His companions set on at once, so I had to twist the staffs free and, partially regretfully, tap their skulls. As the last slumped down I heard a hard, brittle voice say: “If you do not drop that staff this instant you are a dead man.”
Without turning I knew what stood behind me. I dropped the staff. Without seeing the flight of an arrow it is damned difficult — nigh impossible — to judge which way to jump, which direction to use. Slowly, I turned around.
Yes — four Bowmen and an officer stood there, their bows fully drawn, and the lamplight glittered from the sharp steel heads. The odds were against me. I might have dodged, given the mystic disciplines of the Krozairs of Zy, had the occasion warranted. But I persevered in my peaceful overtures — here, in the palace of my father-in-law, for all that I was banished, here!
As it was, I said to the officer at the head of the four Crimson Bowmen: “I do not know you. It is clear you do not know me. I have pressing business—” I got no further.
“Take him to the cells,” said this officer, in his brittle voice. “Question him — Naghan the Pinch will know what to do. You know your orders.”
The officer in his trim Crimson was a Hikdar, a waso-Hikdar, and the pallid hardness of his face and blankness of the stare in his blue eyes would give any nefarious culprit wandering the palace a severe case of the frights. I looked at him. I thought I knew this type — always a dangerous assumption — and I stared past him at the four Bowmen.
One, I recognized.
I said: “Lahal, Neg Negutorio. Why do you stand in the ranks? You were an ord-Deldar the last time we met. I would have thought you a shiv-Hikdar by now—”
That was as far as the officer was going to allow me to prattle on. My attempt at distraction would not fool him. Furiously, he bellowed out: “Seize him up! I’ll have you all jikaidered, by Hlo-Hli!
Bratch!
”
[2]
This was a threat no swod was fool enough to ignore.
Three of the Bowmen, taking their bows and arrows into their left hands, reached out with their right hands.
Neg Negutorio gaped at me.
“Dray Prescot!” he said. And: “The Prince Majister!”
The Hikdar took a step back. The hands of the three Bowmen fell away.
Neg shook his head. “Prince. Times have changed. There are many new faces in the Guard. Dag Dagutorio, our Chuktar, has been sent home, and replaced by Rog Rogutorio.” He wet his lips. “As for me — I was degraded — it was a trumped-up charge — and now I must obey orders I care not overmuch for—”
“Silence, cramph!” shouted the Hikdar. He stared at me with venom in his face and a twitch about his jaws. “If this is truly Dray Prescot, the Prince Majister of Vallia, then is he forsworn! He is banished from Vondium! Seize him! Chain him! Send word to Kov Layco we have taken up a rare prize. Bratch!”
For a second a paralysis gripped the Crimson Bowmen. Then the four Chuliks groaned, more or less together, and opened their eyes. Like the fierce fighting men they were they came to their feet, grasping their ripped-free rapiers, and the points glittered, centered on my chest. These diffs would have no hesitation in killing me if that proved more convenient than attempting to restrain me.
“The Prince Majister is banished from Vondium and sets foot within the city at his own peril!” howled the Hikdar. “Seize him! If he resists — slay him!”
The Chuliks stepped forward. My hand gripped the rapier hilt. In the next second blood would splash luridly across the golden and emerald and ivory door—
“Hold!” rang a clear, perfect voice. A voice I knew. A voice that means everything in two worlds. “Hold! The Princess Majestrix commands! Touch the Prince Majister at your peril!”
Ashti Melekhi, the Vadnicha of Venga
“The emperor my father has revoked the edict of banishment that should never have been passed on the Prince Majister! Get about your duties.”
So, together, side by side, we walked along through the ivory and gold and emerald doorway. We left four Chuliks with blank, yellow faces, and three Crimson Bowmen disgruntled, and a waso-Hikdar raging with icy, baffled fury — and one Bowman with a single enormous grin plastered all over the inside of his martially stiff and unmoving features.
Delia!
She held my arm. I was dizzyingly conscious of the limber suppleness of her as she walked at my side. She wore a long dress of deep purple, unrelieved by any ornament save two brooches, one fashioned into the likeness of a rose and all of rubies and gold. The other was the hubless spoked wheel of precious gems I had given her, the emblem of the Krozairs of Zy.
“My heart — my father — he is ill, so very ill. He is dying, I am sure of it. The doctor—” Here she gripped the scrap of lace between her fingers.
