“Perhaps you should also explain the time limits,” King Rap said, turning pink with his suppressed mirth.
“Why?” snarled the jotunn. “Oh, well . . . There are other restrictions. They are complicated, but in short I could not remain here for more than a few days.”
“Rap!” the imperor barked. “Share the joke!”
The faun flushed even redder as he struggled to catch his breath. “It may not seem as funny to you as it does to me. For many years, Doctor Sagorn and his . . . associates, I suppose is the word. They are never a group and yet they are not exactly separate, either. But for over a century they kept on trying to find some way to break the spell that bound them—tried one at a time, of course. When I was a much more powerful sorcerer than I am now, I removed it for them. They were reunited! Then they discovered that they disliked the experience and changed their minds. At their request, I put it back again. But Sagom had been hogging more than his share of the years, and another of them, Thinal, had been shirking. They agreed that they ought to cooperate more, so I rearranged the original sorcery a little. Now they have to be more considerate of one another. That’s all. The doctor can’t stay around as long as the others can, so they will eventually catch up with him in age. Thinal can’t just vanish right away every time and stay forever young. And if Sagorn says that now he can’t remain with us very long, that means that lately he’s been hogging again.”
The old man bared his teeth in a snarl. “I was engaged in a very complex piece of research!”
The faun smothered another snigger. “Oh, quite!”
The audience looked at one another. It sounded like some sort of elaborate hoax, and yet neither man was the type to indulge in such foolery.
“I want a demonstration!” Shandie said coldly.
“As you wish, sire.”
The king chuckled. “You can’t call Jalon, because he called you. So who will be the new recruit to our cause? Whom will his Majesty have the honor of meeting?”
“I shall let you choose.” The old man was enraged by the mockery. ”Last time I called Andor. You have a choice of Darad or Thinal.”
“Darad?” Ylo said. “The gladiator?”
“That’s the one,” Rap said. “But we have no work for him at the moment, so we should save him for later. I look forward to meeting Thinal again—an invaluable recruit, who can play a noble role in our mission.”
“Highly improbable!” Sagorn snapped, and another man was sitting in his clothes.
He was youthful, and an imp—a slim, dark youngster with poxy features. He glanced all around cautiously, then slid down on one knee and bowed his head to the imperor.
Acopulo had turned pale. Even Shandie was displaying shock. The dwarf was leering, seemingly as amused as the faun. “This,” the king of Krasnegar said, “is Master Thinal.”
“A businessman,” Thinal muttered without looking up. “Oh, Gods! A businessman, sire.”
“What sort of business?” Shandie demanded.
“Monkey business!” King Rap threw his head back and roared with laughter.
Parts to play:
A place in the ranks awaits you,
Each man has some part to play;
The Past and the Future are nothing,
In the face of the stern Today.
— Adelaide Anne Proctor, Now
FOUR
True avouch
1
In a gray foggy dawn, the fishermen put Lord Umpily safely ashore on an icy jetty somewhere on the east side of Hub. He did not know whether it lay within the bounds of the capital proper or in some best-forgotten suburb—he was just glad to have land under his feet again. He had expected to be relieved of his bag of sorcerous gold and dropped overboard in the night.
Muttering prayers of gratitude to the appropriate Gods, he struggled off through snow-packed alleys in search of an inn. Emotionally he was sure he would be coshed and robbed before he found one, even though intellectually he knew that his apprehension was excessive—that no one else could know what caused that bulge in his cloak. His cloak bulged in many places. The lump that bothered him had a harder center than the others, but its mere appearance should not attract undue suspicion. Yet every time he passed a dark doorway, he thought he heard it jingle.
Umpily was no stranger to wild adventuring. He had visited almost every corner of the Impire in the past few hectic years, but then he had always been accompanied by well-armed youngsters prepared to bleed in his defense if necessary. Being alone did make a difference.
Unmolested, cold, wet, hungry, and stinking of fish, he stamped into the Sailors’ Haven. He had patronized worse, although not often. He demanded a room with a fire, hot water, and breakfast. He sent the potboy off to the nearest tailor with orders to attend him at once, bringing a selection of raiment suitable for a gentleman of stalwart physique.
As Umpily was stripping off his wet clothes, he came upon the magic scroll in his pocket. It unrolled into an oblong strip of vellum no larger than his hand, completely blank. With it was the silverpoint the warlock had given him, although he had been told that any writing instrument would suffice. He wrote, Am ashore. Streets impassable. Bells still ringing.. He let the leather roll up again and laid it on the dresser. The bells were important because they meant that the old man was not buried yet. The life of the city must be almost at a halt, with travel blocked by snow and the population driven half insane by the incessant tolling.
When a warmer, cleaner Umpily rang to summon breakfast, it was brought up by the landlord himself. The tray was copiously heaped with plain winter fare—broiled beef and dumplings and a bread pudding, all washed down with a passable porter. Umpily ate until he could eat no more, as was his custom, but he encouraged the fellow to remain and talk. The man seethed with complaint—business had come to a stop, the bar was almost deserted, roofs were leaking, fuel was short, fish spoiled on the quays, and so on. He lamented all through Umpily’s meal, except when he had to run downstairs to fetch seconds.
Satisfied at last, Umpily sent the man off with the dishes, demanding ink, paper, and quills. Then he sat back to digest and consider.
His mission was to discover what was happening in the capital and then report it all to Shandie. Right now he could not do so. The bells had informed everyone that the old imperor was dead, but the smothering snowstorm had stopped all other news from reaching even this far. Here, just five leagues from the Opal Palace, no one yet knew that the wardens’ thrones in the Rotunda had been destroyed, or that the new imperor had promptly vanished from the palace, or that several buildings in the southern precincts had exploded in fire and ruin. Even Umpily himself did not know if the Red Palace had survived the siege. He was not certain that the old Imperor’s funeral could proceed without the new imperor’s participation. If it couldn’t, he decided, the entire population would soon be driven mad by those Evil-begotten bells, himself included.
He took a look at the magic scroll. The words he had written were gone. In their place he found Gods be with you. in Shandie’s neat hand.
Amen to that!
Unlike most male nobles in the Impire, Umpily had never served in the army. His father had died in battle when he was very young. His mother had been a bitter widow and a jealous parent, keeping her son very close to her. He had grown up more familiar with gossiping dowagers at tea parties than with companions of his own age.
His family was small and unimportant, but his title alone had gained him entry to court, even without a sponsor. By the end of his teens, he had wormed his way into court life well enough to be a popular member of the nobility, a skilled collector of gossip, and already plump.
At forty he was obese, married to a permanently miserable invalid wife, and bored to madness by the pointless, sterile existence of an aristocratic parasite.
One evening a chance remark informed him of a petty plot to entrap a certain youth, a motherless, fatherless adolescent who could easily be enmeshed in an apparently compromising situation. The threat would be scandal, the price of silence at least a lifetime pension, possibly land. Such things happened all the time and the victims always paid. Usually a hint would escape and then the court would purse lips and snigger and mutter that boys would be boys although not usually that way . . . and then forget the whole incident in a month.