Servant of the Dragon (9 page)

"But why did a wizard have that?" Cashel asked. He laced his fingers together and frowned in concentration.

Tenoctris flipped her palms up and smiled, a little wanly. "I don't know," she said. "And I don't know why someone would have written it in gossamer and butterfly wings instead of carving it on stone.... But I've never forgotten the verse, Cashel, even though I don't know who or what it was about."

Her face sobered. Lamplight emphasized the age-etched lines on her cheeks. "There were incantations in Ansalem's library that even the most powerful wizard should not, I think, have dared to attempt; but that wasn't what concerned me. Ansalem also collected objects which act as nexi for enormous powers."

Tenoctris rose to her feet as a nervous reaction to the events she remembered. "Ansalem's palace was a storm of energies that warped the very cosmos. No one but Ansalem himself could remain near such things safely. I certainly couldn't."

Garric thought of the objects he'd seen displayed in the audience chamber: the reptilian mummy; an athame of some metal that cast a bluish glow on the niche in which it rested; a fist-sized globe that blazed like flame made solid; and of course the marcasite Great One.

"Why didn't it bother Ansalem?" Cashel asked. "Because he was so powerful?"

Tenoctris shook her head. "Because he was so innocent," she said. "I don't think it's possible to be powerful enough to resist such forces, but there was nothing in Ansalem for them to grip and twist as they would a normal human. A normal wizard, at any rate."

"Even you, Tenoctris?" Liane asked.

"Even me," the old woman said. "There was no wisdom but flight."

She pressed her palms together and closed her eyes as she remembered. "One of the objects Ansalem had collected was the shell of one of the Great Ones, changed to marcasite in the aeons before man. It was as close to pure evil as anything that can exist in the waking world."

Garric nodded agreement. Not even Tenoctris knew how completely he understood what she meant.

"I'd have liked to use Ansalem's library," Tenoctris said. "Even the little taste of it I had was a delight I still treasure. But if I hadn't left at once, I'd have been torn apart by the storm of evil swirling about the palace."

"There were other wizards with Ansalem, though, weren't there?" Garric said. He kept his palms flat on his thighs. When the memories he recalled were those of Carus, some of Carus' fierce hatred for wizards and wizardry bled through as well.

Wizardry was merely a tool. In Tenoctris' hands it was a key of great subtlety that unlocked hidden truths. It wasn't the tool's fault that most wizards used their art like a sledge in the hands of a blind madman.

"Yes there were," Tenoctris said evenly. "Seven of them at the time I visited Klestis; Ansalem called them his acolytes. I'm sure they weren't twisted by anything they learned from him, but...."

She shook her head with a grimace. "If I'd been in doubt about the risks of staying in the palace in the palace," she said, "seeing what it had to to those seven would have convinced me. They were powerful wizards in their own right, though, particularly the one named Purlio of Mnar."

No one spoke for a moment. Ilna got up and stepped to the doorway; she checked the time by the height of the moon. In passing close to Garric, she held out her hand as if to guard herself from contract; that, or as a caress without touching.

"We're done eating," she said. "Tenoctris, you gathered us to look at events in the Bridge District. If we're going to go...?"

Tenoctris gave Ilna a half bow. "Yes," she said. "We should do that. Nothing I've heard tonight suggests that the reports are
less
important than I feared they might be."

CHAPTER FOUR

The driver called, "Whoa up!" to his pair of horses, bringing the coach to a rumbling halt. There was a last jolt as a front tire slipped with a clang into the crack between cobblestones.

Garric flung the door open and hopped down, ignoring the mounting step. He didn't know that he'd ever been happier to have his feet on the ground again.

The coach had crashed and swayed all the way here. Garric's ears were still numb from the roar of iron tires on the stone streets, though now that they were stopped he became aware of the murmur of the crowd gathered on the plaza. Hundreds of people stood in small groups, watching the river.

The vehicle didn't have royal markings, but no carriage was nondescript in a working class district like this one. Folk at the back of the crowd turned to eye the new arrivals.

Cashel climbed down from the box beside the driver. His quarterstaff wouldn't fit inside a coach crowded with five other people, and he didn't choose to leave it behind. He smiled at Garric and said, "I'd as soon have walked, but I guess this is faster; and the driver knew where he was going. Were you able to make plans?"

