The Spikatur Cycle

Chapter four

Chapter four

Concerning the power of Phu-Si-Yantong“See to it, Vanki,” I said to the empire’s chief spymaster.

“Yes, majister.”

His flat and chilling voice was just the same after all this time. His face, pale, composed, held that containment of himself, that inscrutable knowingness, that perhaps he did not realize revealed so much. This was a man who lived in the shadows and was of the darkness. And in contact with people in the everyday run of rubbing elbows they would regard him and know that this man lived within himself. He had proved a master of his trade. Also, and for this I forgave him much, including his part in dumping me under a thorn ivy bush in the Hostile Territories, he was devoted to Delia.

Anyone who tries to run a country, even a ramshackle kind of place as Vallia then was, cannot do it all alone.

You have to learn to delegate.

“And remember, the welfare and happiness of Ortyg and Fransha are more important than a possible advantage on the fringe of Racterland.”

Naghan Vanki still wore his trim black and silver clothes, cut in the latest fashion and inconspicuous. Black and white are the Racter colors. He moved his hand over the papers on his desk, the same kind of damned papers that cluttered my desk.

“Once I thought the Racters held the chief hope for the country. Events have altered my appreciation.”

With a quick look at his clepsydra — the time was flying by! — I turned to leave. “If Mavindeul does not throw in with us and rise, we’ll soon be in a position to attack the Racters from the south, anyway, as soon as Kov Turko has cleared his Falinur.”

“My sources inform me that Antar Voinderam will not risk an attack on the dowager Kovneva of Falkerdrin until he is assured of success.” Had Naghan Vanki been in the habit of smiling, or of allowing any expression on that chilling face of his, now he might have smiled. Old Natyzha Famphreon, the dowager Kovneva of Falkerdrin, was a holy terror. No one — but no one — could ever be assured of success against her until she was battened down and on her way to the Ice Floes of Sicce.

“We’ll do our best to accommodate him.” I opened the door, and then thought that Vanki might profit from a little jolt. “You know there is zorca horn rot in Thoth Valaha. We are going to be short of saddle animals if we’re not careful. I want a full report of our negotiations with the countries in the Dawn Lands we have approached to purchase airboats.”

Vanki said, just a little quickly, “We continue to try in the Dawn Lands, majister.” Then he halted himself, about to say something and checking himself. Oddly, I had the clear impression that he knew something, had thought I knew, and had suddenly realized that I did not know.

“Yes?”

He was very smooth. “I will have the report on your desk before the suns rise.”

It would have been childish of me to have said, “In triplicate!” as I almost did. We were operating on a level a little above that kind of pettiness.

“We desperately need vollers,” I said. Vanki, like most Vallians, called airboats fliers. Voller was the Havilfarese name, coming from the places where they were built. “And we need saddle and draught animals. I shall be going to Hyrklana as soon as I can shed some of this work load. Not that we will get much joy out of fat Queen Fahia. But we must have transport!”

He saw that I was seized by the urgency of this problem. It was vital to the continuing struggle.

“Much of the mergem crop has been planted where the forests were cut down for the sailing ships of the sky.”

“We’ll just have to forage wider for lumber.”

“Yes, majister.”

About to burst out, as the old intemperate Dray Prescot would certainly have done, I held my tongue. Spymasters may become two-edged weapons. If that happened Vallia would be in for much bloodshed before we righted the ship of state, so to speak. He watched me with that calm stare as I went out. Our parting remberees were polite, that was all.

But, for all that, Naghan Vanki was an invaluable servant to Vallia.

* * * *

The urgency of everything was enough to drive a man wild with baffled impatience.

Both Antar Voinderam, Ortyg’s father, and Larghos Eventer, Fransha’s father, had left the city before I could contact them. Messengers were on their trail. After seeing Vanki, there was one more man I would see, perhaps in this case as in so many others, the most important man of all.

Riding back through the nighted streets of Vondium, passing ruins still sprawled in ugly decay but bright with wild flowers, grim and yet glowing reminders of the Time of Troubles, I relished the scent of moon blooms. She of the Veils sailed the sky above. Her fuzzy golden and rosy glow illuminated buildings and avenues, glimmered molten on the still waters of the canals. Truly, even half in ruins, Vondium was still the beautiful city, proud in her beauty.

At my back rode the duty squadron of the Sword Watch.

Formed out of loyalty to the emperor, formed at the beginning by my blade comrades without my knowledge to protect me against the cunning and viciousness of assassins, the Emperor’s Sword Watch kept guard. This was a squadron from 2ESW, for 1ESW was away up north with my son Drak. With him, also, was the Emperor’s Yellow Jackets, 1EYJ, helping to finalize our campaigns up there against the clansmen. With them were Seg Segutorio and Inch, and I hungered to see my blade comrades again and talk and carouse and sing and generally forget that I was supposed to be a puissant emperor.

The two second moons of Kregen, the Twins eternally orbiting each other, lifted over the serrated rooftops, and the night brightened with a confusing crisscross pattern of pinkish shadows.

