Pernie did as instructed.
“Do you remember the fire limes?” she asked, the sunlight flashing in her smiling eyes. Pernie nodded that she did. “Take them to a fire lime and hold the shrimp in the bubbles that come from its shell. Only a half minute on each side or they’ll be overdone. Then try one and see.”
Pernie could hardly get back into the surf quickly enough to test it out. And sure enough, immediately after the minute it took to cook them, she discovered that Djoveeve had been telling her the truth. One shrimp was maple and the other a sublime shellfish slice of Kettle’s birthday cake, three whole bites apiece.
And so went the remainder of the day, Pernie eating shrimp after shrimp after shrimp, and catching more and more until the sun was gone. She kept at it until she couldn’t swallow even one more down, no matter how hard she tried, which set Djoveeve to laughing in the sand. They rested, then practiced with the spear, and twice more across the day, they went out and refilled Djoveeve’s bag. By twilight, Pernie had broken the old woman’s long-held shrimp-eating record by four.
Chapter 26
B
lack Sander reined his horse in as he approached Galbrun Hall, home of the Marchioness of South Mark and seat of power for the largest of all the duchies on Kurr. He saw descending the long stair the figure of Cypher Meste, guildmaster diviner, accompanied by the captain of the Palace Guard and two younger officers. Cypher Meste did not look pleased, and her long dark hair danced about her shoulders as she shook her head emphatically to something the captain had said. She looked up as Black Sander came to a halt, and she squinted into the noontime sun. He muttered the words of a flashing light spell, to augment the solar effect, and, in the few moments that she blinked at it, shaped his features to match those of the gardener he’d seen working a half measure down the road.
Cypher Meste squinted back at him a second time, still blinking, then apparently lost interest and turned back to the crimson-cloaked captain, who was still speaking to her. Again she shook her head, and the four of them made their way to a small stone house down the lane, in which Black Sander knew was located the marchioness’ private teleportation chamber. Black Sander watched them go, his own eyes narrow and calculating until they had disappeared inside the little stonework house. He let the illusion dissolve and rode up to the front, handing his reins off to a stable boy who came running out to take his horse from him.
Once he was inside and admitted to see her—after her chambers and the hall outside them could be cleared—the marchioness glared at Black Sander through pale blue eyes that were little more than slits beneath the drawn curtains of her eyelids, violet eye shadow, and wiry black lashes that quivered at the fringe. Her sneer was a crooked red gash across her gaunt face, and the severity of it was augmented by cheekbones that protruded at such angles it seemed they must cut through the skin at any time. Her whole body was made that way, angular, and so slender her flesh seemed but tissue laid upon a lattice of rapier blades. If it were, all those blades now trembled in ire beneath the opulence of a black-and-gold gown. Black gossamer fabric, webbed with gold, flared like fireworks at her shoulders and hips, a gilded puffery that ballooned as if holding captive clouds of ink.
As he watched anger rattle through the old cage of her bones, Black Sander held his tongue. Slender though she was, thin like split kindling, he understood well enough that she was still the heart of power in South Mark, and the one person on all of Prosperion who could, with a word, actually create a worse fate for him than the War Queen. She and she alone had more connections in the underworld of Kurr than he. Not even her toady, the Earl of Vorvington, could make such a boast.
But this day, they were not comparing notes or arguing cultural realities, though Black Sander could have wished for such levity. No, this argument that they had was one about simple competence.
“It’s been five months!” she said in a low, taut tone from her place near the window of her private rooms. “I don’t ask much from you. The pay is regular, and I give you your head. And all I asked this time was that you place a simple seeing stone. Just one. And yet, all you have managed to accomplish in that time is to get the royal hounds sicced on me from Crown.”
“What did they want?” he asked, immune to the ice in her voice.
