Servant of the Dragon (14 page)

* * *

CHAPTER SIX

Ilna looked back through the atrium when she heard the front door open. The guard who'd entered—the pair on duty this morning were new to her—called, "The chamberlain's here, mistress. Want to see him?"

The Blood Eagles lacked the air of solemn formality that Sharina's doorkeeper projected—Ilna tried to imagine that self-important fellow shouting across the hall instead of approaching his mistress and murmuring the name of the caller—but they didn't seem to resent doing servants' work for lack of anyone else being around. Ilna wondered if the Blood Eagles had been warned that she hadn't wanted them either, and that she was likely to tell them so if they objected to doing what their presence made necessary.

As indeed Ilna would have done, in a fashion those listening would remember.

"Reise's here?" Ilna said, smiling at the thought of dealing with people who thought there was any honest work that they were too good for. She walked toward the door. "Yes, I'd be glad to see him."

Her mouth pursed in wry disgust. She often wished that the thoughts that gave her pleasure had more to do with joy and kindness; but correcting fools
did
make the world a better place. Presumably there were other folk who dispensed joy and kindness.

Garric's father entered. He'd been a tallish, awkward fellow in Barca's Hamlet; respected for his learning and the success he'd made of a run-down inn, but loved by no one. Here, though dressed in the gray of a palace servant, Reise was a different and much more impressive man.

He bowed and made a complicated hand flourish, not because Ilna demanded it but because his position did. Ilna knew that she could no more have stopped Reise from giving her the marks of respect due any palace resident than he could have made
her
accept a chambermaid to tidy her baskets of yarn. Ilna didn't like court ceremony; but she very much liked the determination with which Reise followed his principles wherever they led.

As he always had, she knew. And as he'd raised his son and daughter to do.

"I'm intruding because of a personal matter, mistress," he said as he straightened.

"Garric?" Ilna said, her muscles suddenly cold and very hard.

"I misspoke," Reise said. His wince of embarrassment meant that he understood more than Ilna wished he did. But after all, the whole world seemed to; except for Garric himself. "Your uncle Katchin visited the palace yesterday. He met your brother, but I thought you should be told directly as well."

Ilna sniffed. "You're not intruding," she said. "Come out in the garden, won't you? I'll show you the work I've just finished."

As she stepped into the columned walk she added, "And you were right that I hadn't heard Katchin was here. Cashel tends to forget things that aren't important, and neither of us consider our uncle very important."

Ilna hadn't stitched the three pieces together because she didn't have a room high enough to hang the arras complete. Instead she'd arranged the portions for temporary display on the west—shaded—side of the colonnade. The theme of the action was consecutive through the three bands anyway, so it was much easier to view the details here than it would be when the tapestry hung as a whole before the statue of the Protecting Shepherd.

Reise strolled along the arras. Initially he had his fingers tented, but after a few steps he crossed his wrists behind him as if to prevent himself from touching the fabric. When he reached the end of the third—the bottom—section, he turned and walked back to Ilna. He didn't speak, and his face had no expression.

"You're the first person to see it complete," Ilna said carefully. She wasn't one to demand praise, but she'd certainly expected some reaction. "Do you have any comment?"

"Why do you ask that, mistress?" Reise said in a trembling voice. "I feel exactly what you wanted me to feel. You know that! Anyone who sees this will feel all those things that you made them feel."

"I...," Ilna said in embarrassment. People didn't expect emotion from Reise the Innkeeper. Well, they didn't expect it from Ilna, the orphan who lived next door to the inn either. "With something this complex, I didn't know...."

"This...," Reise said. He looked over his shoulder at the hanging, then twisted his head away with an effort of will. "The image of my, my s-s... of Prince Garric fighting the Beast made me...."

Reise rubbed tears from his eyes and added, "Mistress, I didn't believe in the Great Gods. Oh, I'd make the usual offerings—I had to in a place like Barca's Hamlet, after all. But now I thank the Lady; and I thank you."

"I don't believe in the Great Gods now," Ilna said harshly. "And anyway, the place I learned to weave the way I do now had nothing to do with the Lady or anything you could call good."

She laughed; the sound was brittle, but she couldn't help that. It was all she could do to avoid letting the sound trail off into hysteria as she remembered the gray place and a tree with limbs like snakes writhing.

