A Handful Of Men - The Stricken Field Part 33

Sleepy n.o.bles bounced in their carriages, heading home from the ball, each one escorted now by mounted guards because of the rabble infesting the capital.

In an unused stable, Lord Umpily snored in a heavy armchair almost as well padded as himself. A sorceress sat nearby, stoically waiting on her master's orders.

Her master paced, pondering what he had learned in the nighta"pondering also what blow he might best strike against his enemy before he himself was felled. He had never been especially powerful by warden standards, but he was nonetheless a mighty sorcerer. He did not intend to be found unworthy at the end. In his time he had seen enough youngsters die bravely to know how it was done, and there were still a few blank pages left in the history books. Warriors did not die unnoticed.

Sunlight danced joyously on the icy peaks of the Qoble Range.

Ylo opened his eyes.

He registered ceiling, drapes, blue sky through a c.h.i.n.k in the drapes, silence from the crib in the corner . . . a bare leg next to his. He moved very slightly to increase the area of contact with that delicious smooth warmth.

He lingered happily over memories of the previous evening.

What a transformation, he thought proudly. What a wildcat. What a credit to his teaching. A most rewarding pupil. Big day ahead. Long climb up to the pa.s.s. Must pick a good horse. Ought to make an early start, before the stock got too well picked over. He could not hear anyone else stirring yet, though.

He rolled over and cuddled closer. "Mmmm?" she said.

He licked an ear, and felt a wiggle of pleasure. "Should be on our way early," he whispered. "Mph!"

He slid a hand around to cup a firm, warm breast. There was no resistance. Quite the reverse, in fact. Just two weeks ago he would have needed an hour to prepare that move. "Ought to get up," he hissed.

"Maya's not awake yet," a sleepy voice said.

"So?"

"So what are you waiting for?"

Some time later, Ylo drove the phaeton around to the front door. Es.h.i.+ala was standing there with the bags ready at her feet. He jumped down and went to fetch them.

Her face still seemed flushed, but perhaps that was only happiness. The smile she gave him now was the sort of thing men dreamed of all their lives. No longer would anyone call her the Ice Impressa"Spring Queen, perhaps, with all that that implied. People were coming and going all around, and every man squared his shoulders as he saw Es.h.i.+ala, but she had eyes only for Ylo. Which was very, very nice.

"The air!" she said. "And those peaks! You know, I've seen pictures, but never real mountains before."

"I arranged them specially for you." He lifted the bags. "I thought you must have. Careful with that one, it has milk in it."

"Trust me. And if you think these hillocks are cute, wait until we get to the pa.s.s." Ylo peered around to locate Maya, who was chasing cats, dogs, and pigeons indiscriminately. Satisfied, he turned with a bag in each hand and almost blundered into a man heading for the door. It was nothing serious. The other stepped aside easily enough, but then . . .

There are two ways of looking at another face. One of them says: I know you.

And when that other face registers shock for just a moment and then goes blanka"that means trouble.

Ylo stood and watched as the stranger clattered up the steps and vanished into the inn.

"Those scarlet blossoms . . ." Es.h.i.+ala said. "Something wrong?"

"No. Nothing."

But there was. Ylo could not recall the stranger, but the stranger had obviously known Ylo. Although he had been wearing civilian clothes, he was the right age to be a soldier.

More than five thousand men in Qoble knew Ylo by sight. Twenty thousand might be a more realistic estimate, although he would expect few to recognize him without his uniform and wolfskin cape. And yet . . . And yet he was tall for an imp; to admit that his face was memorable was not entirely vanity. Men might not like to admit it, but they noticed his looks almost as much as women did. Shandie, now, had been able to disappear in his own office, but people remembered Ylo.

As he loaded the baggage and tied it securely, his fingers moved by themselves. His mind raced along other paths. The stranger had been surprised by the encounter, but that was understandable. The new imperor's personal signifer should be in Hub, at court, not here in the provinces. Perhaps there was nothing sinister about that reaction.

On the other hand, if the Covin had apprehended Ionfeu . . . If the Covin still wanted the baby impress . . .

He should not have come to West Pa.s.s. Qoble held many more cities than just Gaaze, where the XIIth was stationed. He should have continued east and crossed by one of the other pa.s.ses and gone to Angot, or even Boswood.

Well, it was too late now. To change his plans would alarm Es.h.i.+ala, and he did not want any clouds shadowing that newfound happiness of hers. He gave her a hand up and lifted Maya to her, smiling guilelessly without hearing a word she was saying.

