The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (82 page)

“My lady,” she said. “The Duke of Thrake sends that we are about to receive a foreign prince, and bids you come, if’n you would.”

“Gown,” snapped the Queen. “Yes—brown. Good. Both of you button it while I put my hair up.”

In two minutes they were in the hall. The Queen was barefoot—unthinkable in Harndon, and merely practical here. Lady Natalia and Lady Almspend went back to the better light to sew.

The hush remained on the hall. At the far end, in the firelight, the company women stitched away on baby clothes. Nearer, the Red Knight stood between the Prior and the bishop. The other magnates were already abed.

Toby came back in and bowed to the Queen as Lord Robin and Lord Wimarc settled her onto the chair that could act as a throne—and put the other great chair in the hall opposite her.

“Who is it?” the Queen asked.

The Red Knight came and stood beside her. “The Faery Knight,” he said. “And Harmodius.”

Tapio entered with Harmodius at his side. A little behind them were two irks, a huge adversarius in a feather cloak, and the black man from Ifriquy’a who had saved Blanche in Harndon, as well as a second black man, this
one in paint and feathers like an Outwaller. Behind the Outwaller were two great bears and a—she had trouble swallowing—a giant white stick figure, like an enormous praying mantis in white armour.

She overcame her fear and hurried to Pavalo’s side and pressed his hand—he put his hands together and bowed, but his eyes were on Harmodius. She had missed an exchange, but then the Faery Knight strode forward in a swirl of elfin cloak and a ringing of tiny golden bells, and knelt. He inclined his head, kissed the Queen’s hand, and smiled, showing a few too many teeth.

“Daughter of man, your beauty isss everything report hasss made it.”

She blushed. “I saw you at Yule!” She paused, and leaned forward to kiss him on both cheeks. “You, too, are beautiful, Son of the Wild.”

“There’s the biter, bit,” Harmodius grumbled.

“I would never have known you, old friend,” she said. He came forward and knelt at her feet, and kissed her hand.

“I have taken another body,” he said, without preamble or defence.

The Bishop of Albinkirk winced.

“For the moment, it is enough that you live, and have come back to me.” Desiderata got to her feet, and threw her arms around the magister’s spare frame—and the older man blushed.

“Oh, how I have missed you,” Desiderata said.

“Your grace,” Harmodius said, and found himself stroking her hair. He pulled his hand away.

“Have you returned to be my minister?” she asked. “Or merely to visit?”

Harmodius looked troubled. “I am my own…” He paused. “There is so much to say, and no easy answers. We have come this night to make an alliance. But that alliance must be based on hard truths. And when the truths are said, there will be no unsaying them.”

Desiderata put her hand to her throat—as she had never used to do—and her eyes dropped. “I, too, have learned some hard truths already,” she said.

The Faery Knight and the Red Knight looked each other over like two boys sizing each other up for a match on the town green. Blanche watched them, fascinated by their similarities which easily overwhelmed their differences—despite the Faery Knight’s slanted eyes, bright gold hair, and long teeth, despite the captain’s black hair and more commonplace eyes, there was something about them that shouted “kin.”

Ser Gabriel bowed to the company. “Your grace, my lords, I propose we sit and talk. Let’s have it done. Together, I believe we can win this war—and perhaps put war to bed for a long, long time.”

Harmodius sighed. “No, my boy. That’s not what will happen now.” He met the Red Knight’s eyes. “But it is a fine dream, and you should cling to it.”

Ser Gabriel winced. “Then—I think I speak for all—tell us.” He looked
at the great warden, as big as a war horse. “A heavier bench,” he said to Toby.

The Queen motioned to Lady Briar. “Bring my son, if you would,” she said.

“First, my companions,” Harmodius said. “The Faery Knight—lord of N’gara in the west. Mogon, Duchess of the North—one of the great Powers of the Wild, and our firmest ally. Nita Qwan, a sachem of the Sossag peoples. Krevak, Lord of the Many Waters, is my peer in the
ars magika
.”

“You are too kind,” the last named irk said in flawless Archaic.

“Flint, of the Long Dam Clan. Accounted among the Wild peoples as the elder and wisest of us. Then—” Harmodius frowned. “Exrech, Birthlord of the Fourth Hive of the Great River.”

