Her friendship with Shandie was a matter of convenience. Neither sought real familiarity, and their respective responsibilities as monarchs would have made that impossible anyway. She admired his self-control, but it made him too cold and humorless for her taste. She resented very strongly his reluctance to discuss business with her. It was an attitude she had seen carried to absurdity in djinns, and she knew that goblin women were no better than slaves, but it was not normally an impish trait. She would have expected better of the imperor himself. The idea that a famous warrior might be intimidated by women never entered her head.
As the convoy drew closer to Gwurkiarg, it also drew near to the Dark River itself. It was in flood, bloating over the landscape like a dirty lake, spotted with ice floes and tree trunks from the mountains, plus many squat barges and lug-sailed boats emerging from winter shelter. Near the capital the towns were more numerous—some of them knee-deep in water and stinking of mud. At night the sky was blotched with the fires of foundries, while the smoke-dulled days were clamorous with the sounds of mills and wagon wheels and metal shops. The dwarves’ was an ugly land, as humorless and prosaic as its citizens, devoted like them to business and profit, devoid of soul.
In the Impire spring was proclaimed by the arrival of swallows and in Krasnegar by geese. The news was brought to Dwanish by mosquitoes. Inos was heartily sick of living under canvas. Common sense would have suggested that the travelers seek shelter within some of the many houses and other buildings now available, but Sergeant Girthar continued to order camp pitched every night. Presumably dwarvish householders demanded rent and dwarvish travelers refused to pay it. Mud and mosquitoes and tents were an unholy combination.
Men came and went within the convoy. Part of the armed escort was relieved and replaced. Old Wirax went off to visit his family, promising to catch up later. Saturnine government officials arrived to tally the loot, which they persisted in doing even when the wagons were on the move.
Halfway through a particularly unpleasant day, Inos learned that she was now in Gwurkiarg, capital of Dwanish. She was not impressed. The road was deep in mire, and cramped between unending rows of stone buildings whose doors opened right on the street; there were no pedestrian sidewalks or gardens. The convoy was now merely part of a continuous line of carts creeping into the city, matched by another line creeping out. At intersections they knotted up in chaos.
Gwurkiarg had a mysterious reputation. Few nondwarves were ever admitted—perhaps because the inhabitants were ashamed of the noise and the smell. Having almost no timber, they burned black stuff they mined, which made their chimneys smoke horribly. Hour by hour, hundreds of melancholy ponies fouled the streets. The skyline of drab slate roofs was unbroken by domes or temple spires; the largest building in the city, she had discovered, was the Treasury, and most of that was underground.
The day was gray and rainy.
When evening brought it to a merciful end, Sergeant Girthar pitched camp in a muddy wasteland apparently reserved for the army’s use. The gloomy buildings enclosing it might be a notorious example of urban decay or the heart of uptown Gwurkiarg—Inos neither knew nor cared. She was much more interested in the sight of Shandie in conversation with a couple of strangers. Jotnar were not inconspicuous in dwarfdom.
She slopped over through the mud and took up position at his elbow, waiting expectantly. He reacted with a formality she considered absurd, considering that they both resembled shipwrecked scarecrows.
“Your Majesty, may I have the honor of presenting his Excellency the Nordland Ambassador to Dwanish, Thane Kragthong of Spithfrith?”
The jotunn was huge and broad, almost as large as Krath, who won the Krasnegar weight contest every year now. He was swathed in leather breeches and a fur shirt that bulged open to expose an equally furry belly with a noteworthy overhang. He wore a sword, a shiny steel helmet, and high boots. His silvery beard was long and forked, and although he was well into middle age, he looked capable of entering a castle without using the door.
“An honor, your Majesty!” He bowed—slightly. Thanes came in one flavor, male, and queens regnant were an absurdity.
“The honor is mine, Excellency!” Willfully mischievous, Inos thrust out her hand.