One pa.s.s was as good as another, anyway. The army watched them all.

2.

Thaile had ridden the night sky like a shooting star among the aurora. At first she went north, and the balefire she had lit at the feet of the Progistes dwindled away into the dark, behind and below, until its tiny worm glow was lost to her.

Leeb, she thought. Oh, Leeb! And, My child! I never knew my child.

Briefly, too, she sensed the hateful figure of the Keeper as a shadowy pillar of sorrow standing huge upon the mountains, staring after her.

Soon she crossed the coast of the Morning Sea, slipping easily through the sorcerous walls of Thume. She caught a momentary vision of the ambience of a startled old man, and knew him for the archon who kept watch over those sh.o.r.es. Then that was gone, also. All gone, and she was Outside, soaring just below the stars, heading north.

A coldness closed in upon her. She had left Thume, her birthplace, the land of her people. Down there in the darkness was the sea, the clean, cold sea. She sensed s.h.i.+ps as pinp.r.i.c.ks and ignored them and the sleeping souls within them, but soon the coast of Guwush was ahead of her and then below. People moved there in the dark, little folk going about their business like ants deep in the soil. They were alien. She felt their strangeness and was chilled by it. Outside! She was out among the demons, and although she knew now that the demons were only people like herself, the child she once had been whimpered its terror within her. She remembered being Quole, dying with her baby under the nails of hungry gnomes a thousand years ago.

So little magic! Here and there she sensed small glimmers, furtive movings, little flames of candle shrouded to hide their light from monsters prowling the dark, but Thume had been full of magic, warm with magic, and Outside seemed stark and cold and mundane. Then there was sea ahead of her again, blue-green northern sea that stretched on to icy, rocky, pitiless lands lit already by the first hard gleams of dawn.

She veered, shying off from day as a doe might shy from a hunters' fire. She headed west, into the heart of night. Far below her went cities, great huddles of people in numbers she could not comprehend. Never had she seen more than thirty or forty people gathered together, and these immense a.s.semblages terrified her. She rose higher, higher, until she felt the stars above her head.

She was not a bird, or a flying woman, merely a thought traversing the night. Only great power could move like that, but she knew her strength was great, for great power brought wisdom, also. She might well rank with the legendary sorcerers of ancient times: Thraine, or Is-an-Ok, or Keef.

People and more people! Her mind reached out and everywhere found people. From Summer Sea to Winter Ocean, people. Where were the forests, the calm pools, the gra.s.sy slopes like those she loved in Thume? Overrun, all. Gone these many thousand years! Where could she find sanctuary in a world so busy? Where was peace when the land was all carved up by roads and blighted by cities and brutally disciplined into angular, working fields?

Onward she went, onward, seeking. Seeking she knew not what.

All her life her world has been that safe little cage. Without it, she will do what birds do when they are frighteneda"fly. Fly and fly. She will fly up and up, and on and on, never daring to come down. And eventually she will exhaust herself and fall helpless from the sky.

Baze had known, then! Or suspected, at least. So had the Keeper. Perhaps it was all written in that book of prophecies. Perhaps there was no sanctuary. Perhaps she was destined to circle back at last, to perch on the twig she had left, obedience returning to the Keeper's hand.

Never! They had slain her love, slain her child, thrust powers upon her that she did not want. Whatever the G.o.ds had in store for the land of Thume, it could not be more cruel than what Thume had done to Thaile. She would not save them, would not play their evil game.

Would not become what the Keeper was.

Still the land unrolled before her, cloaked in night that could not mask her sorcerous vision. People and more people. She would go on, go on forever and when she came to the western seas, still she would go on, never returning.

And then she sensed an evil. It had been there all along, perhaps, but too strange for her mind to grasp, a discordant shadow upon the ambience. Now it was closer and she could no longer refuse to recognize it. It was inhuman, alien, somehow almost metallic. Intelligence without wisdom, desire without pity, a different sort of sorcery.

The dragons are rising. Yea, dragons! That was what that black cloud signifieda"dragons. She knew dragons. In the Defile she had been slain by a dragon, a thousand years ago. But these were hundreds of dragons, a great blaze questing. She sensed their excitement, their joy in this glimpse of freedom, their remorseless hunger for gold or any lesser metal. She also sensed their anger and resentment as they were herded to another's purpose when they wanted to disperse and plunder the riches below them. Appalled and yet fascinated, she found herself being drawn to the dragons. Who or what had strength to constrain this mighty host?

