At the other end of the table the children were having great difficulty adjusting to the idea of chairs, and reasonably so, for the small ones could not see the fare even if they stood on the seats. Ignoring their mother’s ineffectual protests, some of them settled on the floor as usual, but most crawled up to sit on the table itself, eating out of the serving dishes. The food at that end was traditional gnomish cuisine, and Rap wished his farsight was not so efficient. Sweat prickled on his forehead as he tried to force sticky, bony pike down his throat.
Ishist himself had magicked his own chair to a suitable height and was eating in rather moody silence, using both hands, seeming to be balanced somewhere between annoyance at this folly and tolerant affection for his wife’s odd notions.
“This fish is most delicious, ma’am,” Rap said.
Athal’rian flashed him a smile of relief and thanked him for the compliment.
He nagged his mind to give him something else to say. He knew how formal affairs should go, because he had watched Holindarn entertain guests at the high table in Krasnegar. Gentlefolk chatted while they ate. They made jokes, and laughed. Jokes about what, though?
Darad must have the right sort of experience in his multiple memory, but his wits were too dim to use it or even see the need. Gathmor’s idea of dinner conversation was planning the brawl to follow.
Inspiration came to Rap like a pardon to a felon. “I have never seen so magnificent a chamber, my lady! The king’s hall in Krasnegar would fit in here a dozen times.”
“Oh, do tell me about it, Master Adept!”
So Rap described the palace in Krasnegar, and if the dragonward’s lady somehow assumed that the raised dais was where he had sat and the servants’ end was not, well, that was what she expected, not what he said. Then he asked about dining halls in Hub, and she became quite animated in describing them, ignoring her ironically smiling husband and the chaos of children squabbling amid the gold plate. As daughter of the warden of the south, she had moved in the highest levels of society. At fifteen, she had been presented to the imperor. She knew the Opal Palace itself.
“I hardly think of Hub anymore,” she asserted, smiling at her husband, “and I would never dream of going back.” They kissed on that.
She could not have been very old when she left, Rap decided, unless her age had been occultly altered. Mentally she was a small child. Was that the reason she now lived as a gnome, or had she been sane when she came here?
Something was licking his toes . . .
Rap slid his plate unobtrusively from the table and laid it on his lap. Soon he could hear satisfying sounds of pike bones crunching. When he brought it up again, it had been polished. The two jotnar at his side were chewing grimly, their faces running sweat.
The servants came trooping in again with another course, and Rap found himself facing a stag’s head with antlers gilded and a potato in its mouth. He was expected to carve from this, apparently, but the cooks had neglected to skin it before boiling it, and it looked rather too rare, anyway. There was still a reproachful look in its eyes.
In an attempt to seem busy, he ladled out generous heaps of vegetables, comprising unwashed tubers and soft-boiled lemons. The other two nibbled listlessly at them while he prepared to do battle with the stag. He must also continue the insane conversation with the girl-woman at the far end of the table. Yelling over the rioting children between them, she asked about his travels. Rap told a vague tale of being kidnapped by jotunnish raiders, and of shipwreck. Eventually he mentioned that he had visited Faerie and had been a guest of the proconsul. That convenient euphemism caused Ishist’s globular eyes to twinkle like cabochons of jet. He must have ransacked all of Rap’s memories by now, and probably the others’ also.
“I have always wanted to visit Faerie,” Athal’rian remarked wistfully, “but of course my husband’s duties make it so difficult for us to get away.”
Rap thrust his fork into the stag’s head, and one of its soggy eyes winked at him. He recoiled and then glared reproachfully at the sorcerer, who seemed to be totally engrossed in biting lumps out of a shapeless mass that might have been a bird’s nest. Ishist, Rap suspected, had a dangerous sense of humor.
Athal’rian had noticed his hesitation. “Is that knife not sharp enough, Master Adept?”
“Quite sharp enough, ma’am! I am letting the pleasures of your conversation distract me from my duties.”
“Oo, flattery! But Daddy always says that wit is the finest sauce, and a meal without discourse has no flavor. Let me see . . . Who is proconsul of Faerie at present?”
“Lady Oothiana, ma’am.”
“Oh!” Athal’rian seemed taken aback. She glanced uneasily at Ishist, then her eyes wandered briefly over the children. “Don’t do that on the table, Shuth. Go to the Mews. Dear Oothie and I took viol lessons together. How is she?”
Rap cursed under his breath, feeling he had chosen to ride at a dangerous fence. “She is very well, ma’am.”
“I forget if . . . Did she finally marry that musclebound soldier? What was his name? Yodello?”
Tricky takeoff, landing unseen . . . “Yes, she did, ma’am.” Athal’rian bit her lip and seemed to slip away into a memory. “He was very pretty. Too pretty for a man, you know.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The glorious opal eyes came up to stare along the table at him, and their fires flickered through a mist of tears. “He wanted me to marry him, but Daddy had promised me to Consul Uppinoli’s youngest.”
Ishist frowned. “My dear—”
“How furious he was when I told him I would rather wed a gnome!” She looked hesitantly down at Ishist, and seemed suddenly aghast at what she had said. Then she smiled. “And I was right!” She bent for another kiss.
The conversation ended when two of the smaller boys began to fight over the last rat and then pulled it apart in a tug of war. Darad leaned sideways in his chair and threw up everything, triggering Gathmor’s reflexes also. That was bad. Even worse was the way the children all rushed over to clean it up.
H
5
The visitors stood while Athal’rian departed with her brood, sent away by an angry-looking Ishist. The table vanished abruptly, and so did all the chairs except the sorcerer’s.
Obviously the time had come to talk business. Rap walked forward, aware that his two companions were following closely and leaving everything to him. He was an adept, and they were relying on him to save them. But he was also the cause of their danger, for he had used power against a dragon. He had violated the Protocol that had ruled Pandemia for three thousand years.
He stopped before the foul little sorcerer, who was lounging back in his high chair and picking his teeth with a slender bone. The seat was so much too big for him that his muck-laden bare feet stuck straight out. His bulging black eyes were unreadable.
Gruffly the gnome said, “Thank you, Master Rap. I’m grateful.”
That made no sense at all! Rap had done nothing to earn the sorcerer’s gratitude—it must be a trick. Yet why should a sorcerer need to use tricks?
“For what, my lord?” Then Rap remembered that he was not supposed to give the gnome titles. But apparently it did not matter, for Ishist just shrugged inscrutably and switched his gaze to the two sullen jotnar.
Rap knew how hard this must be for them. They had grown up around gnomes. All the towns and cities in the Impire had gnomes to keep down the vermin and deal with the garbage, and all large ships carried one or two, but there had been none in Krasnegar. He had not met gnomes until he was an adult, and then he had merely filed them away in his mind as another race of people new to him, like fairies or trolls. Gathmor and Darad, humbly waiting to hear their fate from this squat and squalid old ragamuffin, must be feeling as if a mongrel dog had suddenly ascended the Opal Throne and started barking orders.
Come to think of it, Ishist did rather resemble a pug dog, with his pop eyes and upturned nose, with the bloodstained cake of hair around his mouth and all those teeth he was picking.
With a shiver of fear, Rap realized that the sorcerer might still be reading his thoughts.
The ugly old man flipped his toothpick away and scratched reflectively at the hairy bulge protruding above his belt. “Sailor, you are an innocent mundane caught up in occult matters that do not concern you. You are free to go.”