Dave Duncan – The Living God – A Handful of Men. Book 4

Truly, Father Acopulo was a fine priest! Like any imp, he was prone to seasickness, but he had ignored it. He had spent many hours with the dying boy, and with his guilt-laden slayer, also. He had greatly comforted Wo-pu’s passing and had already worked a vast improvement in Po-pu, restoring his faith, easing his load of guilt. The family would not lose a second son.

And now the imp had conducted a wonderfully moving service also. Finding him had been great good fortune.

The Gods had been kind.

Merely players:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And each man in his time plays many parts.

— Shakespeare, As You Like It, II, vii

FOUR

Impossible loyalties

1

Again the sun was setting in Qoble.

A solitary crow, homeward bound to its nest in Thume, thumped its way high over the Brundrik River—flying, of course, as the crow flies. The two girls standing on the western bank joined hands and disappeared.

Time stopped for Thaile as she ran into the sorcerous barrier. She gathered power to force an entrance and was accosted by, a man she knew, Archon Raim. They faced each other in the still nothingness of the ambience. He smiled. She glared angrily, prepared to wrest her way by him, and then was stayed by the color of his emotions.

“Welcome home, Thaile,” he said softly.

He meant it, too. He was square-shouldered and solid, but the muscle was all genuine; so was the thick curly hair and the smile. He had bright gold eyes. There could be no deception in the ambience, no concealment of mind or body. Thaile had not been a sorceress long enough to grow accustomed to unrestricted perception, and the last time they had met, she had slapped his face.

“Thank you.” Knowing that she was displaying embarrassment, she glanced at her companion, but Kadie was frozen in timelessness—as was the crow, suspended over the midpoint of the stream.

“You are a sight for worried eyes,” Raim said. He was amused by her reactions, but he was also flattered by them, and starting to respond himself. He could not have been a sorcerer long enough to have forgotten how it felt to a newcomer. Without a word, he passed an apology for his earlier offense and accepted hers for the slap; the incident was mutually discarded.

“I thought my return would be prophesied?” Thaile said. He nodded, surprised. “Of course it is. So is your nonreturn. You have not seen the Revelations?”

He was an arrogant young man, but perhaps he had much to be arrogant about. He was very young to be an archon.

“I saw it. I was not allowed to read it.”

“I am sure that will be permitted now. You will find it confusing.”

“It mentions me.”

He nodded again and laughed. “And many other people, also, most of whom have not happened. It mentions you twice by name. Once it prophesies that Thaile of the Gaib Place will save the College. Elsewhere it says that Thaile of the Leeb Place will destroy it. That is fairly typical.”

“Oh.” Thaile had assumed that prophecies might be obscure or ambiguous, but she would not have expected them to be directly contradictory. ”Then why is the book important?”

“Because it spends much ink explaining how the Chosen One is to be recognized. Because you seemed to fit about as many of the clues as could be hoped for.” He shrugged those husky shoulders. “Because even such apparent nonsense may turn out to be accurate. Much of the Revelations is very, very old, you see.”

They could stand here in nothing forever, without wearying or losing a moment of their lives. Kadie remained a statue. “Old is good?”

“In prophecy it is,” he said. “Mountains are best seen from afar, yes? Close to they are obscured by foothills or even trees. For great events, the oldest prophecies are the most reliable.” He chuckled, pleased by his own metaphor.

“And it prophesies my return now?”

“It also said you might not return, which would be disaster.” Raim hesitated, then grinned and went on, because he could not conceal the rest. ”And you have not been having romantic adventures.”

“That is important?”

“Apparently. Several verses warn of the coming of a woman with child, as harbinger of Cataclysm. That was why . . .”

Why my baby was murdered!

Raim flinched and nodded. “Er, partly. Certainly why you were not brought in sooner.” With less brashness than usual he turned his attention to the petrified Kadie. “And you bring a guest? Only one? The Revelations say the Chosen of the Chosen One are to be granted succor—’Chosen,’ plural.”

Thaile glanced with relief at the petrified mundane, that piteous, ill-used princess. “She will not be harmed, then?”

“No, I am sure.” He frowned, obviously intrigued. “Only a mundane? That sword is a cunning piece of work, but she has no power of her own. Pretty little thing . . . been through some hard times? How and why did you find her?”

“It is a long tale, but she seems to be important, or her family does. Her father is the leader of the resistance to the Covin.”

“They do not concern us!” Raim’s anger flared up in bluewhite auroras. “What the Outsiders do to one another is no concern of Thume.”

He was wrong—Thaile was certain of that, although she did not know how. ”That may not be true any longer. He was a demigod once. He knew five words.”

The archon started nervously. Had he been standing in the real world and not the ambience, he would probably have glanced over his shoulder. In either case, there was no way to know whether the Keeper was listening. She almost certainly was. “Was a demigod? And now is not? How can this be?”

“He told four of the words to the girl’s mother, the queen of Krasnegar, his beloved.”

“Four? His beloved, and he stopped at four?” Perplexity writhed around him like purple flame. “That is contrary to all the lore of magic!”

“Evidently. And the woman broadcast them to her assembled people, diluting them to background words.”

Raim shook his head in bewilderment. “An incredible couple, then! It seems our wisdom is deficient. Such things should not be.”

Thaile could not resist the opportunity. “So perhaps these people do concern us?”

He sighed. “Perhaps. I should not presume to instruct you, Archon Thaile. Your power belittles us all. I am greatly comforted by it, and by your return.”

His honesty reassured her. Raim was not jealous of her power, or frightened of it, as Teal and Shole had been. “Her Holiness is expecting me, I assume?”

Raim laughed, and it was the equivalent of a warm hug. His pleasure at seeing her was completely genuine. “If I could keep your return a secret, I would. I shall humbly suggest that you be granted a few days to rest and relax. You know where to find each other when you are ready.”

“And I am to be an archon?”

“You are an archon! You overshadow us like an elm amid seven daisies. Of course you are an archon! But the daisies can cope without you for a while yet. The duties are not taxing, you know, or we should delegate them to someone else!”

Whom do we serve? Yes, Thaile would be an archon, because that was her duty. All pixies must serve the Keeper and the College, because the Keeper and the College preserved them all against the demons of the Outside. She had walked the Defile and seen the horrors of the War of the Five Warlocks. Now she had sensed the evil of the Covin and witnessed the Almighty’s atrocities. She was mighty, perhaps the mightiest since Thraine. With such a Gift, how could she refuse to serve?

“Welcome home,” Raim said again.

“It is good to be home,” Thaile admitted.

He nodded and lifted the occult veil to let her pass. Instantly sorceress and friend arrived at the Thaile Place. Time lurched back to life.

Kadie uttered a yelp of pleasure and approval at the sight of the trim cottage under the trees. She clapped her hands. Thaile recoiled in dismay. Oh, it was the Thaile Place, all right, a luxury version of the Gaib Place where she had been born, set amid much the same upland pines and scrubby vegetation, the same sort of rocky outcropping and taxing mountain air. No one had been near it since she left. To her eyes it was exactly right, to her heart all wrong. A pixie returning home should be overcome with joy, but this was not home. The Leeb Place, now—wattle walls on the banks of the great slow river, the heavy scents of the lowland, the hum of insects; heron and parrot and flamingo, and memories of Leeb . . . Her soul was rooted there, not here, but the Leeb Place was no more; she herself in grief and rage had blasted it to ashes. A pixie with no Place of her own was a flower with no stalk, a snail without a shell.