“Whole armies can vanish in Thume,” Sagorn said gleefully. “Or not, as the case may be. Travelers disappear or return with tales of an empty, deserted land, yet not even the Impire has been able to commandeer that emptiness! And no one wonders why? Ma’am, gentlemen . . . This does not make sense! Why has it never worried you before?”
Rap glanced around the group and saw the dawning of belief, the dawning of excitement, even. Could the War of the Five Warlocks have left some secret behind in Thume, a secret still active after a thousand years?
“I wonder if we could even approach it?” He looked down at his bare arm and wrote Thume on it. No, that would not be enough. “Thrugg, you’re strongest, I think. Fix this tattoo for me so I can’t wipe it off in a fit of absentmindedness. Give it all you’ve got.”
The result was an explosion in the ambience that almost stunned him. It rocked the castle. The wild melee downstream came to an instant halt, shocked into sobriety. All Rap actually felt, though, was a momentary tingling.
“Thank you!” he said weakly, still dazed.
“Couldn’t do it harder or the shielding would have burst,” Thrugg explained apologetically.
All the other sorcerers and mages in the castle were staring at their leaders in consternation, wondering what had provoked that immense outburst of power. For some reason most seemed to have picked out Rap as the culprit. They should be informed of the new theory, but whom would they believe? Well, there was one person there who would never refuse an audience.
“Tik Tok, why don’t you explain?”
Tik Tok beamed his dagger teeth and sprang to his feet in a shower of rosebuds. “Fiends and alloys!” he proclaimed. “I am pleased to denounce that we have made a significant breakdown in understudying!” He paused and glanced at Rap. “Good start?”
“An inedible performance,” Rap said dryly. “Carry on.”
Westward look:
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
— Clough, Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth
SEVEN
We happy few
1
“For the hundredth time, no! I will not marry your daughter! Not tomorrow. Not next year. Never! Not ever! At no time between now and the end of the world!”
Sir Acopulo spun around in a swirl of black robe to slouch against the railing. His move was too violent—the railing creaked ominously and even the balcony itself seemed to sag, as if in sympathy. He backed hastily into the room, seeking safety. The water was a long way down, and none too clean. One of the harbor’s responsibilities was to remove the village sewage, but the tide was in at the moment.
“But it is your duty to marry my daughter,” Shiuy-Sh wailed.
He was a scraggy little man, small even by Acopulo’s standards. Years of seawater had shriveled his skin like old brown mud, and his scanty hair was turning silver to match the fish scales that embellished his arms to the elbow. His only garment was a twist of dirty cloth, although like all fauns he always seemed to be wearing furry black stockings. Now he stood in the middle of Acopulo’s living room and wriggled his hairy toes in emotional agony, twisting and torturing the straw hat he held in his hands.
“It would be blasphemy for me to marry your daughter. Or your nephew. Or your grandmother!” Acopulo wanted to weep. He had been over this argument thousands and thousands of times, and he knew it was useless. He never got anywhere. Arguing with fauns was like trying to eat marble.
Raw.
“But my grandmother is already married,” Shiuy-Sh said, seeming puzzled. With the widespread nose and large mouth of his race, he looked none too intelligent at the best of times.
“I wish she had never been born!” Acopulo wiped sweat from his brow. Ysnoss had a wonderful natural harbor, or so its inhabitants claimed. The price of that harbor was that the village nestled at the bottom of a gorge, a notch cut in high cliffs. Steep rocky walls beetled up on all sides, capturing the noon sun and deflecting the wind. Ysnoss was a gigantic oven. Perhaps ”stew pot” was a better description, if one considered the foul steamy stench arising from the harbor itself.
There was no road out of Ysnoss. Most of the shanties were built on stilts, because the land was so steep. Acopulo had been given one of the finest houses in the whole village, two rooms directly over the water.
He had been there a month, and expected to remain there until he went utterly insane, in about another ten minutes . . .
“Tcch!” Shiuy-Sh exclaimed in annoyance. “Bad dog, Imp! This is the priest’s house! Where is your shovel, Father?”
Imp was the size of a small pony, filled with the jubilation of youth and totally lacking in manners. Twice already he had stolen the gift of fresh bass Shiuy-Sh had brought, and he had eaten half of it before the faun rescued it the second time.
Wearily Acopulo pointed to the shingle he retained for such needs. That was another curse of living with fauns—there was livestock everywhere: dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, parrots. No faun ever seemed to go anywhere with less than his own pack of hounds and a couple of tame macaws. Monkeys and geese were the worst pests. Fortunately there was not enough flat ground in Ysnoss to stand a cow or a horse on.
“My brother has promised a whole pig for the feast,” Shiuy-Sh remarked cheerfully as he scraped the offensive mess through a gap in the floorboards. “And his wife is preparing wreaths of purple and white—”
“I don’t care!” Acopulo screamed. “It is nothing to do with me!”
He stared miserably out over the water to where the sea shone in the gap between the cliffs. About five weeks ago the Ilranian authorities had finally given him permission to leave. He had taken the first available boat out of Vislawn—Curly Nautilus, a smelly little faun fishing dory blown off course and forced into port for repairs.
For a fee so reasonable that it should have made him suspicious right away, Nautilus’s crew had promised to deliver him to a port in Sysanasso. There he had expected to catch a more reasonable craft to carry him east to Qoble, or perhaps even all the way to Zark. He would have sailed in a basket to get away from those elves. Fauns, he had soon discovered, were much worse.
Ysnoss was a port, of course. He had not stipulated the port he was to be taken to—like most imps, he had no clear picture of Sysanassoan geography at all. The fact that nothing but the locals’ own small craft ever stopped in at Ysnoss was not a violation of the contract. Nor had the negotiations considered the fact that Ysnoss had no priest and both its neighboring villages did, although that had turned out to be a very material detail.
Shiuy-Sh completed his small chore, tossed the shingle back out on the balcony, and wiped his hands on his furry thighs. “If you do not wish to come to my house, Father,” he suggested with the air of a man making a significant compromise, “then my daughter and nephew will be most honored to be marred here, in your residence. Unfortunately . . .”
“Unfortunately what?” Acopulo demanded, scowling at the little man’s woebegone expression.
“Unfortunately, this house is one of the oldest in Ysnoss. Even my grandmother cannot recall who built it. The whole village will be coming to the wedding. Do you not feel we shall be tempting the Gods by filling this place with people? Your faith is very ennobling, Father, but you must forgive the rest of us our doubts.”
“I forgive the rest of you nothing! I have told you a million times that I am not a priest!”
“But you dress like a priest!”
Acopulo put his face in his hands. He knew exactly what was coming if he persisted with the conversation: “But the elves said you were a priest.” “But it is very impious to dress like a priest if you are not.” “But if we believed that you had been guilty of such sacrilege we should have to hold a court . . .”
There was no way to argue with fauns. One might as well wrestle trolls, trust djinns, throw oneself on jotunn mercy, or beg charity from dwarves. A race that had gained a worldwide reputation for stubbornness was not going to start listening to reason now. There were dozens of small boats in Ysnoss. Acopulo had offered more gold than the entire population would see in centuries just for passage around the headland to Ushyoas, and not one owner was willing to take him. Ysnoss needed a priest. Other villages had priests.