NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. 11 was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for this "stripped book." This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in Ihis novel are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. A SORCERER AND A GENTLEMAN Copyright ® 1995 by Elizabeth WiHey All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. Edited by Teresa Nielsen Hayden Cover art by Charles Vess A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates. Inc. 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010 Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com Tor« is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. ISBN: 0-812-55047-1 Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 95-14725 f. First edition: August 1995 First mass market edition: July 1996 Printed in the United States of America 0987654321 To (he Reader "For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, iove, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renown." ùCaxton 1 IT is A PROVERB OFTEN QUOTED but seldom applied, that all a gentleman needs to travel is a good cloak, a good horse, and a good sword. Indeed, given the style and comfort in which those on whom society bestows the appellation "gentlemen" usually travel, the picture of a well-dressed, handsome youhg man on a fine horse, armed with a blade housed in a long silver-chased scabbard, the end of which protrudes from his full-cut sea-green cloak with its shoulder cape flaring in the haste of his travel, would inspire a beholder to identify the gallant as anything but a gentleman. "A highwayman," one might say; or, on a closer look, "a special messenger for the Emperor, who dwells in this great city here in the distance"; or more cynically, "a rake fleeing the city on account of his debts and his mistress's husband"; or any of a hatful of titles might one append to this picture, before "a gentleman" be suggested. And that one would be instantly derided as inaccurate. For, look! This man has no baggage but the saddlebags on his horse; he is alone, without a single servant to attend him; moreover he is on horseback rather than in a carriage with the fine horse ridden by his lackey; and furthermore, he is plainly galloping, as may be seen from the billowing of his cape and the elevation of his horse's hooves, and his hair is blown about and his clothing disordered by the exercise. Lastly and most tellingly, it is night-time in the picture, as the swollen moon breasting the horizon and a few stars show, long after sundown, a time when any true gentleman wouid long since have been snugly established in his chosen inn for the night with a good dinner and a bottle of wine. Thus do many antiquated proverbs suffer derision when they venture into the harsh environment of the modern world. Can he truly be a gentleman, though he ride swiftly, at night, away from the security of the city, alone and armed? Only the rider knows. He is quite secure about his own estate, and perhaps is now observing to himself that he is the very picture of that proverb mainly quoted nowadays by gouty earls at the fireside deriding the softness of the younger generation, who travel with everything but a wine-cellar and purchase and consume one as they go. (The earls suffer amnesia regarding their own pasts and curse the present gout whilst recalling fondly wines of bygone days.) He has no question in his own mind as to what he is, and if you were to ask him, he might tell you without hesitation. You could not ask him. He was already gone by the time it occurred to you; his horse swift and his purpose clear, he went left at the crossroads on the hill where the moon cut a black shadow beside a kingstone. His first goal was to pass that crossroads at that time, exactly as the moon was clearing the horizon and casting the kingstone's shadow as a pointer down the road he took. When he turned, he faded from sight, as if he rode into a fog bank when there was no fog there at all. 2 "ARIEL!" "Here, Master!" "The full moon's rays are requisite for work I plan tonight. Dispel these scudding clouds without harsh wind or undue storm, that the rising lunar light may fall unfiltered on the world." "All of it, Master Prospero?" Ariel asked, dubious. "This part where I am," Prospero clarified, not unkindly. "Let us say, the eastern region of this Continent, including this island. All night." "The breath of your order shall be gale, good Master," Ariel said, and left with a gust of wind, racing east. Prospero's black-lined blue cloak flared and rippled with the Sylph's passage; his dark hair stirred; the island's trees soughed and whispered among themselves, then calmed. From his place by the mighty tree that crowned the island's hill, he gazed over the river to the east and saw Ariel's rippling wake pass over the landscape, out of sight, purling and streaking the fat gilt-shouldered clouds. Now he took his silver-wound staff and struck its bright heel on the ground three times. "Caliban!" he called. "Aye," grunted a voice beneath his feet. The stone roiled and rose: a torso; a rough head coarse-featured; a square slab-body and hard arms textured like fine-grained unpolished granite. Caliban squinted in the beating midsummer sun. "Here at this living tower's roots I'll have a basin sculpted in the stone whereof it grips," Prospero said, lifting his staff and then setting it down, "a hollow which is spherical, circularly exact, such that the diameter be measured from hereù" he struck the stone with the heel of the staff and pacedù"to here at its broadest point below the surface of 4 ù=+ 'Etizaftetfi VlXttey the ground, and such that its opening be from hereù" and he paced againù "to here." There was a perplexed silence, and then, "Ah. Like an orange with the top cut off to suck at it." "Even so." "That will fill with the waters of the Spring that rises here in its middle, Masterù" "Even so." "Ah." The black stone over which the tree's roots ran and into which they had forced their way rippled as Caliban moved. "If it's a well you'd have me delve, Masterù" "No well, but a bowl, which shall cup the Spring's unstinting flow for my night's work." "The basin shall be scoured as you command, Master." "Be finished ere the sun sets," Prospero said, "ere the sun's disk is a fist's width above the long horizon, for it must fill, and I've preparations to complete." "Aye, Master." Caliban sank into the stone, which hissed and heated with his hasty passage. Prospero watched as the stone began to move. The rest of his preparations were made; the stage was being set; there remained but one vital piece of business before the hour of his sorcery came. He left the hilltop and its great tree and went down a footpath, winding through the straight trunks of high-crowned trees and along a rocky outcrop, until he came to an end of the cool-shaded wood. A garden lay before him in casual beds and terraces, clumps of fruiting trees and clusters of exuberant blossoms, and at its farthest end he descried a bent back and a miH-wheel of a yellow straw hat radiant in the sun. A neat gravelled path led him to the gardener. "What cheer, daughter?" She sat back on her heels, grubby and smiling, dark curling tendrils falling from under the hat to nourish themselves on her damp neck. "I suppose you want strawberries," she said. "Were they less sweet and thy care of them less fruitful, I'd have none," he replied, smiling, "so 'tis a tribute to thy own hand that I have devour'd so many; they are the very Sorcerer and a Qentteman 5 heart of summer and their goodness nourished of thine, therefore must I love them as I love thee. But nay, 'tis thee I'll have. The heat's great, the day wears long; thy labor's never done, and as well ceased now as ever. I bid thee lunch with me." "It's early," she said. "Not untimely so," Prospero disagreed mildly. "Go thou, bathe and dress; I'll look to the meal, and we'll meet on the green where the table is. Take our ease as the wise beasts o' the wood do when the sun is fiercest on the flesh." "It is hot. Yes. We must have strawberries, thoughù they'll rot if we don't eat them, and the idea of cooking even more jam ..." Her voice trailed away. "Well enough. Hast thy basket?" Prospero picked the strawberries with her, though they both ate any number of the winey-ripe ones as well, and carried them off while she ran ahead to fetch clean clothes and a towel. He had already made some preparation of the meal, and now he finished and laid a cold roast pheasant, poached fish, a salad of peas and tiny vegetables dressed with vinegar and mint, a dish of hot-spiced grain with raisins, and a pyramid of fruits out invitingly on his huge dark table, its single-slab top upheld by the wings of two carven birds of prey which clutched lesser earthbound creatures in their brass claws. The table, as was their summer custom, stood outside beneath a spreading tree on the little lawn before the small scarp wherein lay his cave, its thick door open to the soft air. He was just opening a cool bottle of sweet white wine when his daughter came up the path that led to the river, bathed and fresh-gowned in gauzy green. Prospero set the bottle down and watched her approach, approving and appreciative. Her tailoring skills were simple, thus all her dresses were little more than smocks, ribboned and laced to fit: indecent in civilized society, but charming here in the wilderness. "In such heat," she said, "the forest is a better place to be. Tomorrow, will you hunt with me?" "What of thy garden?" "Oh, well, as you say, 'tis never done." "No ground to shirk," he chided her gently, and poured wine for her. She curtseyed slightly, as he had taught her, and took the cup. "Thank you, Papa. It was you who tempted me from work with swimming and a lovely luncheon; you can hardly blame me for wanting a holiday." "I blame thee not at all. Come, all's ready, and my appetite as well." "This breeze is good," said she. "It is nearly cool here, in the shade." They ate side-by-side, looking down the slope below their tree and table, which she had planted with flowers and small trees. When the cold fish and meat were gone and the fruits being picked at leisurely, Prospero turned the conversation abruptly from the flowers. "I have in mind to make some alterations in our life," he said. She set down her wineglass and tilted her head to one side, puzzled. "Alterations?" Prospero leaned back. "Long ago I told thee, Freia," he began, "that I am a Prince in my own realm, far-distant Landucùa Prince, and should be King, but that my brothers conspired against me and denied me my rightful place." "1 remember," she said. "Dost remember? 