"Mistress?" Reise said. Then, sharply, "
Ilna
."

Ilna blinked. Her body swayed like a slowing top. The chamberlain offered his arm; Ilna gripped it.
Funny to be getting support from clumsy, hen-pecked Reise!
She laughed, with amusement this time, and that steadied her properly.

"I've been working hard," she said in apology. That was true, and she supposed it was part of the reason as well.

Ilna had wanted to finish the arras quickly so that she could leave Valles. She didn't grudge Garric and Liane the happiness they found in one another—she didn't! Each was a wonderful person who deserved someone as wonderful as themselves.

But though she wasn't sorry for their happiness, it tore her heart out to watch them. Besides, Ilna had debts to pay in Erdin where she'd ruined lives with the skills she'd learned in Hell.

"The arras shows the world the son you raised, Reise," Ilna said, looking with a critical eye at the neighbor she'd known from her first youth. "You can be proud of him, and he of you."

"
Prince
Garric," Reise emphasized. "Whom I fostered."

"Don't tell
me
that!" Ilna snapped. "Do you think I can't read lineage as surely as I can tell you the kind of mulberry trees that fed the worms who spun your robe? No doubt Garric is the offspring of Countess Tera and heir to the blood of the ancient Kings of the Isles; but no doubt he's Garric, son of Reise, as well."

Reise made a sound that was halfway between a bark and a gasp. "May I sit down?" he said, gesturing to one of the benches placed between alternate pairs of columns.

"Of course," Ilna said, though she was a little surprised. "I have beer, bread and cheese, if you'd like."

She grinned tightly. "Though the beer isn't as good as your own."

Reise smiled vaguely, a polite response to words he hadn't really listened to. His eyes were on a patch of wall that had been frescoed in a brick pattern; the sheathing was badly cracked, and a portion had flaked away from the rubble core.

"Tera was a lovely woman," Reise said. He looked toward Ilna. "There was nobody I could say that to, you know. I couldn't talk even to you if we'd both stayed in Barca's Hamlet."

You don't have to talk to me now, since it's of no interest to me,
Ilna thought; but she stopped the thought short of her tongue by an effort of will. Back in the borough Reise had treated her and Cashel exactly as he treated anyone else: with brusque, carping honesty. He hadn't been a friend to the orphans—or to anyone else in the world—but he hadn't tried to take advantage of them either. Reise wasn't easy to like, but his virtues were real and his flaws were ones that Ilna found easy to understand.

"And Count Niard?" Ilna said; out of kindness, she supposed. She'd created a chance for Reise to speak as he felt he needed to because he'd treated her decently when others did not.

"He was Sharina's father," Reise said quietly. Now he was looking at the tapestry again, viewing the figure of the tall, blond woman who danced through beastmen and fiends of living flame. "Not a bad fellow, Niard, though we used to joke that every time he had a second thought in the same day, one of his ears fell off... and he still had both ears. He ordered me to marry Lora as cover for his affair with her; and I did, because it was protection for Tera as well."

He shook his head at ancient memories. "Lora does the best she can," he said.

"And a poor enough job it is!" Ilna said. Lora with her palace airs and shrewish temper had been harder to take even than Uncle Katchin.

Reise turned his head toward her. "Yes, a poor job," he said. "But she fostered another woman's child without complaint."

He smiled faintly. "That was perhaps the only thing in this world or the next that she
didn't
complain about, I'll grant. And of course she didn't realize that Sharina was her own daughter and that Garric was the fosterling; only the midwife and I knew that."

"She treated Sharina like royalty," Ilna said bitterly, "and Garric as badly as she did...."

She stopped
that
thought short of her tongue also, but only just. She met Reise's eyes with a grimace.

He laughed and rose heavily from the bench. "As badly as she did me?" he said. "Yes, more or less. But it's a sign of Sharina's strength that Lora's treatment didn't ruin her... and I'm afraid that strength isn't something the children got from me."

Reise nodded toward the arras. "Mistress Ilna, I appreciate being shown your work. I am honored to know you."

Ilna sniffed, leading the chamberlain back into the house. He was ready to leave, and she had to join the others shortly to see Cashel off on his search for Sharina. "Katchin was after a job, I suppose?" she asked as they crossed the atrium.

