“You are modest, your Majesty,” Sagorn said acidly.
“No, Doctor. I admit that I had great powers once, but not now. I’m not going to try to explain that at the moment. Perhaps never.” Seeing that the old jotunn did not believe him, Rap turned back to the imperor. “I shall do what little I can, Shandie, but magically it will be very small. If you are expecting me to solve things, then you will be disappointed.”
“I see,” the imperor said. He was not convinced either, although he was trying to hide his doubts. He did indeed expect Rap to solve things.
Well, Rap was not going to use sorcery to persuade them. “I do not even know the name or nature of the enemy. Does anyone?”
“Sir Acopulo?” Shandie.said. “You are our advisor in such matters.”
“Speculation upon insufficient data is invariably hazardous. As a working hypothesis . . .” The little man looked like a priest, but he sounded more like a schoolmaster. His ideas of warden behavior seemed improbable even to Rap, whose experience of the Four would let him believe almost anything of them. Sagorn was making no attempt to conceal his mounting skepticism, and eventually his disdainful sneer registered on Acopulo.
“It fits the facts!” he snapped, glaring.
Shandie asked for a second opinion, and the jotunn went on the offensive.
“It fits a judicious selection of the facts, Sire. As a student, Acopulo was always selective in his use of evidence, and I see he has not changed. The last news we had of the wardens, Lith’rian was hurling his dragons at Olybino’s legions. They were at each other’s throats! Now we are to regard them as allies?”
Scholarship was an uncommon calling for jotnar. Sagorn was an unusual jotunn, but not so unusual that he lacked belligerence, and now he was obviously intent on exterminating the unfortunate imp with traditional ruthlessness. The tongue was mightier than the ax, that was all.
Little Acopulo bristled. “That is your only objection?”
“It is the least of them.” Sagorn sneered. “Granted that the Four often squabble, you have failed to explain why this disagreement is so much more virulent than all others in three thousand years—so dire that it required desecration of the Rotunda. You did not explain the dwarf’s prophecies and warnings. You did not explain why King Rap has come from Krasnegar. And you have most certainly failed to explain why, after a thousand years of extinction, a pixie should reappear now, and to his Majesty.”
“Pixie?” Rap exclaimed. Shandie had met a pixie?
“A possible pixie,” the imperor said, smiling at a sorcerer’s surprise. “On my way back to Hub, I broke my journey at a post inn in the Wold Hills. An ancient crone appeared to me, but not to my companions. From my description, Doctor Sagorn believes that she may have been a pixie.”
Rap shot a glance at the old rascal and saw glitters of satisfaction in the faded blue eyes. Sagorn would not have admitted how much he had been guessing. His knowledge of pixies was probably limited to what Kadolan had told him in a conversation on board
Unvanquished, beating up the coast of Zark one blustery morning eighteen years ago—Rap himself had been down in the hold with the ship’s gnome, but eavesdropping nonetheless. Inos and her aunt had narrowly escaped being murdered in Thume, and it was odd that . . . Holy Balance!
Relying on the shielding to keep out the overweening world disaster, Rap risked a peek with premonition—yes, he was on to something. Inos had mentioned her adventures in Thume a few times, but he had never paid much attention. How odd! He had never visited Thume on his solitary sorcerous travels. He had never really thought about Thume at all!
Perhaps he could only keep it in mind now because he was inside a shielded building. Obviously the defenses were enormously powerful, and perhaps even selectively aimed at sorcerers. Remembering the amount of power he had needed to renew the inattention spell on tiny Krasnegar, he was appalled at what would be required to cover a land as large as Thume.
No inattention spell would endure a thousand years without renewal!
Shandie was still relating how he had gone to Wold Hall and consulted the preflecting pool. Rap had heard most of the story from Ionfeu and Eigaze: Lord Umpily had seen a dwarf sitting on the Opal Throne itself, Acopulo had seen Sagom, which was why the imperor was here now; young Ylo . . .
Young Ylo was starting to sweat again, his face locked in a meaningless smile. Obviously Signifer Ylo knew some curious secrets, although this might be the same one that had upset him earlier. Young Ylo had seen a vision of a beautiful woman. Impress Eshiala was clenching mental teeth, also . . . Oh? Who would ever be a sorcerer?
They were both young. She was a beautiful princess, he was a handsome hero—there was only one secret they might share. Rap sighed and put the matter out of his mind. He couldn’t solve all the problems of the world, and he certainly was not going to pry into this one with Shandie present.
The imperor had ended his tale. “So I think I saw your son,” he added. “I feel that I should apologize, somehow, but of course it was by no choice of mine.”
“You did see Gath,” Rap admitted, “and he saw you! It may even have been the same night, but it doesn’t matter whether it was or not. He had a brief vision of a soldier; we didn’t realize it was you until about a month ago, or I would have come sooner. I fear I should have come a year ago, for I was warned then that the end of the millennium was brewing trouble.”
“Warned by whom?” Sagorn demanded, white eyebrows perking up like a dog’s ears.
“A God.” Rap spoke offhandedly, just to annoy him. “I’m not sure which God They were—one doesn’t think to shoot questions when Gods appear. I thought that the end of the millennium was awhile off, but I seem to have interpreted the date too literally. A year or two either way . . . When did the War of the Five Warlocks begin?”
“Around 2000.” Acopulo was not certain, though, and he had left himself open to another thrust from the old jotunn. “The Festival of Healing, 2003, was when Ulien’quith fled the capital,” Sagorn snapped. He was excited, and that was encouraging. The old sage was not easily persuaded, and if he accepted that the coming year 3000 was important, then something in his endless studies of ancient lore had led him to that belief. “You are right, your Majesty. A year or two either way does not matter.”
“But the millennium itself does!” Rap agreed. “The pixies disappeared in the War of the Five Warlocks. Now his Majesty has seen a pixie. That seems to fit, somehow, doesn’t it? Every sorcerer from the wardens on down seems to have disappearedI detect almost no occult power in use anywhere. I sense a terrible evil overhanging the world. Warlock Raspnex’s warnings of chaos and the fall of the Protocol—those may fit, also, although I am far from ready to trust the dwarf. Any dwarf.”
The great pending evil was rooted in Dwanish, and therefore dwarvish in origin. Not knowing that, the mundanes frowned disbelievingly and began to argue. Rap started to explain and was distracted by farsight. Downstairs in the kitchen, a dirty rag hanging on a nail had started to move in a breeze that had not been blowing until now.
He felt the hair on his scalp prickle. The shutters had been forced, and two massive hands were gripping one of the bars that blocked the window. The owner of those hands was still outside, and hence shielded from him, but their size and their gray color were unmistakably dwarvish.
The bar bent like a rope and was removed. Its neighbor followed, a moment later. The hands grabbed the stiles of the opening; a large head appeared, and massive shoulders. Raspnex squirmed into the room, and the ambience shivered as he used power to complete his acrobatic entrance and land on his feet.
He found Rap at once, and recoiled in shock. For a moment the ambience was shadowed by images of thick stone walls. “I come in peace, your Majesty!”
Raspnex believed that Rap was still his better at sorcery, but there were no secrets in the ambience.
Trapped!
“Then you are welcome,” Rap said. “You are in no danger from me, Warlock.”
The warden of the north was squat and broad, in the manner of dwarves. However he might look to a mundane, in the ambience his age was obvious. His hair and beard were still a normal iron-gray, but the turf on his chest was silver. The years had softened his rocky muscles like cooled lava, and his skin hung limp on him. He was still a powerful man, though, as his treatment of the window bars had shown. Now his agate eyes slitted in astonishment as he appraised Rap’s image in the shadow world.