"We weren't able to think!" Sharina said, getting down after Garric. The postillion was handing Liane and Tenoctris out the other side; Ilna waited for Sharina, then stepped down with an expression of disdain for the experience just over. "What a terrible lot of noise!"

"Well, Tenoctris couldn't have walked the distance," Garric said, "and Liane wanted to check her book of sailing directions. I thought that if we came in a coach instead of them in chairs and the rest of us walking, we could talk."

He shook his head ruefully. "I'll know better the next time."

During the Old Kingdom, the inn at Barca's Hamlet had been a stop on the coaching highway up the east side of the island. The road had been paved—Garric could see the broad way in Carus' memory—but the storms of a thousand winters had crumbled all but a few protected stretches into the sea.

Wealthy merchants sometimes rode horses to the Sheep Fair, and occasionally an overweight drover arrived in a palanquin borne by six or eight bearers across the hilly track from Carcosa on the west coast. "Carriage" had only been a word to Garric until the past few months, and even after he left home he'd never expected to ride in one.

"King Carus visited Klestis once," Garric said, speaking particularly to Tenoctris. He didn't discuss how he came by the information, though the others had probably guessed by now. Garric was just embarrassed to be speaking with,
living
with, a man dead for a thousand years. "There wasn't any bridge there at the time."

The driver and postillion could hear him; so could the people at the back of the crowd, though many had returned to their own conversations. Other people listened and watched Garric. That couldn't be helped and anyway, it was a part of life.

Nobody in a palace—or a rural village—had any realistic expectation of privacy. Whether you had servants or you lived in a hut of wattle and daub, your business was going to be the business of everybody else if it was interesting enough to notice.

"If we're going to see a bridge," Ilna said; not harshly, but in a tone of cool dispassion, "then we need to get closer to the water."

"Right," said Garric, wondering if they'd have to force their way to the levee. "Let's move up."

They could push forward, of course, with him and Cashel in the lead. Garric hadn't brought a detachment of guards because he didn't want to cause a stir. It hadn't occurred to him that although his government didn't have an inkling about whatever was happening in the Bridge District, word was certainly out among the citizens of Valles.

And beyond, apparently. Some of the spectators were obvious countrymen in dark wool tunics and hats with wide leather brims. There were also folk—most of them sailors, but not all—in the garb of at least six other islands, including a Dalopan with bone ornaments.

Some knots of spectators were families, others waited as a handful of friends. For the most part men stood with men and women with women. Children played with a degree of nonchalance, but their mothers kept a worried eye on them. There were no servants in these homes to watch children if the parents chose to go out of a night.

Cashel eyed the crowd. "There's room," he said. He started forward.

Because those watching were in discrete groups, it wasn't as much of a problem to move through them as Garric had expected. People talked to their friends, their backs to similar clots of people. They were uncomfortable about the event they waited for, but that hadn't formed the crowd into a mob. This was something they wanted to see in the company of those closest to them.

"Like the way trees in the woods don't quite touch their branches," Cashel said over his shoulder in mild amusement.

He shuffled forward sideways, though even so his bulk cleared a wide path for his friends. Occasionally his arm or chest bumped people apart, but the contact wasn't heavy enough to raise anger. Some folk looked around, but Cashel's size quieted even the mild protest that might have been made.

"Klestis stopped paying tribute to the Duke of Cordin when Ansalem became ruler," Garric said to Tenoctris, who followed Cashel closely. Garric was right behind her. Protected by the two big youths, there was no danger that the old woman would be crushed. "The gifts Ansalem sent to the duke at Ragos were worth many times what the tribute would have been, but he made it clear that he didn't
owe
anything to Cordin or to the Isles."

"That was my experience as well," Tenoctris agreed. "Ansalem was a thoroughly pleasant man, delighted to entertain a fellow scholar, but he was completely self-willed. I'd been told that Ansalem was unworldly, but he didn't really ignore the world. He chose to detach himself from it in every possible fashion."

She eyed Garric. The only light on the plaza was that of the partial moon, but that was sufficient to show the concern in her expression. "Almost anything might be possible for a wizard as powerful as Ansalem," she said. "But even he could make a mistake."