"Yes, I assume so," Reise agreed. "A position with a great deal of show and public honor, at any rate. He'll not find it here, not with my son in charge."

Reise made his formal bow and flourish, then paused with his hand on the latch lever. "Katchin should go back home," he said. "I did."

He gestured broadly, indicating the palace where he'd worked as a youth and the city beyond where he was born. "And I'm
much
happier here."

Ilna chuckled as she followed her guest onto the front porch. It was easy to say that Reise had enormous power in the royal palace whereas all Katchin had to look forward to was being the leading man in a rural borough of an island nobody cared about nowadays. But the chamberlain's duties combined real power with outward subservience, which Katchin wouldn't have been able to manage. And Reise had made a remarkable success in Barca's Hamlet, for all that no one imagined that he belonged there.

Reise started down the path, then turned. The Blood Eagles to either side of Ilna shifted minisculy, though it wouldn't quite be correct to say that they tensed. "I hope you learn where home is, Ilna," he said.

"My home is my work, Reise," she called back. She knew the words were true as soon as she spoke them.

She just wished that the truth made her feel happier than it did.

* * *

"I never saw the Altar of Harmony myself, lad,"
King Carus said as the group made its way up Straight Street—which wasn't, unless you viewed it in half-block sections.
"I'd heard it was supposed to be really fancy—it was ancient even in my day, of course. But when I visited Valles, I had more pressing business than sightseeing."

Through Garric's mind flashed a montage of Carus' memories: a banquet in the Hall of the Combined Guilds—it still existed in the center of Valles, though it'd been converted to a shopping arcade in the past millennium; a meeting of the Ornifal nobility in a temple, the chairs set up in arcs beneath an enormous chryselephantine statue of the Lady; a dozen of Valles' top bankers in a sumptuously-appointed conference room, their faces giving away nothing.

"Though I might just as well have stayed on Haft for all the good I did trying to convince people here that they couldn't stay neutral when I was trying to hold the Kingdom together and twenty-odd usurpers wanted to tear it apart,"
Carus added.
"Ornifal was so sure it could buy peace by paying off every pirate or usurper—the Kingdom go hang!"

"Hey, watch where you're going there!" shouted a waterseller who carried his two jugs on a short staff over his left shoulder. He'd paused to dip a drink for a housewife from the smallest of the three graduated cups chained to a collar that he could shift from the neck of one jug to the other. The staff stuck out into the crowded street, and one of the leading Blood Eagles had bumped it.

"Shut up and get out of the way of your betters!" the soldier replied. He and the man in the next rank grabbed the waterseller by both arms and walked him backward into pavement racks selling old clothing and old—definitely old—vegetables. The waterseller and the two old women minding the racks squalled in unison.

"Enough of that!" Garric shouted. "Sir, we didn't mean to jostle you, but this is a street. And Captain Besimon, remind your men that we take up a good deal of room ourselves, so a little charity toward the encroachments of others is called for."

Liane grinned at Garric and squeezed his hand.

They were a lot more of a procession than Garric would have liked, but he didn't see much way around it. There were ten Blood Eagles in front and ten more behind. They'd need the troops for a cordon at the altar where Tenoctris had decided to speak the incantation that would send Cashel off in his pursuit of Sharina.

The wizard herself rode in a litter; Cashel walked beside it, chatting with her and looking every inch of what he was: a countryman wandering in the big city. His quarterstaff was awkward on the cramped pavements, but nobody was going to complain to Cashel even if they happened to get bumped.

Ilna was right behind her brother. She was close enough to join the conversation, but Garric hadn't noticed her do so.

"I think we're nearby," Liane murmured to Garric. "Mistress Gudea didn't take us to see the altar on our history walks, because of the location."

She giggled. "'Not a suitable venue for young ladies,' was how she put it, though I've seen—"

Liane nodded demurely in the direction of the balconies on either side of a lane joining Straight Street. Bare-breasted women with cinnabar-accented eyes called laughingly to the soldiers who passed stone-faced.

"—quite a number of young ladies since we've been in the district. We looked down from the Citadel, though, so I know we're close."