There were gasps as men recognized the knight in white armour as a great boglin, a wight.

The Queen rose. “This is my captain—the Red Knight, Gabriel Muriens.” At the name Muriens, Mogon snarled and Krevak smiled and showed his teeth.

“Lord Gregario of Wayland and Prior Wishart of the Order of Saint Thomas.”

If the name Muriens had a poor effect, the name of the Order of Saint Thomas made the bears growl and the white thing twitch.

“We can all be enemies very, very easily.” Harmodius looked around. “But then, only our true enemies will celebrate.”

Mogon, the great warden, made a snuffling sound. “So you keep saying,” she intoned. Blanche thought her voice was beautiful.

But it was one of the monstrous bears who stepped forward. “Man is not on trial here,” he said. “Our wrongs at the hands of man are not what we come to address. Let it only be said by the Matron that there will be justice when the fighting is done, and we will have good hearts.”

Blanche took the Queen water—while she poured, she realized that by Matron he meant the Queen. The wet nurse had just brought her the baby.

The Queen looked at the bear—old, and his fur grey with age. “Will you sit with me and give justice?” she asked.

“That would be fair,” the bear replied.

Even Mogon nodded.

Harmodius cleared his throat. “This cooperation—a little late in coming—is splendid. But we all know we must stand together.”

“Tell your tale, old man,” Ser Gabriel said. He said it with a smile, but Blanche could see there was something between them.

Harmodius bent his head. “First, we must do what we did at Lissen Carak—all of us who work with power.”

He and Gabriel locked eyes.

“You put a high bar on trust, old man,” Ser Gabriel said. “But you can come to my house anytime.”

The Queen smiled. “I am willing,” she said.

And then, one by one, they all fell perfectly silent. Blanche watched as their faces changed—not slack, but alert, like people in prayer. Harmodius, the Red Knight, the Faery Knight, the Queen, the Prior, the Bishop of Albinkirk, Mogon, the younger bear, Lord Krevak—one by one, they fell into contemplation.

A golden nimbus, almost like a rising fog, seemed to fill the hall. It covered the floor and then rose slowly to the rafters—slow, unobtrusive, like water filling a pan. Blanche played with a little of it.

Ser Pavalo drank water noisily and sat.

Lord Gregario—a famous swordsman—smiled at the tall warrior from Ifriquy’a. “That is a most marvellous sword, ser knight.”

Ser Pavalo nodded. “I show it?”

In the midst of a conference to decide the fate of nations, Lord Gregario, the squire, and Ser Pavalo began to talk about swords.

Men,
thought Blanche.

The old bear gave her a look as if he shared her thought exactly.

They gathered in Harmodius’s palace.

“Here, I will say what I have to say. I will not say that our enemy cannot listen to this—only that if he can, after all my precautions, we never had a chance.” Harmodius shrugged.

Gabriel found himself sitting in a comfortable chair immediately by the old man.

He smiled at Harmodius, who, in the
aethereal
, still looked like a young Harmodius and not a modified Aeskipiles. The others took seats—Mogon occupied a great throne of ivory that contrived not to eclipse Desiderata’s plain chair of gilt wood.

Desiderata tossed her hair. “Now we are met, let mirth abound,” she said.

Tapio sat crosslegged, and the white gwylch didn’t seem able to sit at all.

Desiderata raised her voice. It was an old song—one of the festival songs.

“Now we are met, let mirth abound, now we are met, let mirth abound.

And let the catch! And let the catch! And let the catch and toast, go ’round!”

She sang, and they joined her—even Mogon, even Exrech, so that, despite different languages, their polyphony rolled up into the
aethereal
. A golden-green radiance suffused Harmodius’s inner mansion, and a great shield snapped into place.

“A potent working,” Mogon said.

Harmodius smiled. “That bodes better than I might have hoped,” he said. “Your grace, you have come far.”

“I have been sore tested,” Desiderata said. She shrugged, and a hint of her
former self raised the corner of her mouth in an impish smile. “Come—even here, time dogs us. Tell your tale, old master.”

Harmodius sat back. “Very well. Some you all know, and some you know parts of, or have seen only through a glass darkly, and even now, I am not sure that part of what I say is not pure fabrication, justification, embroidery. Let me say first—because all of us work in this power—that all of us know that belief and being and becoming and power can be one thing, the same thing, and that renders the process of remembering and history almost impossible.”