'Twas many winters past, and we've not spoken oft since. For it displeaseth me to chew it over." "I do remember,1" she said, "for you told me of your friends there, and of beautiful Lady Miranda, and of the great city and the Palace gardens." "Thou rememb'rest, then, that my pompous brother inflated himself from King to Emperor 'pon his accession to the stolen throne." She nodded. "Thou rememb'rest that I told thee 'twas not finished." His eyes were like high grey clouds with the sun behind them. She nodded again, wary of his intensity. "Time's come," Prospero said, "for me to make my move A Sorcerer and a Qentkman <=ù- 7 'gainst that false popinjay and knock him down, I've labored long here and elsewhere, setting my plans in slow motion, and now the hour is nigh for swifter action." "What are you going to do?" He seemed not to hear her. "To move that action shall require changes here. I warn thee now; I've spoken of some to thee ere this, and I saw them little please thee. Yet change cannot be denied." Freia tensed, straightened. "Why not? Why shouldn't we live as we have, here, you and me and your sorcery and my garden and things? I like this. Don't you?" "I like it well, wench, but a man cannot sup on strawberries all the days of his life," Prospero said. " Twill change, I tell thee, and we'll change too. My idleness ill-fits my nature, and it must end and this idyll withal." She shook her head, contrary. "This is perfect, just as it is, and there's plenty to do and I'm not idle. What are you going to change? What is lacking? Why shouldn't we stay the same?" "Freia, Freia. Think'st thou that I was always as I am today? Wert thou? Nay; I've bettered thee, hast said it thyself. What thou art today, is what I've made of thee; my daughter, a lady, and soon a princess: bettered again." He had taken her hands in his and held them as he held her gaze. "I don't want to be a Lady or a Princess! Why do you want to be a Prince, or a King? Aren't you happy here?" "Freia, 'tis more than a thing I wish to be. Tis what I am. This place is comfortable enough, were I but a sorcerer, but I am not. I did not choose this place to be comfortable in, but to labor, and my labor here draws near completion; the fruits of my patience come ripe, e'en as thy garden be-ginneth with hard work and small shoots, then groweth to savorous maturity. And thou, thou didst not choose this place; 'tis all thy world, I know, and though thou'rt content enough here solitary 'mongst thy fruits and flowers, I know the little discontents that shall fret thee to aversion in morrow-days. Better to remember thy garden-isle fondly later than to hate it." 8 'E&zaBetA "I love this place, I always shall, I love it as it is," she said, heart-wringingly. "Please don't change it. Please. What are you going to do, Papa?" "We must have a city, Freia, walled and strongù" "No!" "ùand bridges o'er the river, therefore great numbers of hardy men to buildù" "No!" They stared at one another. Freia's expression of stubborn determination mirrored Prospero's, and Prospero's hands tightened around hers balled into stone-hard fists. "Darest thou contradict me?" he snapped. "I'll not countenance it; the world moveth forward, be thou retrograde as thou wilt. It must happen, Freia, and it shall, and thou'lt see: Twill like thee better than thou think'st." The Prince of Madana, Heir of Landuc, lay on his bed fully clothed and stared at the white-and-blue scrolled ceiling. Something had happened to him last night. It was something unpleasant. He was dressed, and that was wrong; he never slept in his clothesùhe would sooner go naked to dinner. His head ached. Shreds of dreams still clung to his thoughts: suffocating dreams, drowning dreams, entangled dreams of nets and sticky webs. "Sir?" someone said. The Prince turned his head and saw the concerned faces of five people who stood at his bedside. They were all leaning toward him, eyes wide, and the same expression of relief and rejoicing washed over all five. "Doctor Hem," said the Prince, wondering what was wrong with him. "Tell the Emperor and Empress," said Doctor Hem to the footman beside him, who hurried out. "Yes, Your Highness," he added to the Prince, smiling, bowing. "What's that stink?" The Prince frowned, swallowing and beginning to sit up. "No, no! Do not rise, Your Highness, the crisis is only just past; do not rise, lest the balance of humors be dis- %. Sorcerer and a QentCeman <=ù 9 rupted again," cried the Doctor, and made him lie down again. "What the blazes is going on? What's the matter?" demanded the Prince, grabbing the Doctor's arm. The door banged and the footman cried hurriedly, "His Majesty Emperor Avrilù" "Silence," said the Emperor impatiently, entering, and glared at the others as he did. "You. What are you doing here? Nothing? Out! We know you, you're Hem's boy. Out." They got out, all but the Doctor and the Emperor. The Emperor glowered at his son from the side of the bed. The Prince thought he'd much preferred the gratifying audience now departed. He played a filial note, cautiously. "Father, am I ill?" "Perhaps you can tell us. You've been asleep like this since we don't know when." "What?" "What have you been smoking? Drinking, perhaps?" demanded the Emperor furiously. "With whom? Some bastard you dragged in off the streetù" "Your Majesty," said Doctor Hem hurriedly, "still the balance of humors is very delicate and it would be best not toù" "Silence. Well? What have you to say for yourself?" The Prince stared at his father, confused, and shook his head a little, and sat up again. Hem started forward to stop him and retreated at the Emperor's look. "Tell us," said the Emperor, arms folded, glowering at his son, his eyes like coal. "I don't remember," the Prince said, shaking his head again. "Don't remember?" The Prince rubbed his temples. The Emperor hissed through his teeth with impatience. "You came in at the tenth hour yesterday with someone your chamberboy identified as Harrel Brightwaterù" "Brightwater," the Prince said. "Yes. That was. . . . We met at the armorer's. Bellamy's." 10 'Elizabeth "Not for the first time, in all likelihood," his father said sarcastically, and noticed the Doctor again. "Get out. We'll call you if you're needed." Doctor Hem left, bowing. He had served the Palace for long enough to know how his service might best be extended. When the door had closed on him, the Emperor went on with the beginnings of a fine rage in his voice. "Josquin, we have had enough ofù" "We dined here," the Prince said, ignoring him, rubbing his temples. "I remember that. Chess first, dinner. Talked about fencing. Horses. We had one bottle, didn't even finish it, the new stuff." "It is surprising that you remember that much. What else did you have?" "Nothing. Nothing. Just... We sat after dinner with the chess-board again.... Let me think. Nothing. Didn't smoke anything. Hm," he muttered, still rubbing his head. "It'sù he threw something." The Emperor, who had listened with mounting anger, said, "Threw something!" "I didn't see what it was." "Threw you, more likelyù" "Father. He ... Where is he?" "He left, in your coach. Your standard treatment for your catamites after youù" "Father." Josquin's headache was worse than ever. He ground his teeth and pressed his palms to his temples. "Throwing," he said, "I was standing ... He followed me in. I set the candles down. Heù I turned around and he threw something." "Threw what?" asked a new voice. They both glanced at the door, where the Empress stood; a pair of attendants hovered behind her straight, slender back at a discreet distance, listening for all they were worth. " 'Cora, don'tù" began the Emperor. "Jos, what happened?" She joined them, quick but graceful, and sat on the edge of the bed. "I don't know. Heùhe threw something. I remember Sorcerer and a gentleman 11 ... I felt dizzy," whispered Josquin hoarsely. "What did he throw?" the Empress asked softly. "Nothing. He had nothing in his hands. Nothing. But he threw something. It..." Josquin put his hand over his face. "Like that." "How could he throw nothing?" she wondered, frowning. "How . . . ?" the Emperor began, and stopped. "Nothing," he repeated. "Yes." "He shall be arrested and questioned," decided the Emperor, and opened the door. A few words to his ever-handy secretary Cremmin, and he returned. "My head is splitting," Josquin said to his mother. "Poor dear. Doctor Hem will have a powder for it." "It may unbalance me further," Josquin muttered. He disliked Doctor Hem intensely. "If he has none, my maid Mellicent will," said the Empress, stroking his forehead. "Who was this man who threw something at you, Jos?" "Glencora, leave it for now." "No. I am very puzzled as to how throwing nothing could make Josquin sick." "Having nothing thrown at him." "Exactly. How could it make him sick?" "Was I sick?" "You wouldn't wake up," she said gravely, and pressed his hand. "Oh," said Josquin. "Who was he?" the Empress asked. "A ... friend." "One of his good-for-nothing prancing pickupsù" "Father, heù" "What is his name?" the Empress interrupted. "Brightwater. Harrel Brightwater." "One of the Anburggan Brightwaters? I don't remember any Harrel among them," she said doubtfully. "Doubtless some bastard," growled the Emperor. "What do you know of his family?" Josquin thought and shrugged. "Don't know, really. He 12 'EttzatJetfi seemed a gentleman. We never discussed it. That's women's business," he added in a tone tinged with contempt. "What did you discuss?" the Emperor asked through clenched teeth. "Cards. Horses. Swords. He has an eye for good weapons. Ask Bellamy. He bought a sword from Bellamy yesterday; I fenced with him in Bellamy's yard and he beat me. As good as the best of Uncle Gaston's students." "If he has studied with Gastonù" Josquin shook his head. "No, I asked him about that. I don't think he has. He would have admitted it, I think." "Hm. So you know nothing of his origin." Josquin began to contradict him and stopped. "No. Come to think . . . No." "Were you ever in his rooms?" "No." "Hm. We shall have to investigate further into his movements and associates. In the meantime you are confined to the Palace and grounds," "What! Why?" "Because you display abominably bad judgement in your activities outside them." The Emperor left; his absence made the stifling room seem cooler. "I suppose it could be worse," Josquin said. "He could have confined me to ray apartment. What is that stink?" "Hem was burning incense, I expect," the Empress Glen-cora said, wrinkling her nose, and rose and went to the windows, opening them, waving her hands in the air, which was warm and still today. The incense hung in the room like a veil. It smelled, Josquin thought, like burning bananas flambeed with cheap cologne and quenched with piss. THE BASIN WAS COMPLETED IN GOOD time. Prospero stood over it as it filled with splashing water from the Spring, which arose at the foot of the great tree and which soaked Sorcerer and a Qentieman 13 again into the hilltop after running over the stone. The first battle of his war he'd won with guile. Freia slept, her senses fogged by his gentle postprandial sorcery; he had borne her heavy with dreams to her bed and laid her there, and she'd not wake until morning came. He looked up. The dusky sky was still fringed with clouds to the west; the massive, swift-rising wind driven by Ariel had torn them to shreds and swept them