Servant of the Dragon (7 page)

"I—" Garric said.

Ansalem stepped to the bier from which Garric had awakened him. He ran his hand through the air, seeming to caress the flickering serpent. "The amphisbaena is here," he said, "but not the other objects. Some of them are too dangerous to use, even for me! Don't you understand?"

Ansalem's patted the tall niche, then touched other alcoves and ran his fingers over the top of a marble plinth standing empty beside the door in the back of the chamber. He moved with the quick, jerky motions of a toad hopping, desperate in its terror.

"You must bring them back!" Ansalem said. "They won't do you any good, I assure you. There's nothing there but destruction for whoever uses them!"

The chamber grew foggy as another world began to interpenetrate it. "Bring me...." Ansalem cried in a voice as high as a distant gull's.

The words faded. Garric felt his soul rushing back the way it had come. He was a shimmer in existence like the current of a rushing stream.

"Garric?" a voice said. Not Ansalem, but—

Garric opened his eyes. He lay on a bench in the conference room. Liane stood beside him, holding a lamp; the light through the open door was the last red of sunset. His friends were watching him with guarded concern: Cashel and Sharina, Tenoctris and Ilna; and Liane, thank the Lady; Liane, her worry clear in her dark, limpid eyes.

"I was dreaming," Garric said as he sat up cautiously. "And I'm very glad to see you all."

"You didn't wake up," Sharina said. "We thought—well, Tenoctris says there's something dangerous going on."

"Something very powerful which I don't understand, at any rate," the old wizard explained. She cocked Garric a wry smile. "Which I suppose means it's dangerous, true enough."

She sobered. "I need to learn what the—source of power—is. It's already causing disruption on this portion of the cosmos. There's a nexus nearby; somewhere in Valles."

"I'm going with Tenoctris to, well, fetch and carry," Cashel said with a grin. To protect the old woman, Cashel meant; he was carrying the hickory quarterstaff he'd shaped with his own big, capable hands. "Sharina and Ilna are coming too. We know you're busy, but we thought we'd ask if you wanted to come along. Like old times, you know."

"You're scheduled to dine with Chancellor Royhas tonight," Liane said, meeting Garric's eyes but speaking with a careful lack of emphasis. "I was going to suggest that a more relaxed evening might be a good idea anyway."

"I've seen you lots of times after you've plowed all day in the hot sun," Cashel said. "That sweated you down to a nub, but you never looked as bad as you do now."

Ilna nodded. She'd stayed arm's length behind the others, unwilling that anyone might think she was pushing herself forward even though she and Garric had been friends for all their mutual lives.

"You're stretched too far," she said crisply. "Anyone can see that. I can't imagine how a meal with your chancellor can be a strain, but you obviously think it is. Only a fool would break himself by going to dinner instead of getting the sleep he needs."

"I don't need to go with Tenoctris," Sharina said apologetically. "Garric, why don't you get proper rest in a bed tonight. I'll meet with Lord Royhas if it's just a formal meal."

Garric looked at his friends. "It's not just a formal meal," he said. "It's part of the biggest problem I've got as, as whatever I am now."

"As King of the Isles, lad," whispered Carus through the ages. The king was back in Garric's mind; as straight as an ancient pine, and as great a support to the youth he guided. "That's what you are."

"The greatest problem I've got as King of the Isles, I mean," Garric said, correcting himself with a rueful smile. This was no place for self-deprecation. "And sure, I need sleep, but this nap's been enough to hold me. What I really need is to talk to my friends about the kingdom."

"Garric, I don't know anything about kingdoms," Cashel said. "Maybe Sharina...?"

Garric stepped forward and embraced Cashel. It was like hugging a warm boulder. Garric was taller than his friend—by a bit—but Cashel had a solid strength that went beyond that of any other human being Garric had met.

"I need to talk to people I trust," Garric said. "You five are the only people on earth I can trust to want exactly what I want—peace for all the people of the Isles."