She went to an end table by a long divan, which was covered with embroidered lines of writing, each a great quote once spoken by her father, one of the finest orators in all of history. His words had calmed the people after the War Queen had bested his armies in battle two centuries ago. South Mark had been the last to go. She picked up an object roughly the size of a hen’s egg that was lying there on the divan and brought it to him, placing it in his palm. “Do you recognize this?”
She pulled away her own skeletal hand and left him staring down into his. At the topaz seeing stone he’d secretly stowed on the fleet spaceship during his brief incursion to Tinpoa Base. He’d hidden it very well. Or so he’d thought, stuffing it in a nest of wiring inside a wall panel he’d found in a vacant corridor. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would have been digging around up there, so the only thing he could figure was some sort of mechanical accident. He’d wondered what had happened to it. And why they hadn’t heard anything.
She saw the brief flicker of recognition, perhaps even read it in the slight movement of his lashes or some twitch of the cheek. She rolled her eyes and turned back to the window. “She’s watching everything,” she said, referring to the Queen. “Everything. The fortunes she is spending on defensive spells alone are preposterous, and yet, she’s got people sniffing out seeing stones.
Seeing stones
, of all things. How many people on the entire planet even know how to create one?”
There was little he could say, and even less that he was inclined to speak aloud, so he simply watched her as she stared outside.
“Given what they’ve just asked me, do you have any idea what they must actually suspect?” she went on. “If that child of a guildmaster were not so young or were ranked higher than her V, I’d be on my way to the guillotine. We are being spied on by the capital, and that gold-clad idiot clanking about the throne room is going to bankrupt the kingdom to do it.”
Black Sander, long used to enduring hour upon hour in shadowy places waiting for opportunities, watched and waited here. At some point she’d come back to him. Finish her complaints and give him something he could use.
“Have I not given you the names of enough teleporters to get it done?” she asked. “Have I not shown you enough personally?” She swept her arm out toward a large armoire upon which sat a beautiful mirror in a frame made of bone, a great swirling mess of carved white complexity, wrapped around an oval glass, all of which was set into a beautiful black box of enchanted tarwood. Tucked within the lattice of the bony finery were tiny carvings depicting Earth fleet spaceships. And in the mirror itself could be seen the image of Orli Pewter, standing in a vast cavern beside someone else, both of them wearing clumsy-looking suits of white material and helmets fronted by a half bubble of glass. “Is this not enough? I’ve even given you access to the enchanted seeing spells of Altin Meade himself, made for his little blank hussy. She’s regularly to be found on that ship that was sighted outside of Murdoc Bay. Surely it’s been to Earth a thousand times and back these last five months. Why can you do nothing with that? Must I go myself and simply beg passage to Earth on the privilege of my rank?”
Black Sander watched the two figures in the mirror for a while, their image the product of some augmentations by the marchioness’ personal seer, Kalafrand. Though he was a Z-class master of sight magic, Kalafrand was a well-kept secret, one the marchioness jealously hid from the Queen. Kalafrand was a man with a single gift for seeing, and little else, almost nothing else, but he was a savant. Both genius and imbecile. Somehow, he’d been able to fiddle with Altin Meade’s complex spell, and managed to alter it some, making it something the marchioness could use, at least to a degree.
He took a step closer and watched as the Galactic Mage’s fiancée went about whatever she was doing. The last time he’d looked into this glass, she had been gardening. Now she was with some other Earth man in what appeared to be some kind of mine. The two of them worked together with the lights of their suits flashing on a patch of faintly glowing purple stone, and whatever they were doing sent out clouds of white mist like fog. There were others around them, people working with a strange Earth machine that he could only partly see in the mirror, a large contraption that had been built at the bottom of a large rectangular pit.
“You see them, thief?” the marchioness went on. “You watch what they do. See where they are. Wherever she goes; I show you everything. The woman has the privilege of Sir Altin Meade and of the Earth royalty. I give you this information freely, anytime you would ask it, and yet in all these months you still can’t get a simple seeing stone to Earth for me. Not even on a ship they are on with regularity. I make it easy for you, and yet you cannot get my seer’s eyes to Earth?”