away. In the south above the tree-canopy Prospero saw the first blue-white star of the evening. He stared to the east and discerned, in the deepening line of darkness, the first orange-gold sliver of the moon beyond the sea. The wind that had ruffled his hair and snapped his cloak died. The world was still. "Master, it's done," whispered Ariel. "Bide," Prospero said. He bent and dipped his hand in the water, brought it to his lips and tasted the jolting freshness. Invigorated, he smiled and, as the moon with gravid dignity rose from her bed, lifted his staff and began to Summon the powers at his command. A light swelled from the water in the basin and from the Spring as he stirred and shaped the force that slept there. It grew into a spindle, four threads of which wove and knotted around him and four others of which began curling, turning with the spindle, reaching out and away through the trees and silver moonlight. The best of his sorcery always seemed like a dream to him afterward. This had that stamp, the inevitability and perfection of every act, every word, every event at once foreseen and occurring. Prospero's staff hummed and trilled in his hand, and around him the stillness of the world, into which his voice rolled like the very music of the night sphere that turned overhead, brightened with the light of the moon and rustled with life. He knew, as he worked, that this was going to go very well. "By this hallowed Spring I stand and by it I command all of its nurturing; all that row in the limpid air, all that are borne in the soft water, all that earth and stone engender, all that spawn in the constant flame; here to the heart of the 14 ù=+ "EfizaBetfi Itftiey world I Summon ye, here to the Source of your existence, here to me above the Source, gather ye air and water and earth and fire, gather ye within the Bounds I draw by this hallowed Spring . . ." The arms of power swept outward, stirring like the wind but moving nothing, reaching and gathering. The darkness around Prospero began to fill with rustlings, movements, warm bodies and cool, tense and quick breathing. The Air Summoning brought birds large and small, tone and mated, who crowded into the branches of the tree behind Prospero, to the north of the Spring. One brilliant dovelike bird with butter-colored feathers and a bright golden crest boldly settled on his shoulder and nestled against his cheek a moment before joining the others. Prospero did not leave off his Summoning, but he smiled. The Water Summoning included a few great white-winged birds who settled awkwardly on the ground before the Spring; there were splashing and swishing sounds from the night-dark river that ran around the island, just to the south. The Fire Summoning netted nothing; within the reach of Prospero's spell there were no Elemental or Essential creatures of fire, for the Spring was antithetical to Fire. So east of the Spring was darkness. But the Earth Summoning drew as many of its kind as that of the Air. West of the Spring, first on a rocky bare patch exposed in the light of the moon and then filling the wood that stretched down over the island to the water that surrounded it, assembled creatures unnamed with horns and claws and hard feet and soft, with long teeth and flat, with bodies of every description adapted for every use, From the forests that overspread the round-shouldered hills came the animals, hopping or sliding some, bounding and leaping some, pacing with aloof dignity or, sun-eyed, stalking through the undergrowth, plunging fearlessly into the river and swimming to reach Prospero. The forest itself shivered and woke, altered by the tendril forged of the Spring and Prospero's sorcery that curled through it and then held steady, encircling and Binding the Summoned. Sorcerer and a QentUman 15 Arms upraised, Prospero paused, lit by the light of the moon filling the water and shining out more brightly than the moon herself, who hung just at her fullest as Prospero completed his initial Summoning. He lowered his arms slowly, barely breathing, wholly sustained by the Spring. His eye fell on the foremost of the animals who crouched, unafraid but overawed and worshipful, to the west. It was one he knew weli, a furry, broad-shouldered, blunt-eared creature of long and lumbering body and thick black claws who had dug his burrow by the very Spring. The animal's nose twitched. It rose on its haunches to look at Prospero from bright black eyes, its coarse black-and-brown ticked fur still dusted with the earth of its run. Prospero bent and cupped water from the shining basin, which overflowed now; the Spring was tentatively exploring a little water-course down the hillside. The water gleamed golden in his hand. The sorcerer poured it onto the unflinching animal's head, starlet drops falling. The moon, imperceptible to any but the sorcerer, was turning from full. "Born of earth, be born again a child of Spring and moon and man," Prospero said in a low, deep voice, and the water plashed into the coarse fur; the animal dropped to its fours, shook dust away, and its body flowed and took on bulk below the serene, benignant countenance of the moon; and where the animal had fallen, now a man knelt, sitting back slowly on his heels. Prospero and the man gazed at one another. The man's expression was bemused. He blinked, then smiled, then shook his head again. He was naked. His dark skin held hard muscles and drops of water glistened on his hair. His merry face was bearded and his square hands lay on his legs. "I am yours to command," he said, in a rippling language that had but once before been heard in the world. "Bide," Prospero said, and returned his smile. The man inclined his head and settled back on his shins. He watched as Prospero repeated the transformation with a dun-furred, lean, sharp-clawed, stump-tailed animal who => <úfiza&etfi 'Wittey "Ho, wouldst thou teach me my errand?" Ariel jeered, and he rattled down leaves on Caliban. "Mind thy netherworld affairs, and I shall not hinder thee." "Master set me here," Caliban retorted, "Master bade me wait for Mistress." "For Mistress, for the Lady! Small wonder then she dreams yet, that must see thy ugly face when she wakes. Thou hideous man-mock, thou crude sculpture!" "Wicked wind-thing, nothing! Lady talks to me of flowers." "She will not look on thee, travesty! For thou art foul to look on, deck thee with flowers as thou wouldst." "Ladies like flowers!" "What, dost liken thyself to a flower, thou lichen-crusted relic of failed Art?" "Master made me!" bellowed Caliban. "Master made me, this form is his making!" He swatted futilely at Ariel, and Ariel hissed mockingly though the fronds and leaves and sped away, uncatchable. Caliban subsided, grumbling, sinking halfway into the earth in the darkest shade he could find; the daylight pained him, but Prospero had commanded him to bide here on Freia's waking, and Caliban must obey. Within the cave, the wind's stirring breath on Freia's face had stirred her sleep. She sighed, murmured wordless sounds, and opened her eyes a crack. The creamy background of her screen was bright; thus it was day, and she might rise without fear of interrupting Prospero at his night-work. She pushed the bedclothes down and rubbed her eyes and head; groggy, foggy, her thoughts were jumbled. Such dreams she'd hadùshe might tell Prospero, for they'd been vivid and strange. Freia stood, stretched, peered around the painted screen and saw no Prospero. She padded out, barefoot beneath her drifting smock, yesterday's gown unbound, to wet a cloth and splash and wipe her face and eyes, waking. Her father's bed was empty. Prospero walked the isle, no doubt, or groomed the horses or did any of the thousand things to do .# Sorcerer and a (jentkman <^ù 29 outside the dim cool cave on such a shining day, and she had slept longer than ever was her wont in summer. Freia went out and stopped, her ear struck by the sound beneath the birdsongs. There were not as many birdsongs as there ought to beùwhy, but a single one, a dull-chiming bell-bird, rhythmically stuttering its tedious note. "Good-morrow, Mistressù" "Quiet, Caliban. I'm listening." Frowning, she tilted her head and strained for the sounds: murmuring like water, odd barkings now and againùsomething like wind and water and rustling leaves all together, a new sound under the sun. The sun pierced her thin smock and glowed on her skin; there was no wind. She opened her eyes and looked down on Caliban, perplexity on her face. "Where is Prospero? And whatever are you doing here?" Caliban shunned daylight, shunned visibility; he was Prospero's diligent laborer at some task Freia knew nothing of, deep beneath the earth, and he never left it save at Prospero's command. "Mistress, Master bade me wait here for you and tell you he wishes you to wait here for him. Could you tell me again of the flowers, Mistress, the mountain-flowersù" "Why should I wait here?" Freia asked the world generally. "This is not a day for staying within. I'm going hunting," she said firmly. "O, Mistress, do not go!" Caliban protested, but she had returned to the cave, and he might not enter there. Sandals, tunic, leggingsùshe would go bare-legged for now, but in the undergrowth she'd need cover. Freia dressed and braided up her hair, packed a leathern bag with leggings, salt, dried apples, and bread, put her knife at her belt, and took her bow and arrows from their pegs behind the door. Prospero had not come, and she would linger no longer here. Caliban called to her as she left the cave again. "O, Mistress, Mistress, bide the Master, bide, he commands it," he said in his gravelly voice. "Caliban, I will not. I said I would hunt today, and I shall hunt, and you may remind Papa of that when he seeks to 3(7 'Etiza&etfi Sorcerer and a Qentkman 31 scold you for my leaving. He was supposed to hunt with me. Go back to your own tasks that he set you and he won't be angry." The noise was still there, the birds still quiet. Caliban grumbled unhappily behind her as she set off along the path that would take her to the upstream end of the island. From there she would paddle the tippy little coracle to the mainland. The strange sound grew louder to her ear as she went. Suspicion stirred in Freia's thoughts; Prospero had said he would change things, and she feared he had done that, had worked some sorcery to alter the island. He'd made her sleep before when he had great sorceries afoot, things he did not wish her to witness (not trusting obedience to conquer curiosity). There had been a midwinter night she'd slept three days, waking famine-hungry to find Prospero irritable and short-tempered; he'd never told her what he'd done then, but thereafter she had encountered queer hooved and horned little people, shy and difficult to approach, in the surrounding forest, and other, stranger things of blended natures. This overlong night's sleep smacked of such sorceries, and Caliban's relayed command to her to wait at the cave for Prospero was novel. Ever before she had had liberty to go where she