"Here we are, sir," called Besimon, the commander of the guard detachment. A niche, half natural but improved by the hand of man, bit into the rocky bluff to the left. The first settlers of Valles had built their walled encampment on top of the steep hill for protection.

The Citadel had remained the center of the city during the Flag Wars. After Ornifal was unified, wealth and government had abandoned the Citadel and the poorly-drained district at its foot for more comfortable climes. The Temple of the Lady of Valles still stood on the Citadel; and at the hill's base the first Duke of Ornifal had built the Altar of Harmony to symbolize the unity the island had achieved centuries before Lorcan of Haft became Lorcan, the King of the Isles.

"It must have been lovely when it was whole," Garric said. He'd seen a lot of impressive monuments through Carus' eyes and no few on his own, in the Isles and on more distant worlds that he'd traversed while he struggled to halt Chaos; but the Altar of Harmony was unique and in some ways uniquely beautiful. "Even now...."

The altar stood within a large, roofless enclosure entered by a ramp. The enclosure's marble walls were carved with vignettes of men and Gods within frames of acanthus vines. Age had blackened the stone except for streaks of bubbling white decay.

The enclosure's west wall had collapsed in the distant past. A roof of rushes and a curtain wall of rubble on either end of the ornate altar had converted the remainding space into a dwelling of sorts. No, a tavern—

"Clear this place," Besimon ordered curtly. "Mistress Tenoctris needs it empty for her work."

The Blood Eagles were in half-armor—cuirasses and helmets—and carried their spears as well as a sword and dagger on each man's equipment belt. Six of them immediately thrust their spears butt-first into the curtain wall and levered it apart.

"Hey, what do you think you're doing?" said the bouncer as he and four startled-looking patrons came running out into the open. He held a spiked club, but he dropped the weapon immediately when he saw the detachment of troops.

The roof started to sag. The villainous-looking owner strode out brandishing a hook-bladed knife. He was missing three fingers from his left hand, and the way he combed his hair forward meant that he'd been branded T for Thief on the forehead. That last was a Blaise custom, Carus noted in the same detached fashion that the king judged where his first swordstroke would go if the business turned ugly.

"Who're you to turn me out?" the owner snarled. He didn't drop the knife. A Blood Eagle gripped his arm and bent it back; bones would have broken shortly, but another soldier rapped the fellow's knuckles hard with a spearbutt, numbing the hand to release the weapon.

"I'm a citizen," Garric said, surprised at how angry he felt at what he'd found here. "You've taken what should be an honor to the whole city, to the whole
kingdom
, and said it's yours because you've got a knife and a thug to enforce your claim!"

A Blood Eagle judged his placement, then stamped his hobnailed heel on the knife. It broke at the crossguard against the cobblestones; the hilt spurted sideways, shedding its bone scales.

Ten of the Blood Eagles were facing outward, but the gathering crowd cheered ironically at the entertainment. The taverner didn't seem popular.

"Poor people are no more likely to want criminals for neighbors than anybody else is," Liane said from Garric's side. She counted two silver coins from her purse into her palm, then with a judicious frown added one of the double-weight bronze coins called a Crowned Sheaf for the design on the obverse. "Judging from the clientele, this was the worst sort of dive."

"What?" said the taverner. He sounded genuinely amazed. "Hey, I paid good bronze to One-Eyed Tahsin when I took over this stand!"

The guard released him, though Garric knew it wouldn't take much for the taverner to meet another spearbutt, this time in the pit of the stomach. That wasn't called for, but part of Garric wouldn't have minded seeing it happen.

At Besimon's command, four of the soldiers used their spears as levers to lift the roof and throw it off the back of the enclosure. Inside was a wooden bar and two jugs of wine. Those went over the back wall with as little ceremony as the roof had.

A soldier braced himself to lift one of the carved stone blocks being used as stools. "Leave them," Tenoctris ordered. "They were part of the enclosure wall."

On one stone, a priest led a garlanded bullock with knob-tipped horns. It was probably part of the sacrificial procession at the time the altar was dedicated.

"The Altar of Harmony will shortly be rebuilt into the monument it was meant to be," Garric said. "It's not yours to appropriate, nor mine either. It belongs to all the people of Ornifal. And there's never been a time in the past thousand years that people needed harmony more than we do now!"