On such a night assassins might stalk abroad. I would have to go and see the Hyr Stikitche in Drak’s City, the haunt of thieves and vagabonds and assassins, and see what he would tell me of Larghos Eventer’s doings. Not damned much, for old Nath the Knife, the Aleygyn of the Stikitches, was touchy concerning the honor of assassins.

All the same, he had sent many of his fine young men to serve with 1EYJ, and they had fought passing well.

These thoughts as we hurried along brought up the business interrupted by this passionate elopement. The stray thought did occur to me of that horrendous time when Delia had, by mischance, been abducted. “Shades of the Lady Merle and Vangar Riurik,” I said to myself. Well, that affair had turned out all right in the end, and I hoped that this one would as well.

Despite the urgency of our ride, the beauty of moons-drenched Vondium, half in ruins, could not fail to stir me. If working for mere artifacts of brick and stone is not simple foolishness, it was in my mind to believe we did right to struggle for the well-being of this city.

New schools had not only to be equipped and staffed and funded, they had to be built...

* * * *

A flurry of alarm shook a patrol of the Sword Watch forward, their zorcas running with upflung horns as they passed me, grim-faced men surging up to ride knee-to-knee in a compact body around Shadow, my beautiful black zorca. The staccato crack of hooves, the creak of leather and clink of harness, were punctuated by brief shouts, of interrogation and answer, as the forward patrol sorted out the pother.

Jiktar Rodan had the command of the duty squadron this night. His iron-hard face beneath the brim of his helmet looked like a mere mask, carved as one with the helmet itself.

Shadow slackened speed. Rodan rode level with me. Swords glimmered in the light of the moons. Up ahead the shouts lifted.

A zorcaman came hurdling back, pelisse and feathers and plumes flying. He bellowed it out.

“A party of drunks, Jik! Shall we round ’em up?”

Rodan looked annoyed. He had quite clearly mentally braced himself to meet a savage attack upon the person of the emperor he was sworn to preserve with his own life if necessary, and all it was was a parcel of drunks. Yes, one could sympathize with Jiktar Rodan.

He started to say, “Round ’em up—” and no doubt would have gone on to order them thrown into the nearest dungeon and forgotten.

I said, “Who are they?”

The zorcaman bellowed, “Citizens, majister!”

“Then let them fall into the gutter and sleep quietly, we have urgent business ahead of us tonight.”

“Quidang, majister!”

Jiktar Rodan looked across at me before he fell back into his position at the head of the duty squadron. He took a breath. We had seen action together. He had taken wounds.

“Yes, I know, Rodan. I am too soft with them.”

“Yes, majister.” These old hands, training up the youngster, soldiers who had served with me for seasons, know how and when to take liberties with the emperor — not that they were regarded as liberties by me. We all did our jobs for Vallia and that was what counted. He went on, shaking his head, “We need to put a little backbone into them, by Vox!”

I forbore to ask if he meant his youngsters or the party of drunken citizens.

Certainly, the reaction of the duty squadron had been prompt and sharp, and had there been real trouble ahead then these lads of 2ESW would have nipped it in the bud.

Ortyg Voinderam, who had run off with his Lady Fransha because he couldn’t wait for the legal bokkertu to be concluded, might benefit by a season or two of being trained up by crusty old vikatus like Jiktar Rodan. Vikatu the Dodger, the archetype of the old soldier, the old sweat, can teach lessons to civilians as well as the swods in the ranks...

When I dismounted in a convenient inner courtyard of the imperial palace — convenient because it hadn’t been burned down or knocked to pieces — Rosala, one of Delia’s handmaids, was talking to a soldier in the half-shadows of an archway.

I heard her say in a teasing voice, “And here is the emperor now, you famous jurukker, and I must fly!”

She danced across the flags toward me.

Delia knows how to look after her people. Rosala called the soldier a jurukker, that is to say guardsman, and I, perforce, had accepted this nomenclature. I will not belabor the point about my ambivalent attitudes to bodyguards and the like. They have their uses. And the men forming a juruk — a guard — are the important part of the structure for me.

“Majis!” said Rosala, pert, half laughing. “The empress bid me tell you she has gone with the Lady Jilian. She hopes to be back late tomorrow.”

Throwing Shadow’s reins to the groom who hurried up, and with a pat for the zorca’s gleaming black neck and a word or two for the groom, Yando the Limp, for he had taken a wound at the Battle of Kochwold, I went into the palace. Rosala lingered.

“Do not suborn that soldier from his duty, Rosala...”

She knew I teased her.

“Majister!” Her eyes, her lips, her hair, all looked magnificent in the light of the moons. “He stands guard like a famous juruk, like the best soldier in the Sword Watch. Do you think he would desert his post for me?”

I did not answer. Truth to tell, as I went into the palace in search of Khe-Hi-Bjanching, I realized that any soldier with any sense — anyone without commitments — would desert his post for a girl like Rosala. But she was handmaid to the Empress of Vallia. She was, besides being a girl of remarkable beauty, a girl of immense common sense. She knew the dangers thronging around an imperial palace on Kregen.

And the news she brought that Delia had gone off meant, I judged, that Delia and Jilian were going their own way about finding the Lady Fransha.

