deliberately stabbed him in the back of the hand with the pin.
He gave a startled exclamation and jerked his hand back. ‘Why
did you do that?’ he demanded.
‘Let it bleed, Brand,’ I told him. Then I blotted the drop of blood
from his hand with my handkerchief and handed the frilly little
piece of cloth to him. ‘Keep this tucked away somewhere, dear one,’
I instructed. ‘You must never question your own sanity in this. Any
time you start to have doubts, take this out and look at the blood
spot. This conversation is really happening, and you really are the
Child of Light – or you will be when the time comes. I’m a physician,
Brand, so you can believe me when I tell you that you’re not insane.
now, go wash that hand, and I’ll bandage it for you.’
We held our meetings in the traditional conference room high in
One of the towers of Iron-grip’s Citadel. A lot of memories crowded
in On me there, but I pushed them back to concentrate on the
business at hand. Most of our discussions involved a guessing game.
Torak had surprised us once, and we couldn’t really afford another
surprise like that, so we argued at some length about his next probable
move. King Rhodar of the lost nation of Drasnia didn’t say very much,
but he didn’t have to. His face was careworn anyway, and his
mournful, sorrowing presence was a constant rebuke to all of us and a
constant reminder of the consequences of guessing wrong.
Since we couldn’t really respond until Torak made his next move,
the conference didn’t produce anything very meaningful. My only
real contribution was the suggestion that it might be the neighborly
thing to do to advise the other western kingdoms that the end of
the world was at hand.
Father and I left the Isle of the Winds by ship, and we were
deposited on a rainy beach on the north side of the Hook of Arendia
to begin our search for the elusive Asturians.
After the Mimbrates had destroyed Vo Astur, the Asturian
nobility had taken to the woods to engage in centuries of guerrilla
warfare. In the Asturian view of the world, shooting a lone Mimbrate
traveler in the back with an arrow constituted a major victory to be
celebrated around the campfires for weeks on end. The Mimbrates,
quite naturally, disapproved of that practice, and so armored knights
made periodic sweeps through the forest to locate and destroy those
bands of enthusiasts. The Asturians grew quite adept at concealing
their encampments, so father and I spent a delightful week and a
half searching for the elusive Duke of Asturia, Eldallan. The almost
perpetual rain seething down among the trees added whole new
dimensions to the word ‘uncomfortable’.
Unless driven by hunger, predators normally sit out rainstorms
in some sheltered place, but there was one wolf and one owl in that
soggy forest who were obliged to move around almost constantly.
Have you any idea at all of just how bad a wet wolf smells when
he gets near a campfire? just the thought of father’s fragrance during
our search turns my stomach.
As luck had it, a brief break in the weather dissipated the perpetual’
mist hanging in the forest, and I flew on up above the treetops and
saw the smoke rising from a dozen or so campfires some distance off to the east. When we investigated, we found the encampment
we’d been searching for.
Given their highly developed sense of romanticism, the costume
of choice among the young Asturian ‘patriots’ consisted of green,~Oeri
brown tunics and hose and rakish caps decorated with long feathers.
The Mimbrates had designated them as outlaws, and they were
playing the part for all they. were worth. Literature has its place, I
suppose, but the ballads composed by third-rate poets extolling the
exploits of this or that outlaw out to rob rich Mimbrates and to
distribute the booty to the poor Asturian peasants set the
imaginations of generations of brainless Asturian nobles afire, and they
postured and posed in their green clothing and spent hours
practicing with their bows, riddling whole battalions of straw dummies
dressed in rusty Mimbrate armor with yard-long arrows.
All right, I’m prejudiced against Asturians. So what?
Duke Eldallan and his cohorts were less than cooperative when
father and I entered their extensive encampment. We weren’t
exactly taken prisoner, but there were a lot of arrows pointed in our
general direction as we approached the rustic ‘throne’ where
Eldallan sat with his eight-year-old daughter, Mayaserana, on his knee.