Gabriel found himself nodding.

“Very well. We all inhabit a sphere—a great bubble of…” Harmodius laughed. “Of reality, let’s say. Existence… yes? Some of the Wise hold it to be one single bubble, and others say there are seven spheres, or eight, or nine, each inside another. Yes?”

“And outside, God’s heaven,” Desiderata said.

“No, your grace. Forgive me, but, outside, a sort of chaos of nothing. Very, very like our own
aethereal
. That’s for another time. For us, what matters is that beyond this chaos are other spheres. Like ours.”

Mogon nodded—Desiderata put her hand to her throat.

Gabriel rubbed his beard and considered.

“Of these spheres we know almost nothing,” Harmodius said. “And what we know is tantalizing, irrational and contradictory.” He shook his head. “I digress. What makes our sphere unique—I hesitate even to say this much—is that it is some sort of nexus for all the others, or some others, and perhaps merely a large number. And therein lies our story and our fate. We are the crossroads.”

Gabriel found Harmodius looking at him. “You are unsurprised.”

“We shared the same head during all your research in Liviapolis,” Gabriel said.

Mogon shifted her bulk. “This is no news at all to the Qwethnethogs.” She nodded as her crest, inflated when tense, subsided like a fashionable beret. “We came here from somewhere else. Every birthling knows it.”

Harmodius nodded. “There are two major pieces to my story. One—we are a crossroads. The other—we are pieces in a chess game.” He waved his hand. “The two fit together to explain everything we see around us. We have sixty races that compete for resources. We know of peoples exterminated—we have the rubble of their works, and in Liviapolis, even records of some of their science.”

Mogon nodded. “The Odine.”

Harmodius sighed. “The Odine are but one, and I would not count them destroyed. But they are perhaps the most obvious. Let me make this quick. Powers—great Powers—vie to take and hold our crossroads. They bring the races bound to them to do the heavy fighting. To hold the ground, as Gabriel would say.”

“Why?” Gabriel asked. “I mean, what’s the prize? More slaves?”

Mogon sat slowly back. “Yes,” she said. It was not an answer to Gabriel, but a comment. “Yes, this is shockingly simple. Of course.”

Harmodius nodded. “Another of my order, a great man, far, far away in Dar as Salaam, has more access to the oldest of man’s records than I.” He looked around. “And older records still, not made by men. This is his life’s work,” he said, and produced, in the
aethereal
, a scrap of memory parchment.

“Five names. Five of perhaps seventeen creatures whose powers are like gods. Little, petty, scrapping gods.” He held the list out.

Gabriel read them all at once, as one did in the
aethereal
.

Tar

Ash

Lot

Oak

Rot

“These are not true names,” Desiderata said. The names shook her—it was written on her face.

Harmodius shook his head. “I think we know them all,” he said.

Gabriel sighed. “Do they divide up into good and evil?” he asked. His tone was sarcastic, and the Faery Knight laughed and slapped his thigh.

“They all use the same tactics of manipulation and gross coercion,” Harmodius said. “Draw your own conclusions.”

Gabriel thought of Master Smythe. “I would merely emphasize that my side has a smaller body count and tends to minimize—negative outcomes.”

“One of them is more honest than the others,” he said.

Harmodius shrugged. “My order has made a choice: to fight them all.”

Gabriel narrowed his eyes. “How’s that going for you?” he asked. “That sounds like a typical un-pragmatic solution—something from a classroom. Noble, and doomed. I grant you their power. If they are divided among themselves—surely the classical solution is to use them against each other?”

The Faery Knight stretched his immortally long legs and shook his head. “This is either brilliant or rampant madness. Ser Gabriel, what makes you think these great powers, who are to us like gods, can be manipulated?”

Gabriel looked not at Harmodius, but at the Queen. “Are they all great dragons, do you think? The four, or the seventeen?”

Harmodius nodded. “We think they are all dragons.”

Gabriel sat back. “This is the fascinating cutting edge of hermetical philosophy, no doubt, but—when we fight—” He looked around. “We’re fighting Ash. Ash, making a bid to manifest directly into our sphere, and control the gates directly, one of which—perhaps the single most important one—is under Lissen Carak.” He frowned. “Ash is a dragon?”