He stepped back and glanced toward the wizard. "Tenoctris?" he said. "Can the thing you're looking for wait for us to eat and talk first?"

"Yes," Tenoctris said. Frowning as she tried to explain to people who couldn't see the varied forces that worked the cosmos the way she saw them, she continued, "It isn't a hostile intrusion, not a thing of Malkar or a wizard allied to Malkar."

To Malkar: to evil, the force of absolute black evil that was the abnegation of all light and good.

"It's just very powerful," Tenoctris added, spreading her hands.

Garric nodded. "Half the buildings in the palace compound haven't been repaired yet," he said. "Let's find a quiet spot in one of them and I'll cook supper like I would if we were watching the flock overnight in the North Pasture. All right?"

"Cook?" Liane said. She clapped her left fingers to her lips in embarrassment the instant the question slipped out.

"Cook," Ilna repeated with emphasis. "If the stewards can't supply Prince Garric with flour, cheese and onions promptly, I suspect the chamberlain will have replaced them all before morning."

"And a flitch of bacon," Garric said, laughing with the relief of not being Prince Garric of Haft for this one evening. "We'll eat like rich folk tonight, with meat for dinner!"

He shrugged to loosen his muscles. He needed to exercise more than he'd been doing recently.

"After we talk and eat," Garric said, "we'll find the nexus Tenoctris is looking for. And if it's a problem, then we'll deal with it."

"As we've done before," boomed King Carus. He stood with his thumbs hooked in his swordbelt, grinning at the youth whose mind he shared. "And as we'll keep on doing until the Isles have the peace I wasn't able to give them alone!"

CHAPTER THREE

The big kitchen had served the servants' dormitories when all the palace staff were housed within the compound. That had been under Valence II a generation previous; the site had been abandoned since then. Within the past week a team of gardeners had cleared the honeysuckle off the long building and rolled it into a bale higher than a man was tall.

The gardeners would burn the vines As soon as they'd dried. Ilna guessed that the flames would glare from the bases of clouds. Honeysuckle blazed as hot and fierce as anger.... Ilna's anger, at any rate. She smiled.

A pair of cook's helpers had deposited a hamper of food and a jar of beer—on Ornifal they carried liquids in tarred earthenware instead of wooden casks—on the brick floor of the kitchen. They waited doubtfully for orders. Liane glanced toward Garric, but he and Sharina were too busy looking over the range to notice the servants.

"Go on, then," Ilna said to the helpers. "We'll take care of anything further ourselves."

Garric glanced up and nodded, but the servants were already scampering back to wherever they normally sat on their hands. No point in them hanging around here looking silly. Ilna wouldn't trust either one to sort carrots from parsnips.

"Garric, I can do the cooking," Sharina said as she straightened from the range. She glanced at Ilna and smiled. "Or Ilna can."

The heavy iron bars of the grill were still solid though rust and ancient grease caked them. Ilna suspected that even when the kitchen was in daily use the cooks' standards of cleanliness had been lower than any she—or Reise's children—would have permitted if they were in charge.

"And do a better job, I know," Garric said. "But I'll do well enough, and I feel like it."

Sharina grinned at her brother. "Then I'll chop firewood," she said agreeably. "There's no lack of fallen limbs here, is there?"

Firewood was a valued resource, but this great compound was royal property. While Valence lost his grip on power, dead wood had been allowed to rot on the ground instead of being put to productive use.

Sharina wore a thin tunic with a black, knee-length linen cape for modesty. It was a common outfit in Valles among women of middling station who wanted to be comfortable while they were doing the day's shopping.

The metal kitchenware had gone when the kitchen went out of service, but there was sufficient pottery remaining to feed a packed common room, let alone the six of them. Sharina unpinned the clasp of enameled gold and hung the cape on a peg meant for a skillet. Belted to her waist where the cape had hidden it was a very unladylike weapon: a Pewle knife in a sheath of black sealskin.