The Duke of Asturia was a thin man in his early thirties with
carefully-combed blond hair. He wore forest green, his longbow
handy, and he obviously had a high opinion of himself. He received
father’s introduction of us with a look of scepticism. My father’s
customary shabby appearance obviously didn’t match the picture
of ‘a mighty wizard’ as laid down in assorted Arendish epics. he
might not have believed father, but a short while later he definitely
believed me.
He shrugged off the news of the destruction of Drasnia as an
Alorn problem’, and made much of his near-religious obligation to
exterminate the Mimbrates. I finally grew tired of his posturing and
stepped in. ‘Why don’t you let me talk with him, father?’ I said. ‘I
know Arends a little better than you do.’
‘Gladly,’ the Old Wolf grunted.
‘Please forgive my father, your Grace,’ I said to Eldallan.
‘Diplomacy’s not one of his strong points.’
Then Eldallan made the mistake of mentioning my former
association with the Wacite Arends as if it had been some kind of
moral failing. I decided that since he wanted to be nasty about it,
I’d give him more nasty than he was equipped to accept.
‘Very well. your Grace,’ I said rather coldly, ‘I’ll show you what
the Angaraks did to Drasnia, and then I’ll leave it up to you to
decide if you’d like to have the same thing happen here.’
‘Illusions!’ he snorted.
‘No, your Grace. Not illusions, but reality. I speak as the Duchess
of Erat, and no true gentlemen would question the word of a
noblewoman – or have I erred in assuming that there are gentlemen in
Asturia?’
He bridled at that. ‘Are you questioning my honor?’
‘Aren’t you questioning mine?’
I don’t think he’d expected that. He choked on it a bit, and then
he gave in. ‘Very well, your Grace,’ he said. ‘If you give me your
word of honor that what you propose to show me really happened,
I’ll have no choice but to accept it.’
‘Your Grace is too kind.’ I gently probed
at his mind and found
there an unreasoning terror of the notion of being burned alive. That
gave me all that I needed.
I set a series of disconnected images before him and compelled
him to watch them unfold with the force of my Will. There was
enough generalized butchery in those images to keep him from
guessing that I was concentrating my efforts on the one thing he
feared the most. The seas of blood and the incidental
dismemberments were in the nature of punctuation to the lovingly recreated
scenes of screaming Drasnians trapped inside burning buildings or
being bodily hurled into great bonfires by laughing Angaraks. I
added the customary shrieks of agony and doused him with the
sickening odor of burning flesh.
Eldallan began to scream and writhe in his chair, but I still went
on and on until I was absolutely certain that he wouldn’t argue with
us any more. I might have held him there longer, but the presence
of his little daughter, Mayaserana, forced me to relent. Mayaserana
was a beautiful little girl with dark hair and huge eyes, and her
involuntary little screams and sobs as her father twisted and groaned
tore at my heart.
‘What did you do to my father, bad Lady?’ she demanded in an
accusing voice when I released Eldallan.
‘He’ll be fine in just a little bit, dear,’ I assured her. ‘He just had
a nightmare, that’s all.’
‘But it’s daytime – and he isn’t even asleep.’
I took her in my arms. ‘That happens sometimes, Mayaserana, I
told her. ‘He’ll be all right.’
After the Duke of Asturia had recovered, father proposed a truce
between Asturia and Mimbre,’- a temporary truce, you understand,
just during the present emergency. Of course, if you just happen to
find peace with the Mimbrates entertaining, you andAldorigelll
might want to consider extending it.’
‘you’re surely not proposing an actual meeting between me and
that Mimbrate butcher, are you?’
,(only if you’ll both agree to he chained to the walls at opposite
ends of the room, Eldallan. I’ll make arrangements with the
Sendarian ambassador in Vo Mimbre. We’ll have the Sendars serve as
go-betweens – at least until the Angaraks actually invade Arendia.
When that happens, we’ll come up with a way to keep you and the