The Fox (92 page)

Valda brought from inside of her robe a hand-sized polished steel mirror, a thing Signi recognized with dismay. The magic required to capture living moments and bind them in these mirrors was a complexity that taxed one to the extreme. Such tools were never used idly.

Signi forced her gaze to the mirror, which did not reflect her face. She gazed instead into a light-distorted archway, skeined with shadows. Perhaps it was once a beautiful place—a terrace opening into a garden—the tile floor tessellated in patterns of blue and gold overlaid with highly stylized herons on the wing. Through the vine-covered arch a garden was crowned by three cypresses, the middle oval higher than the outer two. A dark point appeared before the arch, flickering outward like a thousand night-black moths; they vanished and Erkric emerged into the source-less light.

He struggled for breath, recovering from a transfer even more wrenching than crossing continents; Signi knew then that this archway led to a place beyond physical space and even time.

“Gateway to Norsunder,” Valda whispered, and Signi’s body flinched, but her gaze did not waver.

Through the archway stepped a young woman. She was tall, her long, dark hair bound up in a complicated knotwork of silver from which hung tiny shivering pendants. Below the cold glitter of the headdress was a narrow, dark-eyed face smiling with malice. Her gown of raw silk, made high to the neck, gleamed with vermilion highlights and was fastened with clasps in a tulip motif.

“Yeres,” Erkric whispered.

She said, “Ah, you are persistent, Venn.”

“Determined.” Erkric’s voice was thin and breathy. Signi watched him fight for strength he did not have.

Yeres’ lip curled. “Then you had better not bore me with speeches this time. As well my brother is elsewhere; he has not nearly my patience. What do you want?”

Erkric’s voice cracked. “The wherewithal to make rift between sky and ground.”

“And then?”

“And then you shall have anyone I send through.”

Yeres laughed, a tiny high screel, like the death of a bird. “The rifts are closed.”

Erkric said, “I need that magic.”

“So do we,” she said. “But those are games only played every century or so. You will have to cooperate with your Sartoran counterparts to lift that ward they struggled so hard to place. Or wait a few hundred years, until they forget again and cease their vigilance.”

“If Ramis can have that magic, why cannot I?”

“Ramis!” Again the high, thin dart of laughter. “Think what you are about, Venn.” She stepped aside and lifted her hand so that Erkric could see the garden and the shadowy figures seated within. The pale light haloed one figure, a tall one with white hair: a morvende. The strange light seemed to gather about him, but with no life or warmth. His hair, his flesh, his robe were all the white of the northern ice which, at the briefest touch, burns down to the bone. Signi was not ordinarily a fanciful being, but she had the sense that this morvende’s lifted eyes would strike her dead.

At his feet knelt a man in a light gray robe, its lines fine and simple. His unremarkable brown hair was touched with strands of gray; his shadowed face was lowered, his hands resting flat on his thighs.

“Ramis,” Valda whispered.

Signi wished to ask how she knew, but these captured moments did not wait, and so she suppressed the question. Just watched.

Erkric’s breath hissed in.

“You really want magic that uses will as weapon,” Yeres said, “but you have not yet offered us sufficient trade. I deplore your lack of vision.”

And the mirror went dark.

Valda laid it carefully down. “Almost a month of my life I squandered, waiting in that place. I was protected by a circle of mages, and yet I sensed another shield—one I can scarcely define—when I was there.”

“You identified that man in the gray robe as Ramis.”

“Yes, for we met.” Valda’s eyes were wide with remembered shock. “My single visit to Roth Drael. The mages there do not trust us Venn, and I discovered why. Ramis transferred while I was walking from one building to another—no transfer tiles, no reaction. I recognized that robe from a wall painting deep below one of the buildings of white material, impossibly old, the writings the vertical Sartoran of ancient days.” She gestured high to low, two fingers making a scissoring motion. “He is far older than any of us thought. He said, ‘Abyarn Erkric has chosen the path of Rainorec.’ ”

Signi’s startled gaze met Valda’s. No Venn ever spoke of Rainorec before strangers.