“I will see the doctor. We should fetch Nath the Needle—”
“It is no use. Doctor Charboi is most highly respected, and his associates. But they will not let Nath the Needle see my father.”
“I think they will,” I said.
Nath the Needle had doctored me, and he had taken care of Delia. If the emperor’s new doctors did not want Nath about them, that was a matter of concern to me. In the ante room beyond, Seg and Thelda hurried toward us with Katrin Rashumin, the Kovneva of Rahartdrin. She was now wholeheartedly devoted to Delia. With them, Nath the Needle looked just the same, if a trifle absent-minded rather than bewildered in this strange, claustrophobic atmosphere of the imperial palace where we waited for an emperor to die. And, too, here came Tilly, the gorgeous golden-furred Fristle fifi. Now I knew it was she I had seen running off to fetch Delia.
“And has the emperor really pardoned me?”
“Not yet. I said that, for it needed to be said. But he will.”
I smiled at Tilly and she laughed, and sobered at once.
“You remind me once again of the Jikhorkdun in Huringa.”
“And the silver chains are all melted down — master.”
That little minx Tilly knows how to infuriate me, and how I detest being called master by her.
As for Thelda, Seg’s wife, she could not do enough for Delia. She had been in Vondium, and Seg had called there after the meeting of the Brotherhood, arriving well before me. Thelda fussed and organized and sorted out all the tangles, she would have everybody running, and was properly reverential when she came within three doors’ distance of the sick room. I do Thelda an injustice. She had made Seg a fine wife, and she was a good and loving mother to her children, and yet, and yet, still, I could not stop myself from remarking on the silver heart in blue flowers, from time to time, jocularly, and then feeling the biggest villain in two worlds. Poor Thelda!
“And Nath the Needle is most hurt, dear Dray,” said Thelda. A magnificently-shaped woman, Thelda always looked incipiently plump, and yet was not. A disturbing trick to play on a man.
“Nath attempted to treat the emperor,” said Seg. “He was rebuffed by this Doctor Charboi. He has an enormous reputation and is newly come from Loh. He is not,” Seg added, “a Wizard of Loh. But he acts with all the highhandedness of one of those— those—”
“Yes,” I said. Ordinary men perforce spoke carefully when they mentioned any Wizard of Loh.
“Aunt Katri was so upset,” said Delia. “She frets in Esser Rarioch, I am sure. Everything seems so — so
odd.”
I could feel the unease within the palace as in all Vondium. Things had changed in Vallia, imperceptibly, and little attention had been paid when, for instance, the old Pallans died or retired and new Pallans — secretaries or ministers of state — had replaced them. Dag Dagutorio had left suddenly for Loh, and Rog Rogutorio had taken his place as Chuktar of the Crimson Bowmen. The emperor’s chief adviser in these latter days was a kov I did not then know, one Layco Jhansi, the Kov of Vennar. His was a name I was to come to know passing well — to my sorrow, I may add — but at the time he was regarded as the savior of Vallia, the man who would hold the empire together, the emperor’s Right Hand.
Automatically I thought of Gafard, the Sea-Zhantil, the King’s Striker, who had died so far away from Vallia, loving still the memory of our daughter Velia, and I would sigh, and — then — wonder if this Kov Layco could give half the loyalty and allegiance past blindness that Gafard had given his mad genius King Genod.
We passed on and the presence of the Princess Majestrix opened all doors. Yet I gained the distinct and unsettling impression that our little group formed, as it were, a conspiracy, here in the palace. Once the difficulty of my banishment had been cleared up it should have been plain sailing. But it seemed to me, incredibly, as though we hatched a plot. And all we wanted to do was have a doctor we trusted give a second opinion on the condition of the emperor.
Slaves scuttled about their eternal tasks, always an affront. The Archer Guard of Valka which I had instituted had been sent, so I was told the moment I mentioned their absence, to Evir, the most northerly province of Vallia, to help quell a disturbance there. I felt as we walked on that I would welcome the presence of my Archers of Valka right there and then, above that of the mercenary Chuliks, for all their worth and valor as fighting men, and above the Crimson Bowmen, who were fresh strangers to me.
The mood of the palace baffled me. I sensed the heavy oppression, and yet I felt the heady intoxication of terror could not be adequately explained away merely by the emperor’s impending death. The factions would fight. There would be slaughter and murder. There would be burnings and looting. But, all the same, the intense, indrawn, coiled-spring of horror I sensed in the very air of the palace contained so much more of menace that, quite instinctively, my hand rested on my rapier hilt as we walked — rested not in an affected, courtly way of fashion, but in the hard professional grip of the bladesman ready to draw in a twinkling.