liked. Prospero, then, had done something, Freia decided, trotting along the footworn path. But what might it be? She pulled up short as the path came out into a bit of meadow where they pastured the horses from time to time, seeing before her the unbelievable answer to her question. The crowd of people standing and sitting and lying in the long grass, playing with flowers and laughing and talking and becoming acquainted with themselves and one another, the crowd of strange voices and odd faces and nude bodies pale and dark, the crowd fell silent and stared back at Freia. A breeze gusted past her and rippled the grass that the people had not matted down, passing up the hillside in the hard, hot sun. Freia, tense and wary, continued along the path slowly, her gait stiff, looking with distrustful dismay at the faces and bodies of the intruders. They surged, following her, whispers swirling through them. A hand reached for her. Freia flinched from the alien touch; the hand dropped away. They crowded around her but let her pass, slowly, moving nearer and farther, all of them jostling to look at her. Freia began hurrying. They parted, still following her, too close, too many; the heat and sweaty smell of their bodies was overwhelming, the sight of their hands and hair and torsos and faces a dizzying mosaic. A hand brushed her arm; another touched her braided hair, and then there were many touches, light inquisitive fingers feeling her leather tunic, her bow, her body. They whispered, said with strange words things she understood: "Soft. . . hard . . . tail . . . mane . . . claws . . . breast . . . hide . . . smooth . . . soft. .." in a torrent of puzzled collective exploration. They were too big, too many, too intent on her; Freia panicked, pushed, bolted. They shied, running away in a massùor some tried to. The meadow became a churning disturbance, and there were cries of pain and fear as others were jostled roughly. Freia shoved and shouldered her way through them, touching bodies, bodies, bodies, hair and skin and limbs and softness and hardness, and she shut her eyes and put her fist forwardùclutching her bow and quiver to her with the otherùand bulled blindly ahead. They shouted, words she didn't listen to, jumbled noise among the jumbled bodies. She struck something coarse and hard, not skin; it grabbed her and she screamed and twisted away. "Freia!" Prospero shouted, seizing her wrists, dragging her to him. "Stop this! Thou'lt frighten the folk." "Let go!" Freia screamed. He shook her quickly; she was panicked, though, and Prospero must drag her out of the press of bodies, shouting over her head at them until they parted meekly and left space for him to lead his struggling daughter to the trees' shade. Prospero hugged her, wrapping his cloak around her 32 'Efizabetfi. despite the heat, hampering her movements as he would net a bird to confine it. "Freia. Freia! Hold, holdùI did bid thee abide my return, girl, and thou'rt paid for impatience. Freia! Look on me." She did, wild-eyed. Prospero nodded and gazed into her eyes. "Now calm thyself," he said. "There's none here will harm thee. Thou hast given them worser fright than they have given thee." "What are they?" Freia whispered, looking from Prospero to them. They stood, watching, their faces serene and interested. "They are people, my people," Prospero said proudly. "I don't want people here! Why did you bring them?" "These folk have been here all their days," Prospero replied, "and they've as firm a right as thou to live here, for I have made them of the native creatures of the place. I shall not brook thee quarrelling with them, Freia: they, like thee, are made to dwell here, andù" "There's no room for them!" "Pah, they'll build houses for themselves, and a better for thee and me as weil, a dwelling fit for men." "Then there's no room for me," Freia declared. "Let me go!" Prospero released her wrists, though he still held her arm loosely. Frowning, he said, "It is my will that they be here, and my will shalt thou not shake! Whither goest thou so furnished?" "Hunting! You said you'd hunt with me today," Freia reminded him. "I've much to do amongst the folk," Prospero said, "and I gave no promise to course the wood with theeù" "Then I'll go alone," Freia said, and she slipped from his hand and darted from him, from the people, into the trees. The Emperor, oddly, did not seem to blame Josquin particularly for the theftùat least, not to Josquin's face. He bid him a fair journey in the morning without visible rancor. "He must be angry," muttered Josquin to the Empress. Sorcerer and a Qmtieman 33 "There's nothing to be done for it now, dear," she whispered back. Josquin knew better. His father believed firmly in the efficacy of revenge. When the Prince Heir had gone in his coach to the dock where his ship waited, the Emperor went to his private office, told his secretary he would have no disturbances, and locked himself in. He drew the red brocaded draperies closed and went to a black-lacquered writing table which stood against a wall with a large, convex Mirror over it. From the locked drawers of the table he took a number of articles, setting them on its polished red marble top, and then from his pocket a smallish, heavy leather packet which he untied. It held an assortment of peculiarly-shaped Keys. Selecting one, he put the rest away and seated himself. A quarter of an hour was spent in arranging the apparatus correctly and consulting yellowed sheets of handwritten notes; then the Emperor touched a candle to the oil in the glossy brass firepan which now stood beneath the Mirror. He chanted in a furtive undertone. The glass brightened; it took on an insubstantial depth and appeared to enlarge itself somehow, to iris open on a fog, afthough its shape and size were unchanged. Shortly, the glass cleared and the Emperor faced not his own image but that of another man, head and shoulders taller than the Emperor, broader and darker, frowning slightly as he rubbed his sleeve on a spot on the glass into which he gazed. Two long-flamed candles in knots of brass stood to either side of his Mirror, sparking reflections in his gold-brown eyes. "Avril," said he, and then, as an afterthought, "Your Majesty." "Gaston," the Emperor said, "we have trouble." Prince Gaston nodded. The flames swayed. "Josquin has buggered us all. He picked up a hot one and we're properly burned." "This I have not heard." The Emperor snorted. "Why, how surprising; Viola knew 34 ù:> 'EtizaBetfi. "Wittey of it. Our son, in his usual way, took up with a man calling himself Harrel Brightwater. The man's no member of the Brightwater clan . . ." and he told Gaston of what had followed. "You believe this man to be some degree of sorcerer," said Prince Gaston slowly. "We fear it is so." "Yet he cannot have been to the Well of late." "No. Not the way it is now." A gnawing worry bit the Emperor afresh: since their father King Panurgus's recent lingering death, the Well that was the world's heart had been dark and deep-withdrawn, not leaping with sheets of fire. The Emperor took it as a personal slight. The Well had obeyed Panurgus's slightest whim, the Fire shifting and changing as it sustained the world, as the King had willed it. Panurgus had left no instructions on how to tap and command the Well, and the Emperor had refrained from experimenting with the thing, a failure he suspected everyone of whispering about. "An he hath not been to the Well, there'll be but scant good he get of Map and book," Prince Gaston said. "They are of no use; he cannot reach the Road without passing the Well's fire, though he know where the Road lieth." "He knew something. At the least he knew where to look, and although Josquin is a fool he has told no one where he kept them. Nothing else is missing." "His servants?" "They are being questioned, but they have all been here a long time." "And are still there." "Exactly. No sudden departures." Prince Gaston rubbed his chin and leaned back in his chair; the Emperor's flame swayed toward the Mirror, toward him. "I know not what might be done to remedy this, brother," he said finally. "On the one hand: 'tis done. On t'other: perhaps could be undone, but if so I know not how. You seek him?" "Still. Yes." Prince Gaston appeared to be thinking out loud. "With- Sorcerer and. a (jentúema.n 35 out having passed through the Well's Fire, he cannot leave Landuc on the Road. He must conceal him, masked by an assumed name, a disguised faceù Ah. The horse." "The horse?" the Emperor repeated. "You said he kept a horse. A good animal?" "They are looking for the horse too. Yes, it's harder to disguise a beast than a man. That is what is bad, Gaston: he has vanished from the Empire." " 'Tis possible one of the others hath sponsored him. The wards Panurgus set are old, belike weakened, failed." Prince Gaston said this reluctantly; it touched on a charged subject. "We thought of that. Oriana, Escladosùunpredictable and untrustworthy, all that sorcerous lot are." The Emperor shook his head. "But it makes no sense, for in that case he needn't steal Map and Ephemeris. He'd copy his sponsor's." "True." "It could be Prospero," the Emperor said. The Prince shook his head slowly. "Why? No doubt he could disguise himself, but why wait, why befriend Josquin? If he lacked Map and book, he could slip in and take them. He knoweth the lie of the Palace as he knoweth his arms, his legs. It's not reasonable that the thief be Prospero." "Perhaps Prospero sponsored this so-called Brightwater, then. He has been too quiet." Prince Gaston forbore to point out that the same objections applied to Prospero as to any other sorcerer. "He may have quit his claim." The Emperor slapped the table with his hand, glaring at Prince Gaston. "Hah! Don't play the fool, Gaston. You don't like facing him, but he will never give it up until he has been defeated and killed. You have managed the one and never the other." "I saw him deeply wounded last time. 