“He then said, ‘If you do not see, you follow.’ ”

Signi exclaimed, “How strange, for this man to come to you in such a way! Did you not suspect evil intent?”

Valda sighed. “I might have had I not already harbored my own doubts about Erkric. But even then, I must speak with care. It is far too easy to say, ‘He is evil.’ Does a man who was so kind to us all when we were young, who has always worked so tirelessly, wake up one morning and decide henceforth he will turn to evil?”

Signi said, “I believe I know your thrust. Did not someone among the Sartorans write that there is no human more dangerous than he or she who is most devoted to an ideal?”

“I have so read,” Valda said, drawing a deep breath. “Yet are we not devoted to Ydrasal? I would amend it to say, ‘those who will justify any means to serve their ideal.’ Ideals are seldom evil—outside of Norsunder—and who can say what their justification is? But Erkric’s ideal is no longer Ydrasal, which demands balance with all things; it has become the ascendance of the Venn, at any cost.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Rainorec.”

Rainorec—the doom of the Venn—did not always mean the same thing to everyone. Many felt that Rainorec lay in a shady future, perhaps the result of prideful but weak leaders being overcome by evil enemies; most ordinary folk regarded it as a term of disapprobation for adults, much as “naughty” is used for chiding children. Valda’s mage circle believed that no doom was worse than that suffered by one too high, who held too much power, because the powerful, in falling, took everyone under their command with them.

Signi bowed her head, palms together in assent.

Valda touched the stone. “Durasnir, for example, hates Erkric, yet would defend his actions before the king saying— and believing—none more loyal to Ydrasal.”

“I agree.” Signi considered. “Tell me more about Ramis.”

Valda set aside the mirror. “I asked how I was to see more than I saw already. Ramis said if I truly followed Ydrasal then I must witness in that place I showed you. It has taken me months to master first the magic, then to learn how to stay undetected in the realm of the spirit. I was protected by our circle in the homeland. One of us cannot manage alone. Even so, it takes us all at least a day to recover after such a session.”

“Realm of the spirit,” Signi repeated in a whisper almost without sound. “How do we contend with people who talk so easily about such things, who speak of waiting for centuries? ”

“We do not. We must contrive with what we know.” Valda brushed her hands over her face again, as if to wipe away the memory of what she had endured. “Erkric was thrust back here, in Jaro; he was unconscious, the servants spoke of blood.” She touched her ears and nose. “I came away through the means I had learned.”

Signi said, “Will he get such magic?”

“It is clear he was there before. You saw what I saw on this visit: do you not think he will go again, when he can, no matter the cost, until he gains what he desires?”

“Yes. But does such magic exist outside of Norsunder? There is no reference to it in our own archive, and I have seen nothing that indicates the Sartoran Mage Council has access to such spells.”

“In the historical record there are references. It belongs to the ancient days, because it was systematically destroyed after what the Sartorans call the Fall.”

“Can we act against the Dag? The intent of such spells is against all we do!”

“And yet Prince Rajnir has agreed to magical experiments. He is convinced such magic will achieve the king’s will. Erkric uses the prince’s anger. He will experiment on Count Wafri first, the prospect of which delights Rajnir. The Dag has,” she said softly, “promised Rajnir Sartor, by subjugating Iasca Leror by magic after the invasion. The Marlovan warriors can be sent east to take new land for the Venn, and no one will be able to stop them.”

Signi felt chill down to her bones.

“And Rajnir rejoices. He craves a brilliant success that will reinstate him in the grace of the king.”

Signi gripped her forearms close against her body. "Then... you cannot believe the Dag means to control Rajnir?”

“Why do you think the Sartoran Mage Council destroyed all evidence of such magic, long ago—before we even learned it in the Land of the Venn? Aside from the questions of what the Old Sartorans could or could not do by nature, what human being now can master that much power and not be warped by it? The gaining of power becomes, in a succession of small decisions, an end in itself— always for the right reasons.”

Signi made a swift gesture evocative of desire. “At last, it is sufficient just to want. And so you must gain proof that the Dag . . . walks the path of Rainorec?” She knew it was weakness, but she could not bring herself to give voice to the words: that if Erkric sought to assure victory over the Marlovans with the aid of Norsundrian magic, the next step along that path would be to subjugate Rajnir to his will so that, if the prince was brought to the throne of the Venn to replace the king, in effect Erkric would be king, with so much power no one could resist him.