The knife's heavy blade was straight and as long as Sharina's forearm, with a deep belly that put the weight of a blow at the tip. A Pewle knife would chop wood as well as an axe and let a life out as quickly as a sword. Its former owner, the hermit Nonnus, had used the knife for both purposes until the night he died protecting Sharina.

Sharina had carried the knife ever since. More as a memorial than a weapon, Ilna supposed, but she'd never asked and Sharina had never volunteered her feelings on the matter. It was good to have it around to chop kindling since there wasn't a hatchet by the side door as there was in most prosperous houses in the borough.

Ilna laughed. Everybody looked at her, even Cashel who was checking an overturned bowl to see if he'd have to clean it before he used it to carry water.

"It's hard to live in a normal way in a palace," Ilna explained. "The normal things aren't here unless you ask for them specially."

Garric smiled, but he looked tired at a level deeper than muscle or even bone. Ilna would have hugged him if... well, if she hadn't been Ilna os-Kenset. And nobody was to blame for that but her.

"I don't even know what normal is any more," Garric said. "But I know I'm glad I have friends who make do with what's available. If there were more people in Valles and the kingdom who—"

He stopped himself. "Well, maybe there will be when people see that there's a real chance for unity and peace," he concluded. "And if not, well, we'll make do, won't we?"

Liane looked at Garric , worried by the tone of his voice. She put her hand on his and squeezed it.

"I saw loofas growing in the kitchen garden," Ilna said as she turned away. "I'll fetch some to clean the grill."

She walked quickly around the building, blinking at tears. The garden had been abandoned when the kitchen was, but some crops survived. The row of asparagus had grown into a thicket and the gourds had continually reseeded themselves. Ilna squatted and reached for the paring knife she carried in her sash.

"I'll help," said Liane.

Ilna looked over her shoulder. Liane knelt beside her. She'd drawn a double-edged dagger from its hidden sheath. The blade was only a finger long, but the steel was better than anything seen in Barca's Hamlet. It was the sort of weapon a wealthy lady kept by her while travelling, insurance if her retinue of guards and servants wasn't enough to prevent the unexpected.

Despite the jeweled hilt and gold filigree on the blade, it would open gourds just as well as the knife Ilna used for the tasks of kitchen and household.

Liane's tunics, inner and outer both, were simply cut but made of silk. Her sandals were vermilion leather with decoration in gold thread; one of them had sunk ankle-deep in soft earth on the way to this nook in the palace grounds. Ilna didn't bother with footwear within the compound, though she wore clogs when she went out on the hard cobblestone streets beyond.

But just as the fancy dagger was able to do this job, so was its fancy owner.

"Yes, all right," Ilna said, twisting the vine and then slicing through the woody fibers which still held the gourd. "I'll need about a dozen of them, I'd judge, as filthy as those grills looked."

Liane snipped off a loofa in a close approximation of what she'd seen Ilna do. "And I'll help with the cleaning, though you'll probably have to show me how to do that too," she said as she reached for another vine.

Ilna swallowed. "I wonder...," she said, keeping her eyes on her task. "You were reading a poem the other day. Something about bees weaving?"

"'I've a jar of wine in its ninth year, Phyla, and in my garden the bees weave crowns...,'" Liane said, "Yes, isn't that lovely? It's Celondre."

"I wonder if you could go over that for me till I can remember it all through," Ilna said, dropping a third gourd into the lap of her outer tunic. She cleared her throat again. "There was something about knowing your station, too."

"Well, Celondre thought of himself as an aristocrat," Liane said apologetically. "But I'd love to do that. Right now, if you'd like."

Ilna smiled wryly. "Yes, I'd like that," she said.

"'Only pursue the things you're worthy of,'" Liane said, running over the verse for herself. "'Shun what is above you.'"

Someone, something, with skill greater than Ilna's own was weaving a pattern of which she was a thread. Ilna couldn't see the end yet; perhaps she never would.

But she was sure there was one.