'Tis possible he died," said Prince Gaston, "elsewhere." "We haven't seen his corpse." Prince Gaston nodded slightly. "Nor heard of him." "Nor heard anything." The Emperor tapped his fingers 36 'EXizaBeth quickly, once, in succession. "Golias hasn't been heard of, either," he said, his mind skipping to other bad old news. 14 Tis lamentable we lost his trail in wild Ascolet. I'm more certain of his return than of Prosperous. Yet it hath been years, Avril." "And their tombs are empty," said the Emperor. "It has not been time enough." His hand tightened into a fist. 5 THE TWO CLOCKS NEVER AGREE. The constructions are a marvel of the sorcerer's Art. One tells the time in a place so far removed from this one that the nature of the creatures who live there is fundamentally different. The other tells the time at a place very far away which can be found only with difficulty, but yet is more attainable than the first. Their ticking never synchronizes. They chime out of order; sometimes one will ring a single hour to two or three of the other's; sometimes they ring midnight and dawn together. The spheres and circles, beautifully and precisely etched on metal and glass, move around and around one another in motion as perpetual as the Universeùor rather, Universes. Standing on their black table at one side of the room, the clocks collect light coatings of dust, which are regularly removed by a quick hand wielding a soft old flannel cloth, and they reflect sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and the light of the more and less earthly fires made by the hand which dusts them. On the wall over the clocks has been engraved and painted an elaborate analemma for telling local time, along whose curves sun and shadow progress through the year. Beneath the analemma, a grey slab of slate covering the wall is covered in turn with small and large chalked notations. The center of the room is occupied by a polished black table, its mirror-slick surface adorned with curious looping, stretching, curling designs set in fine lines of gold like spider- Sorcerer and a QentCeman 37 webs mixed with cyclonic swirls and radiant bursts. The design is partially obscured by sheets of parchment and paper and papyrus, by curled scrolls of smoothed bark and thin metal sheets finely scratched with notations, but enough is uncovered to show that the lines have two foci at opposite ends of the long table's top. Close examination would show that some of the designs on the table's surface also appear in the engraved circles and spheres of the clocks. The door is of triple-thick and cross-grained dark wood, reinforced with iron bands shaped like arms reaching from one side to another so that the hands grip the hinges. It stands ajar, and one can see that it lets upon a small landing from which descends a narrow stair. The stair is lit by a skylight above it, and now, at high noon, a patch of sun skylight-shaped falls straight down upon the landing, a doormat of light. Beneath the skylight, to one side, hang three glass globes, like those which formed the spheres of the clocks. One has a bubble; one is infinitesimally thicker on the bottom than on the top; and the third has the beginnings of engravings upon it, one of which contains an eyelash-fine line imperfectly curved. These are inadequate to become parts of clocks, but sorcerers are thrifty and do not willingly discard even broken apparatus after having invested so much of their time and themselves in its making. Today the two clocks look like soap bubbles. Freshly dusted this morning, they sparkle as they move in harmony with the different pulses they measure, until the sun that falls on them is briefly interrupted by the graceful flight of a folded piece of paper. The paper glider whisshed as it landed on the gold-inlaid black-topped table in front of a dark-haired, young-looking man in a finely pleated blue-green silk shirt. He was folding another paper glider out of a sheet of closely-scribbled paper decorated on both sides with large, definitive X's. He launched this vessel with a flick of his wrist and watched it spiral up and up and then plunge nose-down into the floor from about five meters' altitude. 38 'Elizabeth "Bah," he said, and collected an armada of paper from the floor and doorway. Returning to his table, he smoothed them out again and put his head in his hands. "I am a charlatan," he grumbled, and pushed the whole stack of papers away. "I ought to hang out a shingle and go into business, peddle love potions and wart removers to benighted villagers," he went on to the empty room. "I've studied geomancy, hydrology, pyromancy, lithology, astronomy, mathematics, alchemy, logic, and botany ù I've learned them all and more, all the pillars of the Great Art. None has mastered the Art as I have; none has travelled as far as I, and I believe there is none living who has stood to both Fire and Stone. But look at me! Were this insoluble the cosmos could not exist. I find no error. None! The cosmos does exist ù this is the base of philosophy, truth fundamental, a sine qua non! ù and thus I'm in error. But where?" he cried, and slapped the papers with his hand. The clocks moved. The sorcerer glared at the clocks. It was the clocks which had first caused this unexpected detour in his programme of research, which had begun years previously with an ungen-tlemanly but necessary violation of hospitality. They were wrong: a tiny, tiny error, like all errors of the sort, had cumulatively thrown them off by varying orders of magnitude, and they were useless. He trusted his craftsmanship enough to say that the clocks were capable of keeping time correctly; the error's root was that the forces they measured were not behaving as they ought. They were being bent and distorted, rather than flowing in the prescribed currents. Understanding that there was an error and then calculating how great it was and how it increased had occupied him in his lonely octagonal tower for nearly twenty years. He had been confident, as he began, that he would discover some simple fault in his calibration or calculation, but there were no mistakes: the clocks ran correctly and the times they kept were wrong. It was remarkable that they ran at all, but he wanted them to be right. He had come here to live in peace and quiet, to Sorcerer and a QentUman 39 occupy himself with building ingenious devices and elegant apparatus and using them, to invent new ways of doing and new things to do, and now he was confounded by a flaw in the very foundation of his premise. He could ignore the flaw and develop his skills furtherùit did not affect most of his activitiesùbut the idea of leaving the problem unsolved galled him. Arrogantly, yet accurately, he believed himself uniquely talented and blessed with ability in all the worlds, and since only he knew of this problem then only he could solve it. Indeed, he ardently desired to solve it. It defied solution. The checking and re-checking of his figuring was making him a little mad, feeding the righteous anger he was beginning to feel at the Universe for not operating the way he thought it should. He had gotten back into the habit of pacing agitatedly, a habit he had been glad to lose somewhere after his childhood; he granted the most trivial of doubts and possibilities serious consideration day and night; he could no longer divert himself with music, books, or poetry. Now he went up and down beside his table, from window to blackboard, not really thinking of anything but his own vexation. When both clocks chimed at once, it was too much; he flung himself out of the workroom and stomped down a flight of stairs, through a library to a door which led to another flight of stairs. At the bottom were some pegs on which hung a few pieces of clothing and a bench with a couple of pairs of boots under it. He doffed his slippers, donned a nondescript grey-brown coat and tough brown boots with thick soles, and went out through the door beside the pegs. The commotion in his head had grown too cacophonous to be contained in the tower. Outside, it was a fine day, brisk as late spring was apt to be. The nameless long-thorned flowers which grew in abundance at the base of the tower and some little distance up its sheer sides were setting buds. Seemingly blowing in the breeze, they drew back from him and from the doorway, clearing a path through their thicket of tough vines and 40 finger-long thorns. The sorcerer stood for a moment on his doorstep, inhaling and looking around, and then set off in no particular direction. He returned as the shadows were filling the valleys. The stairway was dark, but lights leapt up in iron sconces when he opened the door and crossed the threshold. He sat on the bench and put on his slippers again slowly, hung up the coat, and then shuffled into the kitchen, tired after a daylong trek up hill and down dale but stillùstill with the same load of mind-bending, world-distorting problems he had had before. However, he thought, at least it would be easier to sleep when he was this tired. He hadn't cheated; he'd rambled all day, drunk water from a stream when he was thirsty and jogged on, ascending, circling, and descending the straight-shouldered mountain nearest to his tower in its bowl-like dell. He rummaged in his cupboards for dried fruits and vegetables, bread, a cheese, and ate an uninteresting but filling supper. When he had cleaned up the kitchen and put everything away, he started out and tripped on a small three-legged stool which was hidden in the shadow of the table. He was a tall man, but agile, and he would have recovered but for the stool's getting under his other foot as well. It rolled; he staggered and grabbed the table with an "Ow!" of surprise, and his head struck the side of the stove as he was thrown backward. The lights in the kitchen burned tirelessly. Upstairs in the workroom, the clocks whirled and spun slowly. The man on the floor groaned to himself and rolled onto his side, holding his head. There was blood on his handù he'd cut the scalp, and he was glad it hadn't been an eye he'd hit on the iron stove. With crabbed, uncomfortable movements he rose and saw the stool. One kick sent it crashing into the opposite wall. "Oohhhhh . . ." sighed its victim, and tottered to a trapdoor in the floor. Beneath it in a hidden drawer was ice, chips of which he dropped into the dishrag and held to his Sorcerer and a QentUman 41 head as, one-handed, he closed the icebox again. When he had risen, the stool came in for another kick back toward the door. He started toward it for a third and picked it up instead, an incendiary spell on his tongue. It had been a long, difficult spring, the culmination of long, increasingly frustrating years. He was a little mad, but only a little, and the idea of taking vengeance on the stool suddenly appeared to him to be as ludicrous as it was. He laughed and shook his head, then hefted the stool to toss it in the corner. It landed, rolled, and lay on its side. He gave it a small kick to upend it and turned to leave the kitchen, still cooling his bruised head. Then he stopped and looked at the stool carefully. He bent and picked it up again, staring at it, a frown coming onto his face. "Three," he said. The melting ice and blood began to run down his neck into his collar. "Three," he whispered reverently, and set the stool carefully in its proper place beneath the table. The blackboards were covered with smudgy numbers, lists, and diagrams drawn freehand over everything else. The table was clear save for a few small, oddly-shaped counters, placed on certain parts of the engraving which covered its top, and a trio of instruments. Papers and books were stacked on every other flat surfaceùbeside the clocks, on the windowsills, on the shelves, on a chair. A delicate scale made of some fine-spun transparent stuff clearer than glass stood in the center of the table; a thing that looked like a windmill growing out of a compass of the same delicate crystal stood a foot or so away from it. Its feathery vanes were spinning lethargically. Another, identical device was on the other side of the table, pointing in a different direction, also moving but more slowly. They would have been invisible but for the reflected light flashing from them as they turned. The clocks twirled and processed in degrees. The workroom was empty. On the bed in the next room, 42 Elizabeth the tower's occupant, half-undressed, lay on his back snoring softly. His previously clean-shaven face had accumulated a short beard. His mouth was slightly open, and his hands were slack on his chest, where the laces of his shirt lay untied in his fingers. A partly-eaten apple had rolled onto the floor at his feet. The exposed white flesh had become brown; the peel was curled around the bitten area. A square of sun progressed along the wall and across the carpet and then along the wall again before he moved. "Uff," he exhaled, and drew his legs up onto the bed, crawled to the pillows, and lay down with his face in them. From the workroom, the soft chimes of a clock sounded. He chuckled before falling asleep again to descend into an old dream. He walked away from the burning Well in its eight-sided white wall and wandered in dream-fashion through gardens, until he came to the Royal Tombs and found himself standing in the ivy-choked arch that led to one. He ascended the mossed and crumbling stair behind the arch and found at the top a great tomb. A tall man, bearded, by his bearing powerful yet clothed austerely, emerged from the tomb's grapevine-overgrown portico. The grapes were ripe and purple. 