Doctor Nath the Needle looked exactly as when I had first met him, when I’d been recovering from the infection from the shorgortz and the intemperate orders of the man who was now my father-in-law, the man who was now dying and whom Nath had been forbidden to attend. Dried up, wispy, wearing his old dark-brown clothes, his tawny yellow hair roughly combed, he looked just the same, and he held the same old velvet-lined sturmwood case of acupuncture needles under his arm.
“I am happy to see you, prince,” he said, most formally.
“And I you, doctor,” I answered gravely. “I do not know what this nonsense is about your being refused an audience of the emperor; but we’ll go in and see him now.”
Nath nodded and then, because, as was proper, the Princess Majestrix walked first, and Thelda and Katrin walked a half-step to her rear, and Seg was trying to catch a bundle of wool about to fall from Thelda’s bag, Nath and I walked at the rear.
Nath began to talk as these savants do, increasingly oblivious of his surroundings, absorbed by his own thoughts.
“The shorgortz poison — you remember that, I am sure, my prince — is proving of fascinating interest. The Blue Mountain Boys captured a specimen in a pit and, knowing my interest, for I sent messages and gold to Korf Aighos, they extracted the poison and forwarded me a sample. It is indeed remarkable. Incredible, if a doctor may ever use that word. I have conducted experiments, see—” Here he halted and began pulling papers from the pockets in the flaps of his old brown coat. I swear dust flew. He bashed the papers about — they were ordinary paper and not the superb paper made by the Savanti — and crumpled them up and dropped some. I helped him collect up these vital medical discoveries.
“I shall look at your work with great pleasure, doctor; but later. Now I want you to see the emperor and tell me just what is the matter with him and what must be done to cure him.”
Nath the Needle favored me with a look, jolted back to the reason for his presence here. He made a singularly apt remark about Charboi; but he was perfectly willing to try again. He sneezed a couple of times, stuffing the papers away.
If I thought the obstacles to Nath the Needle seeing the emperor had all been overcome, then I was an onker indeed.
We debouched beneath overhanging arches lavishly decorated with exquisite mosaics depicting — oh, the pictures were filled with the fire and passion of Vallia’s turbulent past. Across the wide marble-floored space where cool fountains sparkled in the perfumed air, where fruit trees bloomed and delicately colored birds flitted from branch to branch, the long white wall barring off the emperor’s quarters as approached from this direction showed a solid crimson and black band along its foot.
The guards stood shoulder to shoulder, a Crimson Bowman and a Chulik, alternating. Pacing toward us came two Jiktars, high officers, one a Bowman of Loh, the other a Chulik.
Delia proved herself a princess in her handling of them.
Haughtily, yet with just the right amount of friendliness stopping this side of condescension, she avowed the Prince Majister was now free to walk in Vondium, that she intended to see her father, and her suite would go with her. The guards stood back. We walked through. Although I did not smile, my fist no longer rested on the rapier hilt. A little thing — but revealing. . .
There was no mistaking the abrupt dispatch of a Bowman runner, a lithe young man fresh from Loh, learning his trade.
The light chilled. Heavy doors swung inwards. I knew just where we were, now, and had studied the plans of the palace drawn up many seasons ago when this wing had been built. At last, past a bevy of waiting nurses and minor doctors, we entered the sick room.
The place struck me with a chill repulsion. Delia visited her father constantly, had been drawn away by Tilly’s startling news. He lay in the wide bed, on his back, the covers drawn to his chin and pettishly pulled half down one side. His wasted face spider-webbed with etched lines, the cheeks sunken in. I saw the hand he extended to his daughter and was shocked at its skeletal aspect. He had always been a firmly fleshed man.
His flesh was wasting away. His condition really was serious, and Delia’s concern struck me, suddenly, with an anguish for her I detested and found biting and acid and altogether hateful. My Delia! Well, everyone must go through the agonies of seeing loved ones die. Because Delia and I had bathed in the Sacred Pool of the River Zelph in far Aphrasöe, the city of the Savanti, the Swinging City, we were assured of a thousand years of life and the rapid recovery from wounds and illness. The wounds I had taken in the Jikai of the Brotherhood of Iztar against the Shanks were already healed. And yet, I had held my daughter Velia in my arms as she died. What agonies mortality tortures us with.