“It will be longer,” Azak said, but Inos thought she detected an odd note in his voice, and she remembered his subtle wink in Elkarath’s garden. She also sensed a warning that made her bristle. The only person within earshot was Kade.
What devious intrigue was boiling inside that deceitful djinn mind? Surely he could not suspect Kade of being unfaithful? He rose suddenly, looming against the stars. “I must go, while there is still light enough for fighting.”
“By the way,” he added, “I don’t like onions.”
He stalked away before Inos could think of a suitable reply. After a few minutes, she decided that there wasn’t one.
4
Night came at last to Faerie.
Moonlight shone in through the wicker walls of the hut, and Rap could not sleep.
He was not accustomed to a hammock, for one thing. Little Chicken was snoring, for another.
There were bugs, for a million more. He ought to be used to bugs by now.
He was going to die. The word his mother had told him was worth more than his life; not that any man’s life would be worth very much to a warlock, probably.
He had always thought of jails as being cramped, dark places, built of stone; smelly and cold, like the dungeons in Krasnegar. In Holindarn’s day those had been mainly used as storerooms, and the palace children had played in them sometimes. At eleven or so, Inos had enjoyed ordering people locked up, tortured, and beheaded. As she would never let anyone else order such things done to her, the rest of the gang had tired of that game long before she did.
Proconsul Oothiana’s jail was not like those nasty stone boxes at all. The but was airy and pleasant, and even reasonably clean. Clear water flowed up magically in a stone bowl and trickled away down a magical drain that served for a toilet.
There were many of these huts in the woods, and probably they were all much the same, all set in the same sort of grassy clearing. Quite probably these were the most pleasant dungeons in all Pandemia, with fresh air, room to exercise, and no ugly stone walls. Birdsong and sunlight.
The but was enclosed in an invisible occult barrier. Merely by closing his eyes, Rap had been able to establish that the shielding cut off the tops of trees, so it was a dome like the dome that enclosed the whole palace compound, or the smaller shield over the castle at Krasnegar. Only someone with farsight would know that it was there.
But the magical cowl did more than block his farsight; it was also an aversion spell. Inisso’s chamber of puissance had been protected by such a spell, but that one had been old and worn out. This one was irresistible. If he tried to walk away down the path, he felt a strong desire to turn back. If he persisted, he became giddy and nauseous. Inos had often accused him of being stubborn, but he wasn’t stubborn enough to resist what that sorcery did to his mind. He just could not make his feet obey.
Simple!
A pleasant jail. At mealtimes imp slaves brought around baskets of food. Legionaries guarded them, and they were not affected by the spell.
Simple, but very effective. He was going to die.
Unless the mosquitoes ate him first, he would be tortured until he told someone his word of power and then he would die, just like the fairies who had been abducted from the village.
And Inos would never know that he had even tried.
Buzzing of insects, and sea noises. Then the wind shifted in the treetops, and he heard a distant beat.
He sat up suddenly, tipping himself sprawling from the hammock to the dirt floor. He yelped. The goblin grunted, twisted, and went back to sleep.
Rap fumbled around to find his boots, then walked out into the moonlight. The night was warm and soft and restless.
Now that he was trying to hear it, it was quite audible, a rhythmic tattoo somewhere to the north of him, nearer the end of the headland. The fairy child had said, “I will clap for you to dance.”
So at least some of the fairy captives were still alive, somewhere in this jail. The moon was shining, and they were dancing. The beat was complex, and stirring, and joyous, and it brought a hard knot to his throat. The fairies faced the same fate as he did, but they were much more innocent. He was a thief, an accessory to murder, and any respectable court of justice would condemn him to death anyway. Their crime was to have been born fairies.
In the faint, hopeless hope that the aversion spell did not work at night, he headed for the path through the trees. In a flew minutes he felt strongly disinclined to go any farther. He stopped, balked, a few paces from the occult shield that blocked his farsight.
He was going to die.
So was the goblin, although he might not have realized that yet. Possibly the forbiddance that Proconsul Oothiana had put upon Rap would prevent him from warning Little Chicken of his fate. He hadn’t tried. There was no hurry. Warlock Zinixo might take weeks or months to make up his mind, but eventually he would come for all his captives, each in turn.
A pleasant jail. Night-flowering plants were putting out heavy, drowsy scents. Bugs whined nearby, and the sea rumbled far away. Somewhere in middle distance the beat of the fairy dance rose and fell as the warm wind toyed with it. If he were Zinixo, Rap decided, then he would definitely harvest the faun and the goblin before slaughtering any of the fairies.
With a sudden chilling insight, he realized that this was not a prison at all, it was a farm. The fairy inmates were livestock, and this jungle jail had been designed to give them familiar surroundings. There might be hundreds of them living here, generation after generation, bred to die. Oothiana had hinted—very evil, she had said. Completely unstoppable.
He’d tried to escape, of course, but the aversion spell was implacable. The twists in the path had prevented him from working up any real speed, and no matter how hard he had tried, he had always flailed to a stop before he reached the barricade, then come scrambling back from it in panic and revulsion.
He’d persuaded Little Chicken to make the attempt, too. The goblin did not even need a long runway to build up speed. His occult strength let him take off from a crouch like an arrow leaving a bow; but it also enabled him to stop dead in his tracks when he wanted to, and of course the aversion spell made him want to. The advantage of his great speed had been completely canceled out. The path was gouged where he had dug in his heels, and he had come no nearer the invisible barricade than Rap had.
But possibly his heart had not been in it. He had not seemed very convinced by Rap’s explanations, preferring to believe his own conclusion that the magic merely stopped him from going more than a certain distance from the hut. He thought in terms of a tether, not a fence. That was very logical, Rap supposed, if you didn’t have farsight. It might even be true, and the aversion spell might be quite unrelated to the shielding. It might just increase in power indefinitely as the distance from the but increased. He couldn’t prove matters either way, because he couldn’t tell if the aversion spell extended outside the shielding . . .
Oh, yes he could!
With a yelp of triumph, Rap went racing back to the hut to waken the goblin.
Rap’s mother had firmly maintained that all cats were gray in the dark. Goblins in moonlight, likewise, lost any hint of being green. But they could still look dangerously surly at having been roused from a sound sleep. What dreams a goblin might enjoy did not bear thinking about.
Little Chicken stood on the path, scratching, slapping bugs, and showing his teeth in a fearsome scowl. His angular eyes glinted crossly as he listened to Rap’s proposal. He nodded agreement. “Easy.”
“You’ll do it?”
“No. Then you leave the island? Leave me? You think again, Flat Nose. Find better idea.”
He turned on his heel, intent on returning to his hammock. Rap grabbed his shoulder. Little Chicken spun around, knocking Rap’s arm away with a blow so hard that for a moment Rap thought the bones were broken.
Never let him save your life . . .
Facing a hate-filled glare, he wondered if he was about to die at once. The goblin had not mentioned the subject of trash since Rap had come to the jail. He had spoken very little, spending most of the afternoon just eyeing Rap like a cat eyeing a bird. He might now consider that his diversionary attack on the soldiers had relieved him of any further obligation to his former master. In that case, Little Chicken was now free to pursue his life’s ambition. The only thing that could be restraining him was the flimsy hope that he might one day drag his victim back to Raven Totem to enjoy the fun in relaxed family surroundings. If he ever discarded that hope, then he could start work anytime. Like now.