'Though we meet at my tomb, I am not dead," he said. The dreaming sorcerer nodded. Now the stranger walked toward the dreamer, down the weedy walkway of the tomb's approach, and stood before him. "I lay upon thee this geas," he said, and he moved his hands and spoke slowly, and the force of the Well flowed into his words so that they became one with the world. "Seek me until we meet, and when we meet shall thou tell me thy name and lineage that I will know thee." The sorcerer looked into the man's eyes, which were bright grey like clouds, not cold but kind and grave, and the geas fell, settling on his life and altering it. "Safe journey," the man said. "That which brought thee here will bear thee safely away." Sorcerer and a Qentieman 43 Something tugged the sorcerer deeper into sleep, deeper than dreams, and he sighed and turned unknowing. When the sorcerer rose from his bed, he bathed and dressed, then went down to his kitchen and prepared a hero's breakfast. Having eaten well and tidied the room, he climbed up to his bright workroom again and stood, arms folded, contemplating the table. The twin vaned compasses, which he had designed and built in his fury of enlightened insight, still pointed in two different directions. However, the lines along which they pointed intersected in an area nearly devoid of the markings etched into the table's glossy black surface. "I have you at last," he whispered to the table, uncrossing his arms and leaning over the place where the lines intersected. "There: wherever there might be." The sorcerer took from a shelf a single-dish scale with a polished ball of flawless rock crystal suspended where the pan would be. This he placed on the table, changing the location by fractions of millimeters many times, until he was satisfied, crouching at eye-level to the tabletop and squinting at the vaned compasses, sighting from it to them. He straightened and reached for one of the compasses, touching it lightly. A golden line sprang from it, running back to the center of the diagram, where the scale swayed and steadied itself, and more lines sprang out from the counters placed here and there on the lines, finally hitting the second compass. A new line arced from both compasses now and struck the crystal sphere, which bobbed, and the sorcerer reached into the lacework of the spell and adjusted the sphere's placement again and again until the ball filled with light of its own and a new network of lines sprang into being over the old, very pale and fine. He took his hand away and looked at the tabletop, which lit the room now, and then opened a glass-fronted cabinet to take out a long slender sliding-rule with six moving bars and peculiar scales engraved on it. With this he sat by the 44 òECiza&etk "Wittey table for a long time, calculating, writing in a leather-bound book. One of the clocks chimed with an almost apologetic note. He snorted softly and murmured "You're next" to it but did not look up. Thus he passed the day and the night, then slept awhile and worked again, measuring and calculating and plotting in his book, seized by an inspiration of genius and knowledge and revelling in the possession. This phase of his labors bore him through the waxing and waning of summer in the mountains around his tower. In the autumn, he found his apparatus to be inadequate to his vision and passed the winter, and many seasons following, designing and building a substitute for his tabletop covered with fine lines. It required that he leave the solitude of his tower several times to travel and obtain materials. He was exacting about the composition and purity of everything he used and could tell at a glance what were the qualities of a stone or spool of wire. The old table was retired to the kitchen with honors; for the sorcerer loved kitchens and respected them. A new, larger, more detailedùand roundùtable took its place. The sorcerer sat looking at it, pleased, for some little while when he had it arranged; and when he had looked his fill, when he had fully savored his accomplishment in its creation, he rose and left the table, left the cunning whirling clocks which were now correct and now were three in number, left the glassed cases stuffed full of the tools of his trade, and, wearing his long sea-green caped cloak, he locked the tower behind him and set out on a great journey whose ending he could still only dimly forecast. THE SORCERER STARTED ACROSS A LOW-ARCHED Stone-and- plank bridge, lifting his hat to wipe his forehead, and stopped halfway to the other side. Sweet-noted bubbling Sorcerer and a Qentteman 45 dawnsong pealed from the thick-grown forest around and above the bridge's stream; early sun glowed through pale new greenery that fringed the branches over the stream, which was at spring flood, chuckling and gurgling around boulders. The water was deep and the current swift, catching and discarding flotsam as it pushed along the rocks. The steep banks were impenetrably thicketed to the brink, chewed by the turbulence so that knots of roots and stones hung half-exposed over the water, festooned with trailing white- and purple-flowered weeds. A red-headed bird whizzed out of a tree to sit on a slender branch, doughtily repeating his high-pitched spring challenge. The sorcerer gazed at the sight with a pang of appreciation, forgotten hat in hand, leaning a little on his black staff. "It is just as well to stop, sometimes," he murmured. As he stood, filling his eyes with the moving water and light, he heard the rhythmic, disorganized sound of a troop of horses approaching from the direction he'd just come from. The sorcerer put his hat on slowly. Brigands? As he travelled, he'd been warned many times against the gangs of armed robbers who peregrinated through these Pariphal Mountains south of Ascolet, but he had yet to encounter any. They came around a shallow curve and down the slope that led to the river and pulled up, forming into ranks as they did. Twelve threes, armored and dressed uniformly: uncommonly well-accoutered brigands. "Hey! You!" yelled a man in a red cloak in the center of the front rank. "Move!" The sorcerer's heart sped with instant rage; no one commanded him thus, like a lackey, a peasant. He half-turned toward the mounted men. "Get your bloody ass off that bridge," shouted the red-cloaked man. "You find something objectionable in other travellers using a public bridge?" retorted the sorcerer, drawing force up through his staff, flexing his hand around it. "Captain," said a slight rider beside Red, "there's no need to quarrelù" 46 'EtizaBetA "We're wasting precious time, your ladyship. Get moving, tourist, or be over-ridden!" The sorcerer's eyes hardened. He shifted his grip on his staff and muttered quickly as he brought it down hard on the bridge, stepping back from the center toward the bank. The piers shivered. The stones of which they were built tumbled down into the stream, and the thick wooden planks fell with them. The rumbling and crashing of the wood buried the outraged shout of the commander and the growls of his men. The sorcerer stood on a small platform of wood remaining on the opposite bank, three planks still fixed to the first stone pier of the bridge. The stream's banks were sheer and the water deep, turbulent around the boulders. It would be difficult to cross without the bridge. "Shocking that the Emperor's gold buys such shoddy work," he observed, the fires of anger and power still in him. His staff hummed in his hand, a note only he could hear through his palm. The horsemen were tense and silent. The red-cloaked man urged his horse forward a couple of steps, moving, trying to see under the traveller's dark-grey hat. He raised his right hand. The other lifted his staff, waved negligently, and scattered the rocks up- and downstream with splashes and cracking sounds. For good measure, the sorcerer threw a geas of repulsion on the debris of the stream for as far as he could in each direction. It would be impossible to stack them now. Any new bridge must be built of other stones. The red-cloaked captain swallowed. He stared across at the man in the sea-colored winter cloak, who chuckled and turned and walked quickly away into the wood. "Otto," whispered the woman. "Son of a bitch!" Otto lowered his hand, realizing he had nearly exposed himself to great awkwardness, a fool's mistake, in his anger. He chided himself. It wasn't time for that. Too many explanations. "Who could that have been?" she asked. "We'll have to ford here." He sat staring at the stones for Sorcerer and a (jentCeman 47 three breaths, then turned and called the order to move ahead, adding, "Watch your footing!" They didn't see the man on the road after picking their way across the stream, which at once relieved and worried Otto. He had simultaneous urges to kill him for wrecking the bridge and delaying them (though it was some comfort to think that Ocher too would be delayed by the missing bridge) and to grab him and ask how the hell he'd done it. On the third hand, if there could be one, Otto thought he could live the rest of his life happily without running into him because he'd challenge the bastard if he didù "Otto," the lady said. "Thinking." "Ocher will believe you destroyed the bridge." "Let him. It'll occupy his six brain cells with something new." "But he'll file a complaint against you. On the Emperor's road, that's a crime against the Crown." She was genuinely worried. "Well, in that case I have a lot of witnesses to say 1 didn't do it. Including you, my lovely abductee." He grinned reassuringly. She