He stepped forward so that it didn't look as though he were hiding behind a rank of black-armored guards. Though he faced the taverner, he pitched his voice so that he could be heard throughout what was by now a considerable crowd.

"Hey!" cried someone in delight. "That's Prince
Garric
! The prince is here!"

"Prince Garric?" repeated the taverner. "What're they talking about?" He mumbled the question to the soldier who'd disarmed him. The locals—his bouncer among them—had backed well away as though from fear of contagion.

How am I ever going to pay for rebuilding this?
Garric thought despairingly. He didn't know why he'd spoken, though now that he'd said the words they would stand. Pterlion bor-Pallial, the new treasurer, would scream.
There's so many better places to spend what little money the kingdom has!

"And again, lad,"
King Carus whispered through the ages, "
sometimes the symbol is the thing
.
There's worse uses for money than convincing the people in tenements that they're part of the kingdom and that the king cares about them."

"But it's just old stones," the taverner said, protesting more at the idea than for his loss. "I keep an honest house—"

Ilna sniffed. The taverner looked at her. He wouldn't be likely to understand the net of cords in her hand, ready to be drawn tight before him, but the sneering disbelief of her expression was as obvious as the cobblestones.

"Well, anyway," the man muttered, "I paid—"

"And I'm going to pay you for your loss," Garric said sharply. "But the payment comes with a warning: don't be here when the workmen arrive in the next day or two."

Could he get the job under way that quickly? Probably. The odd thing about being king was that while for the most part Garric didn't seem to be able to do anything, the specific things that he
could
do happened almost before he finished thinking about them. If only harmonizing Ornifal's regional tax structures were as easy as getting an ancient building renovated!

Liane stepped forward holding the three coins, the Double Sheaf and the two Ladies, fanned between her left thumb and forefinger. The taverner gaped to see the wink of silver. He would have snatched the money, but he noticed the way a soldier shifted to butt-stroke him into a state of greater respect.

The taverner bowed and held his cupped hands out before him with his face lowered. Liane dropped the coins into them and stepped back, dusting her palms together unconsciously. The taverner really
was
a disgusting brute, and even the almost-contact of paying him was unpleasant.

"If you are here when the workmen arrive, still misappropriating public lands," Garric continued in a pleasant voice, "then you'll join the chain gang repairing the city wall. For the rest of your life."

He flicked his fingers. The former taverner popped the coins in his mouth and scampered off. Scampered into the crowd, at least; there seemed to be a number of voices claiming he owed them debts. The fellow made it into an alley but not, from the sound of it, very much farther.

Captain Besimon grinned faintly. He felt no more inclination than Garric did to interfere with the local administration of justice. Not in this case.

The soldiers had cleared the enclosure with a brisk thoroughness that impressed Garric. Under Attaper if not before, the Blood Eagles had been more than a ceremonial force—and more even than a true bodyguard, capable of preserving the king's life on the field at the cost of their own. They were trained in all the construction and engineering duties that an army in the field required. This business, emptying a small building of the debris that choked it, was nothing to them.

"Troops who can't fortify their camp before they go to sleep after a march,"
King Carus noted approvingly, "
are going to wake up before dawn one day with the enemy in bed with them
."

Besimon looked at Garric for orders. Garric raised a hand to show he was aware of the situation and said, "Tenoctris? What would you like us to do next?"

The old woman had bent to examine the remains of the central altar. Cashel stood beside her, quietly solid with his staff and a wallet on a heavy shoulder strap. Cashel didn't have the cow horn with a wooden mouthpiece that he carried to give the alarm when he watched the sheep of the borough; otherwise he looked exactly as he would have any morning back home.

He
was
that same person, Garric realized; it was just that there had been more to Cashel than anybody in Barca's Hamlet had seen. He guessed he was the same Garric or-Reise as well. It was hard to remember that sometimes, when everything around him was so different.

Liane smiled at him. Well, 'different' didn't always mean 'bad'.

"I think if the men will keep the crowd at a distance...," Tenoctris said as Liane helped her rise. "There's nothing for anyone to do except for me. And Cashel, of course."

"Besimon," Garric said, nodding, "Mistress Tenoctris will be working where the altar was. Please have your men cordon the open side of the enclosure to give her room."