Suddenlya"danger! There was another ent.i.ty in the night, another power in the ambience. Not inhuman, but more evil, enormous, and consciously evil. Dragons had no pity; they could not comprehend suffering, but this other could. It loomed over the ambience, a flickering beacon of darkness in the very center of the world. This was what drove the dragons, and now it had detected Thaile. Black tentacles of power reached out for her, querying, groping as a hand might grope in a sack. She sensed two great stony eyes peering around, looking for hera"wondering, worried, dangerous eyes.

Unless a hawk catches her first, of course, Baze had said.

There was the hawk! There was the evil that had overthrown the wardens. Now it had caught a glimpse of Thaile. Not a proper glimpse, perhaps, just a hint. She had creaked a floorboard and the guard had raised his lantern. If the Covin was sure of what she was and where she was, it could s.n.a.t.c.h her from the sky and make her its own. Even she could not withstand so much ma.s.sed power. The Keeper herself could not, or so she had said.

As the tiny songbird might seek to dodge the plunging falcon, Thaile swooped downward in panicky flight. She made herself small and elusive in ways that words would not describe. She flitted low over the world, seeking to hide her essence behind the great bulk of the Nefer Rangea"but mere rock would not block those stony eyes. She rushed south over Ilrane, barely taking thought to marvel at the towering crystal sky-trees, and there she began to feel success.

It was the dragons that saved her. If the usurper took his full attention away from the dragons, they would scatter and start to ravage and that was evidently not his plana"not yet. Even the ma.s.sed power of the Covin could barely control so many. Now was not the time to go hunting wisps. Angrily the eyes turned away, the tentacles withdrew.

Saved!

Thaile stood in a garden. The house beside it was an odd affair of woods and colored stones, alien and impractical, but curiously beautiful. All around it were sleeping flowers and drowsy trees and small ponds of fish. Within slept a man and a woman and two children, golden-haired and golden-skinned. Elves, the gold-haired demons . . . they did not look very demonic. Apart from their coloring and their silly little ears, they looked quite like pixies.

There were other houses scattered around in the hills with people in them. By Thume standards the landscape was crowded, but it was rural compared to any other place she had seen Outside. A skytree towered heavenward very far off, its top glittering in the moonlight. Its base was below the horizon. She called up visions of the books she had browsed through. This was Ilrane, the land of the elves. Could Ilrane be the sanctuary she sought?

"No," the Keeper said at her back. "There is no safety here."

Thaile whirled and screamed aloud. "Go away!"

The familiar tall shadow leaned on its staff and made a cackling noise like a rattle of bones. "You are a pixie. You are a freak! No one will offer shelter to a pixie. Pixies no longer exist, remember?"

"Go away, or I smite you!"

"You will draw the usurper."

"Then I will draw the usurper!" She gathered power . . .

"You have seen him," the Keeper's mocking whisper said. Eyes glinted within her cowl. "You know his evil now. He will bind you, bind you forever. With you to serve him, the last hope dies. All will be his, to destroy."

"But you cannot bind me! Not that way! You have tried everything else, but that last obscenity is barred to you or you would use it. You cannot bind me to do what you will require of mea"that which I will never do! Now be gone or I strike!" Thaile brandished power like a fiery sword and the Keeper faded away.

Now even Ilrane was sullied by memory. Thaile went also.

This time she was more careful. She was learning, mastering her skills, and she made sure that she remained un.o.bserved. She headed west again, fascinated by the sinister song of dragons.

As the night drew to an end, so did the land. Only Westerwater lay ahead of her, cold and lifeless. Rosy dawn lit the peaks of the Mosweeps, icy ramparts soaring above the downy clouds, and she sank down again, to watch the sun rise and to rest. Eventually she will exhaust herself and fall helpless from the sky . . .

She sat on a snowy ledge above a pale abyss, hugging her knees and viewing the world of ice and white crags. It was cold, but it was clean. A sorceress could be quite comfortable where a mundane would freeze solid in seconds. She could see forevera"see the dragons still questing northward, see the pillar of evil in the center. Probably she could even see Thume itself over the curve of the world if she tried, although she knew that Keef's mighty sorcery would conceal the inhabitants from her.

Hunger? She made a juicy-sweet mango, and a silver knife to cut it. When she had eaten the pulp, she turned the pit into a diamond as big as a pixie's ear, and tossed it away in the snow. There were only two problems a puissant sorceress could not solve, and the greater of those was death.