laughed. Ottaviano laughed with her, but not long nor hard. It was a bad start to the day. The summer had been dry, after a dry spring and a warm, snowless winter. Prospero had left the weather to itself, for in the preceding seven years he had done much weather-working, and it was tasking to constrain the natural patterns for very long. He had other things to occupy him, drilling and instructing his army of men, taking them step by step through formations and maneuvers. The drought was no great inconvenience; the river still ran, and his folk got from it their drinking water without difficulty. Nonetheless, he used the occasion to have teams of men sink wells, pounding through the soil and rock, in certain auspicious locations where he divined that water would be easily reached. They toiled unwillingly until their first bubbling water-strike, which delighted and heartened them so that 48 'Etizabetfi 'Wittey Sorcerer and a (jentteman 49 Prospero was hard-put to dissuade them from driving holes all through the forest and the cleared fields. The fields by the riverside (where a few years before trees had reached over the water) were brown early in the season; crops must be irrigated by hand and with quickly-built pumps, and Prospero released men from laboring on the first stone building of the town to aid the women and children in watering the sapling orchards and the fields of grain. Seven years had his people dwelt by the riverside; seven years of changes had they wreaked under his command, and seven years of change had worked on them. There were long-houses now, communal places where the folk lived together; in the beginning Prospero had tried to segregate the sexes and had given it up, though men and women labored at different tasks in different places. He was amused by his own dismay at the easy manners of his people, for they coupled without inhibition when the notion struck, and that was often. Though some were pair-bonded from the beginning, the idea of matrimony made little headway here. They had not even a word for it in their rippling, lilting, Spring-born tongue. They all appeared to be mostly free of jealousy, which was well, because few were inclined to fidelity and none to chastity. The first child was born less than a year after Prospero's night of Spring-fed sorcery, and so many others hard after that Prospero could not recall which of the many it had been, nor who the mother was. The place had teemed with smug, big-bellied women and then with squalling infants. This occasioned delay in Prospero's plans; he ruefully adjusted them to accommodate the nurturing of a sizable population of children. The men who were not paired to women were largely uninterested in the infants, although many of them were visibly annoyed by rebuffs from the preoccupied mothers. Prospero had not expected a sudden crop of brats, but indeed that was the natural consequence of the vigorous amorous activity. After the initial explosion, births came in a more even scattering, most frequently in autumn. None of the children wanted for sustenance or attention, and the score or so whose mothers had died in childbed and soon afterùfor with births came the first deathsùwere adopted and nursed by foster-mothers, without need of Prospero urging it. In the third year, Prospero became aware that many of the women had formed into close, clan-like associations, based around the farms, and that some of these groups mostly spurned the company of menùthough not all, for the women bore children still. The men lived in a military structure Prospero had shaped, gradually imposing more and more organization on them as he taught them the use of weapons and supervised them in the heavy clearing work of preparing land for the women to farm. Yet some of the women's clan-groups included men who worked the fields and gathered wild food with the women, and Prospero gave up trying to comprehend the shifts among the settling population. He cared not, Prospero decided, what their sexual customs were, so long as they did his bidding in more important things; their nature was still half-bestial, and so he glanced over the grappling in furrow and forest without censure. As long as they avoided violence and none were forced, as long as they accepted his rule and served his plan, they might associate in whatever ways pleased them. Prospero's only qualm was for what Freia's reaction might be when she returned and was exposed to the cooing and rutting. Surely such unbridled and flagrant activity would stir her own covert desires. Though he had no ready plans for her marriage, he would not have her make her own. She was his own blood, after all, of noble and particular genesis, not to be squandered on the first lubber who might catch her eye and tumble her. Therefore he spoke of her to them as different and other, an object of reverence as Prospero himself was, aloof and untouchable; no playfellow, but a mistress, a lady. For himself, his attention was focused on other mattersù although he sought without success for the woman who had been his last-made creature. She had gone wandering, as some of the folk had; she returned briefly in the third year, SO ù=> in the arms of another woman, and Prospero shrugged to himself wryly and pushed her from his thoughts. A voluptuous blonde called Dazhur, his first-shaped female creature, made no secret of her interest in bedding Prospero; his courteous refusal piqued her vanity and heated her desire, and she displayed herself invitingly to him whenever possible. But Prospero was cautious of such entanglements, and Dazhur's lust came to naught though she sought year in and year out to slake it. Seven years had passed, and Freia had not returned from her hunt. On full-moon nights Prospero Summoned visions of her in a golden basin full of the Spring's water, to watch her as she cooked her meat, paddled in dark waters, or slept curled beneath sky or bough, all unaware of his spying. Healthy and solitary, she roamed through mountains and in thick, saturated tropical forest: far north of the Spring. She would return. Prospero could wait. She had bolted before when their opinions diverged and, drawn back to him by her own nature, she had always returned, had always reconciled herself to his will. Freia was seldom iri his thoughts, but occasionally, as today, everything brought her to mind and he wished she would return; seven years was as long as her longest journey before this, surely long enough. The weather was oppressive. Her abandoned gardens withered in the drought. He had neglected to have them weeded or watered: the folk did not come to the isle unless he bid them. Prospero walked through crumpled plants and flaccid leaves in a searing red dawn, uneasily sniffing a hot, dry wind. It was a wild wind, none of his calling, and it smelled of cinders and smoke. There had been great numbers of wood-elk about for the past few days, other beasts too, and bloated corpses had floated by in the river. Prospero suspected fire, struck by one of the hail-throwing thunderstorms in the mountains and borne through the wood on the wind, high Elements allied against the lowest. The wind sucked the moisture from his lips and eyes. He wiped them. Perhaps he should raise a storm of his own to Sorcerer and a (jentkman 51 batter the wild ones down, to counter them before they reached here. Such raisings had frightened Freia, and he recalled with melancholy fondness how she would rush to his arms for comfort when he returned to the cave from the Spring's hilltop, having stirred a fine storm to blast and blow. Then he must hold her, but he would stand in the open doorway, mentally critiquing the storm's thunders and lightnings whilst soothing her terror. Prospero reached the stones at the upstream end of the island and sat on one. Someday he would have a proper boathouse here, with proper boats, not this clutter of crude canoes and coracles; proper civilized gardens, too, green and groomed, not the wilderness resulting from Freia's desire to plant some of everything and her inability to keep it all tidy. Coo! shade he'd have, and fountains; grapes and roses on arbors, and soft lawns. Prospero mopped his neck; he wore only a thin shirt on his back, but he was sweltering. The water was busy this morning. As he sat, a quartet of the native spotted otters came out of the water nearby, looked insouciantly at him, and poured their long bodies into some hiding-place among the stones. Logs had piled up at this end of the island and were snagging flotsam in their limbs and roots. Prospero saw a tree-trunk, its roots wrenched from the earth, floating silently past in the hot morning light, and another, and dark shapes he knew to be animal corpses. Yes, there must have been fire, far upriver, and now the river bore the debris to the sea. "Papa," he heard, a panting voice at the water's edge where the otters had been, accompanied by a splash and a slosh. "Freia?" Prospero jumped to his feet, some part of him unsurprised. "Papa," she said again. Freia it was, dripping wet and sagging onto the ground. She wore only her scant hunting tunic, no leggings, not even an arm-brace, and she was barefoot; and as Prospero made his way to her he saw that she was bone-tired and somewhat singed. There were blis- 52 'Elizabeth ters on her left arm and a long angry burn on her left thigh, and her legs were laced with scratches. Her hair was burnt unevenly on the left and back. "How now, Puss," was all he said, and he bent over her, half-lifted her to her feet. She nodded, wobble-kneed, and let him lead her from the water. He patted her shoulder. "Wert caught in the fire?" "I couldn't get away. I ran and ran. It's horrible. Papa, Papa, it's ali flames, all the wood, and the animals run, and the poor little Satyrs, and the birds cannot fly fast enough ù " She coughed, shaking her head. "The river is full of death," she said. "I thought I could float with the logs, but the flames falling, and the animals ù " Freia sat down again, on a long rock this time, shivering in spite of the heat. Prospero sat beside her. " Tis a dry season," he said, "and some lightning-strike in the mountains hath sparked the blaze. It will devour until it meeteth its own flank, and there die, self-poisoned." An infelicitous metaphor: he thought of Panurgus, of the flash of fire and blood as he was wounded, dismissed the thought. "Please, Papa, please, 'make it stop?" " Twere best I not tamper overmuch with it," Prospero said. "There's a natural rhythm to these things best left unchallenged. Such fires are not unknown; they've come beforetimes, though thou hast never seen them, and they serve to scour the forest of deadwood and choking brush, making place for new growth. I'll not hinder it, Freia. I know it pains thee, but I'll not stop the fire 'less it threatens us here." She stared at him. "Why won't you stop it? How can you let it burn all the forest away?" and she coughed again. He stood. "Come now. Let's feed thee and salve thy scorchings." "How can you?" Freia's reddened eyes accused him. She