He barely spared it an icy glance. To kiss her fingers would be unthinkable and a jotunn handshake was a test of strength and resistance to pain, not a greeting that could be offered a woman. The ambassador’s sea-blue eyes were perhaps less bright than they had been in his youth, and well padded now in fat, but they could still register devilry. Too late she realized that a thane would not be outmaneuvered so easily.
“Nay, let us not stand on formality, kinswoman!” His great hands shot out and lifted her bodily, folding her into a crushing bear hug. He then kissed her, with considerable fervor. There was a beery odor to his mustache and his beard tickled. By the time her feet were allowed to return to the ground, she knew that she had been outflanked, outmatched, and outsmarted, and Shandie was probably fighting off an urge to roll on the ground and gibber.
She staggered back, gasping to regain her breath. “Kinswoman?”
The ambassador was rearranging his beard with an expression of great satisfaction. “We are distant kin. If you want details, then I confess I shall need to wait for my skald to return from Nordland.” The old man smirked. “Thane Kalkor, of blessed memory, was a second cousin of mine.”
Ah! “Then my great-great-grandmother Hathra comes into it somewhere.” Inos bore a lingering grudge toward that ancestral lady and the relatives she had towed into the family tree. The royal house of Krasnegar had other, older connections with the aristocracy of Nordland, but most of those would have been forgotten by now had it not been for Hathra. “I confess I was not aware of you, kinsman. I am sure I have many other worthy and noble relatives whom I could not list either—but I do not mourn Thane Kalkor. My husband did the world a favor there. Nor do I mourn his loutish half brother, Greastax.”
Her candor earned a frown from the snowy eyebrows. “It may be that we shall journey to Nordland together, kinswoman. If so, then you must learn discretion. To speak such words in the hearing of the present Thane of Gark or any of his brethren would compel bloodshed.”
Inos had just been outflanked again. “Truly said, kinsman! I shall guard my shrewish female tongue more carefully in future.”
“It’s all right in private,” the thane said mildly. “I admire a woman with wit.” He grinned down at her triumphantly. She decided the battered old colossus was considerably sharper than he looked; she might even learn to like him, provided he let her win a point or two sometimes.
“And the ambassador’s daughter, Mistress Jarga,” Shandie said. He must have noticed the byplay, but he was diplomatically not reacting.
Jarga bowed, also. She was shorter than her father, but still half a head taller than Inos, raw-boned and weatherbeaten; she wore leather breeches and jerkin.
In Shandie’s account of the escape from Hub, Jarga had been the name of the sailor who . . .
“Kinswoman!” Inos said. “Jarga? Then you must be—”
”I had the honor of meeting your husband, ma’am ,”
Jarga said quickly. Her ice-blue eyes were alert with warning.
“I am very grateful for the help you gave him on that occasion,” Inos replied swiftly. There were mundane dwarves around, but none close. Was it possible that the ambassador did not know his daughter was a sorceress? She did not seem very much younger than her father, and probably wasn’t.
“Master Raspnex will be here in a moment,” Shandie said. “He is seeking a suitable site for our discussions.”
“Then I shall depart,” the ambassador rumbled.
Shandie looked startled. “You would not rather—”
“I think you will talk of things I prefer not to know.” The big man was hiding a smile in his silver beard. “At least, not know officially. Jarga may care to remain and reminisce with her old friend the warlock.”
And that was that. If the thane wished to leave, obviously only sorcery or a small army would dissuade him. Shandie went along, escorting him to the edge of the camp, while Kragthong moved through the dwarves like a gander in a chicken run.
“Sailors have superstitions about the occult,” Jarga remarked wryly.
That was true, and Inos knew what sort of sailor he must have been. How many more bloodthirsty demons did she have in her family? Thanes were killers by definition.
Dismissing the doubtful past, she brought her mind back to the future. What was to be discussed at this meeting? Jarga had been one of Raspnex’s votaries. If the old dwarf was honoring the new protocol, then she had now been released and was a willing helper. She was also free to be a traitor, of course. Meanwhile, the ambassador had made an interesting comment—