“They aren’t royalty, Your Grace—”
In the time it took him to breathe, she’d cut him off. “Don’t equivocate with me. I pay you to solve problems, not quibble with me about identities.”
“But My Lady, it is not to quibble, but to point out that Sir Altin and the Earth woman are well guarded, more so than even the fleet ships. And they are well guarded here on Prosperion, not only in Crown, but at Calico Castle as well. Sir Altin has shrouded the old keep in nearly as many counter-spells as the Palace has. He’s taken on a guard of at least forty men. And while the general and his troops are no longer encamped beyond the walls, he’s got more traps and magicks around that place than any other Prosperion but the Queen.”
“Of course he does. Vorvington’s idiot nephew kidnapped his intended—getting himself banished and killed in the process. You can thank dead Thadius Thoroughgood for the traps. The Galactic Mage watches over her like a beholder hawk now. But it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to break into Calico Castle. You have to break
on
to Earth. And that requires a simple seeing stone. Just that, so I can get a teleporter there. So you see, I haven’t tasked you with all that much, have I?”
He started to explain again the nature of the heavy guard and the way that the Earth people saw through illusions and sensed for magic in the flicker of electricity, but she saw it coming and silenced him with a glare.
Though she did not quite raise her voice when she spoke, she managed somehow to add more ice to it, rising as she did to her full height. At nearly two spans, she looked like a noble razor. “They are blanks!” she said. “And I’ve hired you because you are supposed to be able to do what no one else can. You’re supposed to be the master of traps, the king of illusion, the go-to chap when it comes to circumventing rules, magical or otherwise. That was the on-and-on about you. The ‘procurement specialist,’ everyone says. That is what I bought you for.”
“Speaking of things bought, Your Grace has pointed out herself that the Queen is sparing no expense.”
“Your reputation for rising to occasions seems to have been more fiction than I would have liked.”
Black Sander would not bother to defend himself. And she, wisely, recognized her own temper on the rise, a circumstance beyond dignity.
“Get me a stone on that infernal planet before it is too late. The sands are running out. If I don’t have one of my teleporters on that planet by year’s end, all my other preparations will be for naught. All of them, do you understand?”
He didn’t. “Perhaps if Your Grace were to give me more information, my divining informants would be of greater use.”
Scrutiny shaped her gaze like the blade of an axe. He saw the internal debate that danced upon that edge, and saw that he had won some small victory shortly after.
“I need weapons,” she said bluntly. “And I need them before that fool sitting on the golden throne gets us into yet another war. Perhaps several of them all at once. It seems having three enemies this year was not a great enough challenge for our beloved, overreaching monarch.”
Few things surprised a man whose entire life had been devoted to ferreting out surprises more than that one did. Another war? It didn’t seem possible.
“That’s right,” she said, seeing it in his eyes. “The ink isn’t even dry on the treaties, and she’s already making flanking moves for territory in space. She’s preparing for war as we speak.”
“War, Your Grace. Truly? So soon? There is no sense in it. She’s not recovered her treasure or her troops. She’s not ready for one.”
“Correct. And yet she’s at it with all haste, from what
my
divining informants can tell. She’s set up a colony on the planet they call Andalia and hasn’t mentioned a thing about it to anyone from Earth, at least not as far as Vorvington can verify. His informants tell me that the
Citadel
mages have found another world as well. Again, secretly. And how do you think the Earth people are going to appreciate that little dollop of news?”
He barely shrugged. He had no guess, nor inclination to. Politics was only interesting to him in how the shifting winds might blow something promising his way. But he did think it was too soon for war again. A wasted populace has little of value to barter, steal, or trade beyond picking through the remnants of burned-out domiciles. People are quickly reduced to worries about food, water, and physicians, where real wealth requires an active economy. Another war, several wars, could push Prosperion toward being that kind of place.