Valda bowed her head. “That is my task. We have direful work before us because the need is dire. I cannot stand before the throne and accuse the Dag without proof. In the meantime, you must find allies on that ship, without mentioning the cause, because when I give you the sign, you must act.” She looked old and afraid.

Signi said, “The sign will be orders that separate us from the patrol?”

“Yes. It might be a month, more likely longer. But when your
Bluewing Seeker
is alone on the water, wherever it is sent, you must act at once.”

Valda made the sign of peace, returned by Signi. They knew this was probably the last time they would see one another.

Each day as the sun rose a little earlier Jeje had wondered which dawn would bring Inda back.

She had come to expect that, if he arrived at all, it would be at the head of a mighty fleet or with some sort of parade suitable more to a king than to a not-quite-pirate’s exile.

But it was a quiet arrival, exactly a year and two days after they’d parted. A messenger appeared in Fleet House, waving significantly at Jeje before scampering upstairs to where Chim was busy with some captains.

That look was enough. Jeje’s heart thumped, and her hands shook as she straightened her work area.

So she was ready when Chim came downstairs, summoning her with a beetle-browed glance. The messenger ran out, and before long the familiar tall, stout, gray-eyed Guild Mistress Perran emerged from the cooperage and joined them.

The three of them met Inda on the way to a cotton weaver’s shop, where Chim was certain they could be assured of privacy. Inda paid the child handsomely. She grinned again at Jeje—she was one of the trainees, as were her mother and uncle—then vanished into the crowd.

Jeje studied Inda. Strange how you don’t see someone for a year, and though you recognize him instantly, he looks different. Older. The planes of Inda’s face were sharp, the boy long gone. Yet his sudden smile when he saw Jeje recalled the fellow rat of their days on the Pim ships. It was a sweet smile, an odd thing in so wary a face.

She did not yet know how glad he was to see her. More than glad. Gone forever was the blithe assumption of loyalty. Wafri had destroyed that. But each encounter with one of his friends who appeared when and where they had promised to be was as strong as any healing spell to his heart: first Mutt, and then Dasta and Tcholan, with the new fleet they’d been building up, all waiting for him at the Smuggler’s Cove off Danai Harbor.

She scrutinized him again. He moved with the sailor’s rolling gait, almost a swagger, his long, four-strand sailor’s queue swinging. He wore his sun-bleached, much-mended unlaced fighting shirt under a long vest, despite the heat. Jeje knew he was fully armed.

She fell in step beside him, then laughed inside. It had never occurred to her how short Inda was compared to most mainlanders, though she still had to look up at him, being a full hand shorter.

They followed Chim up narrow stairs. The hot summer air was thick with the smell of spiced cabbage mixed with the aroma of too many people in rain-soaked clothing. Thunder rumbled in the distance; until this morning there had been no rain for days. Dust seemed to hang suspended in the air.

The waiting Guild Fleet members and six captains all murmured greetings, studying the famed Elgar the Fox with a mixture of reactions. They sat along the walls on crates and barrels, leaving the single plank bench for Inda and those who accompanied him.

“Are ye ready?” Fleet Master Chim asked Inda as soon as they sat down.

“No,” Inda said.

Guild Mistress Perran gasped, then glanced Jeje’s way.

“I’ve spent a year watching. Sometimes running,” Inda said, the last part wry.

He looked older and tougher partly because he had a new scar, this one on the other side of his face. A long one, too, vanishing into his hair. Jeje shuddered. Hard as they’d drilled, those were only drills. Inda’s presence made violence imminent again.

Guild Mistress Perran, who had come to like and trust the gruff Jeje, felt her mouth go dry; Chim thought of the Venn threats and subsequent royal decrees, the spies, inter-guild wrangling, dwindling funds, and, worst of all, interrupted trade, but said only, “Why?”

“They communicate by magic,” Inda said. “I want some of those scroll-cases they use.”