She remembered her few months with Leeb and the tears froze upon her cheeks. Keef and Is-an-Ok, Thraine and six or seven others since the world first turned, and now Thailea"she knew now she could evade the usurper as long as she was careful. Her power was great enough, greater than he would ever look for. She could go anywhere and do anything. But she could not call back Leeb, or her baby. She had nowhere to go and no one to love.

The second problem was loneliness. The sun shone on all Pandemia.

The world was hers and it was nothing.

3.

Lord Umpily had just completed breakfast. The surroundings were somewhat bizarrea"a filthy, cobweb-strewn stable littered with rubbish. Only a sickly gray light trickled through the little grimy windows, but better illumination might have spoiled his appet.i.te. In the middle of this midden he sat at a damask-covered table laden with silver plate. The dishes contained scant remains of turbot, smoked sturgeon, roast venison, and an oyster-and-mussel omelette, but all of the excellent veal kidney pie had gone, and most of the warm, fresh loaf. He sipped at his goblet of porter, dabbed his lips with the crisp serviette, and reluctantly decided that he could eat no more. The surroundings might lack refinement, but he could not recall a more superb repast.

The sorceress was still sitting where she had been when he drifted off to sleep some hours before dawn. For all he knew, she might not have moved all night. Her face was just as indistinct by daylight as it had been under the lantern. Two young men had joined the group and sat now in silence on the ladder-backed chairs. They wore doublet and hose, but Umpily strongly suspected that they were the two fake guardsmen who had abducted him from the ball. They, too, were impossible to make out clearly now. n.o.body was speaking, but the three glanced at one another from time to time, and he was sure that they were conversing by sorcery.

"His Omnipotence furnishes an excellent table," he said cheerfully.

No reply. No one even looked at him.

He sighed, wondering where the warlock had gone. The niggling problem with the excellent table was that it was so reminiscent of the hearty last meal traditionally furnished to condemned prisoners of rank just before they were led out to execution.

The door clicked, squeaked, squeaked again, and clicked shut. With a swirl of gray cloak, Warlock Olybino came striding in to join the meeting. He had discarded his gaudy armor and shed much of his size, although his face was still recognizable. He was apparently playing the role of a nondescript, middle-age artisan, but his bearing was much too arrogant. Who would tell him so?

He glanced at the ruins on the breakfast table and shot Umpily a contemptuous glance. "Moderation is not your strong suit, my lord."

"Moderation insults perfection, your Omnipotence." It was an old saying of Is.h.i.+pole's, but Umpily thought he had used it rather well.

The warlock grunted and turned to his a.s.sociates. Silence fell, but again a silence marked by glances and small gestures. Something was being discusseda"and apparently something important, for Olybino suddenly turned on his heel and strode to the far end of the stable and then back again. In pa.s.sing he reached out and lifted a rusty old horseshoe from a collection nailed to a pillar.

Then he came to a halt, idly bending and flexing the metal in his hands as if it were rope, shedding a blizzard of rust flakes. "That is how it will be!" he snapped. "No further argument!" He spun around to face the solitary mundane. "The legions are advancing on the goblin horde at Bandon At least five legions, possibly six. I dared not look too closely. The dragons are almost upon them."

"Upon the legions?"

The warlock nodded grimly. "I suspect that is the plan."

Umpily shuddered. "But why?"

Seeming to apply no great effort, the warlock stretched the iron bar to twice its former length. "Who can plumb the horrors of the dwarf's mind? I may be wrong, of course. A couple of dragons per legion would be ample, yet he has summoned almost every worm there is. Four blazes could waste Hub itself in half an hour. Why so many?"

"I-I-I can't imagine, sir."

"Nor L" Olybino tied the iron bar into a knot. "But I still think the legions are his target. Remember that only sorcerers know anything about him and his Covin. Only they know of his usurpation. So far as the mundane world is concerned, young Emshandar sits the Opal Throne and the Four rule in their palaces. Now comes the millennium. After a thousand years it will be dragons versus legions again! It almost happened at Nefer Moor, remember. That probably gave the poxy runt the idea. How will the Impire see such a battle?"

It was obviousa"South against East, warlock versus warlock.

"He seeks to discredit the Four," Olybino confirmed, scowling. "One or two more disasters like that and he can throw off his cloak of secrecy. He will step forward as savior, declaring that he has deposed the evil wardens. Then he will proclaim a new order."

He tossed the knotted metal away and wiped his hands. The former horseshoe clanged on the cobbles.

Umpily hugged himself. "Is there nothing we can do?"

"You, fat man?" The warlock glanced again at the empty dishes. "You might offer to create a famine for him."

"The genuine imperor found me useful in the past!" Why did that sound so sulky?