Now I am well aware that I am a crusty old curmudgeon who takes delight in foolish notions that appall the more sober-minded, plain Dray Prescot with the weight of an empire in ruins hanging on my shoulders. Yet, I think, and I truly believe, that I was genuinely more concerned for the safety and happiness of Ortyg and Fransha than I was for the political maneuverings surrounding their match. So, as I found Khe-Hi-Bjanching wide awake in the chambers given over to the Wizard of Loh, I felt the leap of gratitude to him and hope that all might yet be well.

“Majister,” he greeted me. “I have been trying — but so far my powers fail me.”

All my sudden hope vanished like thistledown.

The chamber was illuminated in the mellow glow of samphron oil lamps and was filled with comfortable furnishings. There was nothing of the tawdry bric-a-brac of the common sorcerer here. Wizards of Loh, the most famed and feared thaumaturges of Kregen, as far as I then knew, needed no gimcrack trappings of skulls and bats blood and reptile inner parts and pickled dragons.

“You have been into lupu, Khe-Hi?”

“Yes. I sent my powers out and found nothing. It was strange. Ortyg Voinderam is no sorcerer of any kind, surely?”

“No. Not as far as I know.”

I felt the chill. If another sorcerer were at work here, preventing Bjanching from discovering the whereabouts of the runaways by means of his kharrna which gave him the power of observing events at a distance, then that other wizard might be the wizard...

Bjanching saw all that on my face.

“If Phu-Si-Yantong is interfering here...”

“Sink me!” I burst out. “I’ll have that devil’s tripes one of these fine days. He is a maniac and although I have searched for some I have failed to find goodness in him yet.”

“I do not know anyone who would say he was capable of an ounce of goodness—”

“Well,” I grumped, “I suppose he must have some redeeming features. If we could discover what they were perhaps we might talk to him—” I looked at Bjanching. “Have you contacted Deb-Lu-Quienyin?”

“I was about to do that when you arrived, majister.”

Deb-Lu-Quienyin, with whom I had been through a fraught time or two, had remained with Drak and my friends in the north where I fancied he would be of inestimable value to them. He was just about the most powerful Wizard of Loh there was — always excepting that crazed power-mad devil Phu-Si-Yantong.

Even though I had spent much time in company with Quienyin and Bjanching, and had seen Wizards of Loh performing their mysteries, I, like anyone else on Kregen, could never fully feel at ease as they set about their arcane rituals.

Khe-Hi-Bjanching wore a severe robe of a lustrous black. No runes or magical symbols sullied his vestments, and the pallor of his face and the fiery red Lohvian hair seemed, by contrast, all the more striking. As a young — or relatively young — Wizard of Loh, Bjanching might have been excused displays of thaumaturgical fashion. He disdained them. He was able to exert his power and go into lupu — that strange, half-trance state in which his kharrna extended and gave him pictures of people and events many miles away — without fuss and without many of the physical preparations of other Wizards of Loh I had known.

Waiting as Khe-Hi-Bjanching prepared himself, calmed his whole body and psyche, began to infiltrate the tendrils of his power into those arcane other worlds no mortal might tread with impunity, I found my sense of screaming impatience easing. This would take time, and time I did not have, yet I could wait quietly.

Bjanching’s eyes rolled up until, in the moment before he placed his palms over them, his eyes glared forth sightlessly in white blankness. The waiting was mercifully short. The Wizard of Loh’s breathing lengthened and drew out, softer and softer, shallower and shallower, until it seemed he did not breathe at all. The chambers gave no sound. We were two primeval spirits, isolated in the great mysteries.

Then — Bjanching lowered his hands.

He stared at me, and in his face that knowing look told me he had broken through.

I leaned forward eagerly. “Quienyin?”

No answer.

“San?” I gave the Wizard of Loh the honorific of dominie, or sage, and I breathed in a deep draught of the close air.

“Majister—” The voice was Bjanching’s. “San Quienyin is there, on the periphery, and he is trying to make contact with me. But...”

I put my teeth into my lip.

For a long space the two wizards sought to reach each other through that timeless, formless, unknowable hinterland of the occult. Sweat began to roll down Bjanching’s face. Abruptly, he jumped up, his black gown swirling. He took three faltering steps, beginning to spin around in that dervish-like whirling by which some wizards summon their powers. Instead of going on with the rituals that had been unnecessary for him for so long, he tottered and collapsed into his high-backed chair.

He looked at me, and that look of knowingness had fled.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Majister — Quienyin and I were separated, as by a barrier of enormous force. This is new. We must work and investigate and—”

“Yes, yes. Tell me!”

“We cannot discern a single thing concerning the whereabouts of Voinderam and the Lady Fransha.”

“Now the devil take it!” I said, and I swore.

“But, majister — do you not see?”

“I see, San, I see very well. Phu-Si-Yantong—”

“Yes! That arch devil has interdicted our powers, and that means he has achieved a recrudescence of power taking him into an altogether new plane. I think, majister, I believe, we are in for a fight passing anything that has gone before.”

“And it’s a fight you must win, or all Vallia is doomed.”