“Not wanted. I’ll take care of him.”
Oothiana nodded, glanced at Rap as if about to say some thing, and just vanished. Rap jumped, then looked warily up at Raspnex, who was regarding him contemptuously.
“Never liked fauns. Stubborn lot. Roisterers and spendthrifts.”
Rap could not see how humility would improve his situation much. “Will you let me go if I promise to be boorish and niggardly, like a dwarf?”
Raspnex growled, an unpleasant grinding sound. “You told the lady your green friend wants to kill you, so I’d assume that—”
“You were spying?”
The older man scowled. “I was. Mind your manners, faun. You want to share a cell with him, or would you rather not?”
“Share,” Rap said. “He wants to kill me in public. He won’t hurt me without an audience.”
“You pick odd buddies! Jail is along—”
“I’m hungry,” Rap said.
The dwarf rubbed his beard, staring at Rap as if puzzled. Then he growled, ”Come here, lad.”
Rap walked over and climbed the bank. He stopped as soon as his eyes were level with the dwarf’s—two beads of gray flint staring out from a face of pitted, weathered sandstone. Even the wrinkles around those eyes looked more like cracks.
“You know what’s going to happen!” His voice was a subterranean rumble. “How come you’re not more scared?”
Silly question. Rap would feel plenty scared if he let himself think about the matter. Fortunately, he hadn’t had time yet to brood and screw himself up into a funk. “You’re not dead till your heart stops,” he said; one of his mother’s little homilies. His heart was thumping pretty firmly right now.
Raspnex pouted. “Kinda fancy the proconsul?”
“Fine lady.”
A faint nod. “Not just faun. What else are you?”
“Jotunn.”
“Gods, what a horrible mixture! Explains that flash of temper we saw, though, doesn’t it? Still, might work. A jotunn would’ve tried something brainless, and a faun would’ve just sulked. How are you for stubbornness, with those bloodlines?”
Rap had no trouble keeping his temper reined in when he knew he was being bated. The man had called him over to put him within punch-swinging range. Only idiots fell into traps that obvious.
The dwarf grinned suddenly, showing teeth like quartz pebbles. ”Here,” he said. He held out a sandwich of black bread and hot, greasy meat.
“Thank you, sir!” Rap grabbed the offering. As he bit into it, he noticed that some of it was already missing.
“Don’t thank me; thank the skinny recruit with the buck teeth. What’re you smirking about?”
Rap spoke with his mouth full. “Never thought I’d ever meet a better thief than Thinal.”
Raspnex chuckled. “Jail’s that way, faun. Be off with you!”
The jail was a long way north, at the end of the cape. Rap’s feet knew the way and took him there, pacing unswervingly along the middle of the road, making confident choices at every branch or intersection. He remembered how Inos had been abducted by Rasha in the same manner.
Three times carriages veered around him in clouds of dust and oaths. Other pedestrians were rare, but once he came face to face with a full maniple marching toward him. Apparently his ensorceled behavior was not unknown in those parts, for where a free man would have been mindlessly trampled into the dirt, the centurion bellowed for the lines to open, and Rap proceeded along a corridor of oak-faced legionaries heading in the opposite direction. Not one of them met his eye.
His way led across grassy meadow, through groves of trees, and alongside formal gardens. Many of the buildings were shielded from his gaze, smaller shields within the greater shield around the whole complex. He identified the recruits’ barracks, but not the particular buck-toothed lad who had lost his lunch. He saw workshops and a library and private houses. He admired flower beds and herb gardens.
He also saw a great many statues, some of them so ancient that they had weathered into shapeless pillars. They flanked the paths, being especially common at crossroads. He assumed that they represented former proconsuls or imperors or both, for almost all were male. Most were depicted in either uniform or antique costume, but many of the newer ones wore nothing at all, or only a helmet. He could think of few things sillier than a man brandishing a sword when he had no clothes on, but he saw some of those, also.
And at last he arrived at a patch of forest, an unkempt stretch of trees and undergrowth. His feet continued without hesitation along a winding dirt track through the middle of this. His eyes caught glimpses of many little huts hidden away in the bushes, but each one was enclosed in its own fence of occult shielding, so he could not tell who inhabited this strange settlement. He thought he could guess, though. The flimsy wickerwork structures were identical to the houses in the fairy village, and on the same miniature scale.
Finally his feet turned off along a narrow side path. He headed into a wall of shielding and broke through, and a few more steps released the compulsion on him. He stumbled to a halt a few paces from a cabin door. Lounging on a log in the shade, idly fanning away flies with a handful of fern fronds, sat Little Chicken.
His angular eyes widened, then he grinned. “Welcome to prison, Flat Nose,” he said.
3
She had escaped from jail—Inos clutched that thought as she would have clutched a rope while dangling over a precipice. The caravan had departed before noon and struck out at once into unfamiliar terrain, skirting the hills she knew from Azak’s hunting trips. She had thought she already knew, what true desert was, but she had been mistaken.
The sun’s light was a naked blade, its heat a bludgeon. The drab land lay dead and wrinkled as if it had been moist at the creation of the world and ever since been steadily shriveling and crumbling in that sadistic glare. A few goatherds and a scattering of miners were all who lived there; except of course for ants and millipedes and scorpions and poisonous snakes. And lots of flies. Lots and lots of flies.
Camels were noisy and smelly and untrustworthy. Their gait was better than the motion of a boat, perhaps, but similar enough to make her queasy. With no reins to hold, she felt like a useless passenger in a very uncomfortable chair floating high above the arid dirt. In a few days, when she had become more familiar with camels, and when there was no doubt that the fugitives had safely escaped from Rasha—then, Azak said, he would happily give his supposed wife a few lessons in the finer points of camel riding. Meanwhile, the nose rope of her mount would remain attached to the baggage animal in front, and if she needed anything she should just ask Fooni, and excuse-him-he-was-busy-now.
But they had escaped from Arakkaran. That one thought was a lake of cool water in the barren mental landscape, a jewel without equal, rain in a drought.
As the sun dipped to the dark sharp edges of the Agonistes, the caravan came to an oasis. It was disappointing, not at all the soothing romantic setting Inos had expected. There were no buildings. The palms were few and scraggy, and the grass had been grazed to the roots over the years by thousands of caravans converging on the capital. There was a well for people and a couple of muddy ponds for the livestock, but no shade or shelter from a scorching wind that sprang up unexpectedly to blow dust into eyes and teeth. The camels expressed their opinions very loudly and unmistakably, and Inos agreed wholeheartedly.