* * *

Cashel stirred the porridge with a spoon he'd shaped with his iron knife after Sharina had cut down a willow sapling for him. He hadn't asked to borrow the Pewle knife because he knew Sharina was more than strong enough to shear through the soft wood herself—

And besides, Cashel felt a little uncomfortable about that knife. Nonnus the Hermit had treated Sharina as if she'd been his own child. He'd protected her when Cashel was far away and had died protecting her. Cashel was as grateful as could be about the hermit's sacrifice, but sometimes he felt that he had to measure himself against a saint; and Cashel couldn't convince himself that he came off well in the comparison.

"The thing that keeps throwing me...," said Garric. He paused to turn a strip of bacon with his dagger. The silvered steel glittered in the light of the lantern Liane had hung from a swivel hook in a disused hearth. The long, tapered blade was pretty fancy, but it did a cooking fork's job well enough.

"It isn't the crises themselves," Garric went on as the bacon spluttered, a salty smell in the wood smoke that made Cashel think of home. "Though the Shepherd knows it's been one thing after another. And now whatever it is you've found, Tenoctris."

He grinned to show that he wasn't blaming the old wizard for bringing him a warning. Garric looked five years younger here than he had when Cashel and the others awakened him this afternoon.

"The latest is we've gotten word that both the Earl of Sandrakkan and the Count of Blaise are planning to call themselves king. Of their own islands, not Kings of the Isles, but it'll cause about as much trouble as the other would. Valence III beat the Earl of Sandrakkan at the Stone Wall twenty years ago, but the kingdom's never recovered from the strain."

"Can you trust the rumors?" Sharina said, speaking to her brother but glancing at Liane who had charge of the confidential reports.

Liane looked at Garric; he nodded. "Yes," she said. "In this case we can. The only thing that's holding them back is that they're both afraid of being first. They remember the Stone Wall too."

"Even without spies," Garric added, "it's what you'd expect them to do. The title didn't matter so much when they could ignore whoever was sitting on the throne in Valles. Now that it looks like the Isles'll have real unity, they're likely to act."

"When the forces that turn the cosmos peak," Tenoctris said musingly, "they put all society in a kettle on a hot fire. Once a millennium everything comes to a boil. It isn't just that wizards now have more power than they dreamed of a few years ago."

She grinned and added, "Some of us don't have very much power even now, of course."

Cashel believed Tenoctris when she said that she wasn't a powerful wizard, but he knew—as she certainly knew—that a lot of times strength wasn't as important as knowing how to use the strength you had. Tenoctris saw and understood the sources of power, while other wizards used them blindly. There was much the old woman couldn't do, but Cashel had never seen her do a single thing she didn't mean to.

He grinned broadly. Cashel knew better than most how important it was to be careful. You broke things otherwise, and sometimes you broke yourself.

Garric nodded. "I might have an army that could defeat one or the other of them," he said. "But I don't have a way to get the army to Sandrakkan or Blaise. And anyway, winning would be just about as bad as losing for what it'd do to the kingdom. Knocking heads isn't the way out."

"We need time," Liane said with a worried expression. "A few months might be enough. If the rulers of the other islands see that Ornifal's better off under a real king, that may keep them quiet better than the threat of the army alone."

Fleetingly Cashel wondered who she meant by 'we'. Probably 'the Isles,' and anyway, it wasn't his business to worry about.

Ilna sniffed from where she sat in a corner, plaiting rushes into pads. "So long as you still have the army. Some heads should be knocked."

Garric nodded, more to show that he was listening more than because he'd heard anything he thought was a solution. "We—the government of the Isles, my government—could find a way to deal with Blaise and Sandrakkan."

He sighed and began turning the rest of the meat as he continued, "The trouble is that my council's fighting itself and I don't know what to do to change things. Nothing's getting done—or it isn't getting done right—because people who are supposed to be on the same side are squabbling between themselves. We needn't worry about evil if the folks on our side do evil's work."