Cashel reached the levee and turned. The crowd directly overlooking the River Beltis was less dense than it had been twenty feet back from the masonry dike. Furthermore, none of the people Garric noticed in this front row were from the Bridge District. Many were foreigners, and there were several groups of nobles accompanied by shoals of guards and servants.

Garric stepped aside, forming a pocket into which Liane, Ilna and Sharina could fit along with Tenoctris. He and Cashel had worked together so often on jobs where timing had to be perfect to avoid danger—tree felling and similar tasks involving heavy weights—that the process of making room for the women was a matter of reflex.

"Excuse, sir," Garric murmured to a sailor with a cloudy emerald set in the lobe of his ear, pressing back the fellow with his chest instead of using the point of his shoulder. Garric's shoulder would have been arrogance and challenge; a bump from his ribs was accidental contact caused by too little room.

Cashel made space on the other side by looming over a footman in a lace-hemmed tunic, never quite touching him but forcing him back by sheer bulk. The footman scooted around to the other side of the group he was part of, throwing a black look over his shoulder at Cashel.

Liane squeezed close to Garric. He grinned down at her—like Ilna, she only came up to his shoulder. Sharina was within a hand's breadth of Cashel's height, and Cashel wasn't much shorter than Garric himself. Liane smiled a reply, but concern underlay her cheerful expression.

All of them knew that there was danger in wizardry; but Liane had watched her father blight his life, then lose it, through mistakes in what he called his art. Garric had never seen Liane flee from danger, whether natural or otherwise; but dealing with wizardry took a particular effort of will for her.

"The sailing directions I just searched are Serian," she said. She was speaking to all of them, but particularly to Garric and Tenoctris standing on either side of her. "They follow a different tradition than those of rest of the Isles."

Garric nodded. Liane's father had been a great traveller for the whole of his life. He'd used Serian bankers and often Serian ships as well, so his daughter had connections that would be unavailable even to Garric in his persona of Prince of the Isles.

The sailing directions were a notebook of thin bamboo sheets Liane had brought to read on the way from the palace. The oil lamps on either side of the coach lighted the interior through isinglass panels, but it must've taken enormous concentration to read during the jolting, thunderous ride.

"Serian sailing directions are really just a compilation of landing places on a stretch of coastline," she said, lifting the booklet from her left sleeve to identify her subject. "They give the political circumstances to the degree that a merchant needs to worry about them, and a list of imports and exports for each landing."

Garric nodded to show he was listening to Liane, though his eyes were on the river. The Beltis ran more swiftly here than it did a few miles south, where it broadened into a delta that reached the Inner Sea through three mouths. Nothing moved on the surface but moonlight and flotsam.

"This set is centuries old," Liane continued. "Too old for use, but a shipper who'd had dealings with my father still kept it in his library. It says that Klestis is a little fishing port of no particular importance—"

"Right," said Garric. That's what Ornifal sea captains had told agents of the royal courier service when Garric asked about the place.

"But it also says that Klestis used to be the greatest harbor on the southern coasts," Liane said. "And that the old city sank into the sea as part of the same cataclysm that engulfed Yole."

Tenoctris pursed her lips. Her expression reminded Garric of a robin deciding where—or whether—to probe for a worm.

"That's possible, I suppose," she said. "And of course I was snatched away from Yole during the cataclysm, so I have no personal knowledge of what else might have happened at the same time. But I don't think Ansalem would have made the kind of mistake that would destroy Klestis that way."

She paused, considering how to explain what she felt. With a quizzical grin she went on, "Ansalem truly
was
Ansalem the Wise, but his wisdom went beyond mere scholarship like mine. He had an understanding of the cosmos that was more than simply human. In that he reminds me very much of Cashel and Ilna."

Tenoctris looked toward the pair, acknowledging them so that she wouldn't seem to have spoken behind their backs. Cashel hadn't heard her; Ilna grimaced, her eyes on the river.

There was a cold shimmer above the water. "It's happening!" a young woman cried in a voice quivering with wine and excitement.

"Yes," said Ilna as a tracery of blue light formed, stretching from the levee into infinite distance. "It is."