Cashel thought for a moment. "You mean Attaper and Waldron are at each other's throats about running the army?" he said. He didn't know anything about politics, but he knew how rival males acted. None better than a countryman to understand that.

Garric laughed with relief at being able to talk freely. "No, not quite," he explained, "because Attaper and Waldron are both of them too dangerous. Neither one will give the other an inch, but they don't play silly games. They both know that the other has killed more men than they can remember. They don't goad each other, because the other man will go for his sword if pushed, and they've both been down that road too often to go again for little reasons."

Sharina sat on a chopping block that she'd covered with reed pads that Ilna had woven with a few twitches of her fingers. "So it's Lord Tadai and the chancellor who're fighting?" she said.

"And how!" Garric agreed. He swept the bacon to a brick support to drain while he cooked the remaining rashers. "Any project Royhas proposes has to wait forever for funding. Any revenue proposals that come from the treasury go unstaffed or get staffed with people you wouldn't trust to pluck a chicken. Things aren't getting done, and they need to get done!"

"But you're the king," Cashel said, speaking aloud not so much to get an answer as because sometimes he understood things better if he heard himself say them. "You can tell them what to do."

"As I could tell a flock of sheep which way to take to pasture," Garric said. "And have about as much chance of them obeying me. The sheep'll go their own way because they know what's best. It takes more than a little shouting to change their minds."

Cashel smiled. Garric caught his unspoken thought and said, "Right, the path the sheep takes probably is the best one. The trouble is, here I've got two different leaders. Maybe they've both got good ideas, but I can't—the Isles can't!—go both ways at the same time."

"Sometimes you get two ewes like that," Cashel said, continuing to puzzle over the problem aloud. He withdrew the spoon and licked it; the porridge was warm through to the center. "If they're both worth something, you sell one out of the district. If one of them's nothing special for milking, well, you've got to cull the flock before winter anyway, right?"

He lifted the pot from the fire. They didn't have hard bread for trenchers, but Sharina had sliced birchbark to eat from while there was still daylight. Liane wouldn't be used to everybody dipping a hand into the pot.

"You said ewes, Cashel," Liane said. "Don't rams fight too?"

Besides being Garric's friend, Liane was a real lady, but she was always nice to Cashel. He had the feeling that a lot of people in the palace laughed at him behind his back. He was used to that. Folks in the borough had been the same way, "Big as an ox and just as stupid," he'd heard often enough before he got his full growth, and he knew they still said it, though not where he could hear.

They might even be right, but Cashel didn't like it; and he didn't like the people who treated him that way. Liane was different, so instead of snorting in amazement he glanced at Garric—who shrugged.

"You don't need but one ram for a herd, mistress," Cashel said. "There's no point in wasting fodder on something that's just going to make problems for you."

"Oh," said Liane, blinking. She was a smart girl, no question, but Cashel had noticed that city folk generally didn't understand how hard rural life was and how hard rural people had to be as a consequence.

"In fact, Tadai and Royhas are both valuable," Garric said. "And perhaps more to the point, they're both too powerful to be kicked out in the cold without causing real trouble for the kingdom. They conspired against Valence when they thought it had to be done, even though he'd been their friend in earlier years. Neither man is my friend."

Cashel tried to get his mind around the situation. Liane noticed his frown and said in a friendly voice—not talking down, just talking, "A lot of people on Ornifal don't like having a government that does what's right instead of what it's been bribed to do. With a man like Tadai or Royhas either one to lead them, that sort of people would be a danger."

Cashel nodded. "And you don't want to kill them," he said; not asking and certainly not suggesting, but just getting the facts straight in his mind.

"I'm not willing to do that," Garric said simply. "I think it'd be bad policy anyway, but the truth is that I just won't do it. Kill a man because it's awkward having him around."

He forced a laugh to change the subject. "I think we've got a meal ready," he said, sliding the last of the bacon off the grill. "Let's eat!'