wiped at her face and stayed seated. Prospero sighed and sat again. He took her right hand in his left, pressing it. "It likes me little, Freia, but I cannot mend all that's amiss in the world. Yet what's amiss with A Sorcerer and a ºentúeman 53 thee, can be mended." After a pause, "Hast been long from home," he said. "Are they still here?" Freia asked, looking significantly at the clearings on the banks, the boats drawn up, the long-houses. Prospero nodded. "Aye, they are here. I would no more send them from the place than I'd send thee. Less, indeed." He watched her face change, open heart-ache. "Freia," Prospero said, leaning toward her, "thou hast that which none other hath, my blood. Thou'rt mine own and there's none like thee. Dost compass the difference 'twixt thyself and these others I have made?" Freia looked down at their clasped hands. He took her left hand also, holding them both between his now. "Puss," Prospero said, pressing her hands, "I do love thee; art dear to me as only mine own child could be. Yet thou canst not have me all thine own, no more than the wind may blow only on one tree or the rain fall on one stone. Must share." "There's too many of them," she whispered. "They're a, a herd." "Thou hast not seen a group of men before," Prospero said, scenting victory. "They startled thee, I know; thou art likewise strange to them. Aye, they're many, but withal my concern for them is balanced by my love for thee, and thou'lt receive full measure of thy entitlement." "Why did you make them? Wasn't I good enough?" Freia asked, looking up at him. Prospero smiled at her. "Good? A flower fresh-budded hath more of evil or hatefulness than thou. Leave jealousy, lest it canker and corrupt thee. Good enough? I am pleased with thee; thou art made to please me. I made them to serve my purpose in ways beyond thee, in matters where I would not hazard thee. Sooner would I build a wall of blossoms than spend thee on such wholesale work as I undertake with them." Freia gazed at him, perplexity in her face. "Then what do 54 Elizabeth "Wittey you want me to do. Papa? Why am I here? I'm no use to you. What should I do?" "Do thou obey my bidding, and be of good cheer, and keep thy duty uppermost in thy thought," he told her. "Do as thou hast ever done, as a daughter ought, and thou wilt be ever near my heart." Ottaviano, his lady, and his men arrived in the large chartered town of Peridot as the town gates closed, having pushed five miles further than kind usage of the horses and the spring-muddied roads would have permitted, and, Otto reckoned, leaving Ocher at least ten miles behind them, stranded in one of the far less hospitable villages through which their road had taken them that day. Their feeling of safety died when Ottaviano selected one of Peridot's three inns and found that a large chamber had been reserved for Lunete. Otto asked how this came to be, and the landlord explained that a gentleman had bespoke it for her. "What gentleman?" "Put him down, Otto!'Was he a tall man with a blue-green cloak and a black staff?" Lunete interrupted. "Yes," whispered the landlord. "He's outùsirùmy ladyùback soon now I daresay, sirù" "I'llùbeùblowed," Otto said, and apologized to the landlord in cash. Then he, his lieutenant, and his betrothed put their heads together. "Third time's the charm," Lunete suggested, smiling despite Otto's glowering face. "Charm, my leftù" Otto interrupted himself. "This is the third time he's been right where we're going. Last night and yesterday afternoon, not to mention yesterday morning at the bridge. He's following us." "Sir, we've got to get rid of him. He may be reporting to Ocher," Otto's lieutenant Clay urged. Lunete said, "Ocher wouldn't have such a man working for him. Indeed, I don't think such a man would work for Ocher." Clearly she thought him too elegant to be associated with the gross Baron of Sarsemar. J? Sorcerer and a QentCeman 55 "What do you think he is, then?" Otto snapped at her impatiently. "An eccentric nobleman fond of walking alone? A wandering student? A bard with expensive habits and a long purse? Coincidentally bound for Lys, just as we are?" "Would a spy reserve a room for me?" To Lunete, the answer was obvious. The spy would betray himself by snowing too much interest in her if he did that, and so no spy would. Otto began to frame his own answer to this question and said instead, "I'm checking it over before you set foot in it." "Do it now, please. I believe my head begins to ache." They proceeded upstairs without further conversation, Otto carrying the small bundle that was her sole baggage. His humor was not improved by his discovery, on opening the door, of an unseasonal yellow rose in a slender glass vase on the table. Behind a screen waited a basin of steaming water strewn with rose petals, and the fire had pleasantly overcome the spring chill. "Oh, lovely!" exclaimed Lunete, and brushed past him. "Lu! There could beù" She shook his hand off. "Otto, you're being very silly. I think you're jealous." His jaw slackened; he gaped at her, taken off-guard by the accusation. "Sky above me! We're running from half an army, toward a war, and you think I'm jealous because this, this crazy rich vagrant is following us?" "Yes," she said firmly, taking her baggage from him. "If you knock on the door in an hour and a half perhaps we'll have dinner together. Au revoir." The door closed behind him. Otto stood with his back to it, fuming, building up a good head of steam, and then growled deep in his throat on his way down to the public room. There he was, talking with a well-dressed merchant in the common room. Ottaviano ignored him and had a mug of good dark beer until the merchant had left, with many courtesies, to join his fellows at table in a smaller room on the other side of the inn. There were few locals in the inn yet, 56 ù=> and they were loitering at the counter. Otto ignored the stranger a few minutes more and then suggested to Lieutenant Clay that the men should go into the inn-yard and run through an hour of drill, to limber them up after the riding and keep them at peak readiness. When his men, grumbling, had left the inn, Ottaviano walked up to the stranger, who was now reading by the fire in the early spring twilight, at his elbow a table which held a candle, a pewter plate of tidbits, a glass of red wine, and a bottle. Otto observed that he wore high black riding boots and clothing of good but not ostentatious cut and quality, displayed by a full, bluish-green cloak thrown back over one shoulder; the light showed gold on his dagger's pommel and his sword-hilt, and a very nice emerald pendant dangled from his left ear. Ottaviano glared down at the stranger. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded in a low voice. "I beg your pardon," said the man, lowering his small black book. "Are you addressing me?" Otto belatedly alerted his senses for nascent sorceries and locked his gaze on the other's. The guy might try another spell. If he did, Otto must disrupt it or avoid it. "Yes, I am," Otto said softly. "Don't get cute." "I have been called many things, but never 'cute,' " said the other coldly. "1 believe you. You're tailing us, or me, and I find it very, very annoying, buster." The sorcerer looked at the man leaning over him. The fellow plainly wanted to pick a fight. He thought he'd deny him the satisfaction of it. "You have an overrated opinion of yourself if you believe that, sirrah. I have no interest in you at all." "I find that hard to believe, considering the number of times I've seen your face lately." "Believe anything you like, by any means," said the other, indifferently. "I'd also like your attentions to my fiancee to stop," Otto said. Sorcerer and a (jentkman 57 "You have confused me with someone else," the sorcerer decided, and raised his book again. "I don't think so." "You think?" the sorcerer muttered, and it took a few seconds for the insult to register. Ottaviano reached for the sorcerer's wrist, but a slow, sticky resistance engulfed his hand. He tugged back at it. He couldn't free himself, and he realized he had been snared and immobilized by a protective spellùone he hadn't sensed in the slightest degree. "I can leave you like that all night, you know," said the sorcerer, not lifting his eyes from his book. "Where are you from? Noroison?" Otto whispered, cold seeping into his extended arm through his fingers. There was no one to see his odd position; the room was still empty. "Yes." Otto had intended the question sarcastically; he had expected any answer but that. "No shit." This statement had no possible reply that the sorcerer could conceive. He reread the sonnet. He couldn't decide whether he liked it or not. The conceit was not novel, but the interesting way the poet had broken the meter in the concluding coupletù Meanwhile, Otto tried to free his hand again. No success, and he was numb to the shoulder. "Uh, look, if you don't mind, we should either finish this conversationù" "We aren't having a conversation. You're swaggering and making an ass of yourself. If I release you, you shall cease this buffoonery." "You just happen to be going everywhere we're going." "It appears so. Unfortunately. The journey becomes rather dull when one sees the same faces again and again." "Where are you going?" Silence. "All right, your business. It's rather unusual to see anyone from Noroison around these parts." The sorcerer glanced up, and Otto noticed that the man's eyes were a remarkably intense blue, even in the dim light. 58 ù^ "I suppose so. You'll speak of this to no one." "Yes," said Otto, automatically it seemed, his mouth agreeing without consulting his thoughts. "Excellent." Ottaviano's hand flew back; he staggered off-balance for a moment, then walked away from the sorcerer without another word, massaging his arm. Noroison. That put the wind up Otto, left him cold long after his arm was flexible and sensate. Was it possible? One of the legendary bogeymen, here: not far from Landuc and the Well itself. How had he crossed the Limen, King Panur-gus's sorcerous screen between cold, ancient Phesaotois and burning, younger Pheyarcet? Had that outermost Bound begun to weaken, after the King's death, as the Well had faded and drawn inward? Otto pushed that question aside for more immediate worrying. The stranger was probably a spy, and certainly a sorcerer, as all the people of Noroison were reputed to be. He was not spying on Otto personally, but on things in general. Otto's doings, however, would form part of the spy's stock in trade, and Otto thought he objected as much to that as to the attentions to Lunete. Yet there was pitifully little that he could do about the man. Killing him outright, considering the command of sorcery he'd demonstrated so offhandedly, would be difficult. He was protected and wary. Otto wasn't so foolish as to get himself into a sorcerers' duel. Stepping out the stableside door into the damp spring twilight, Otto folded his arms and leaned against the wall, scanning his surroundings automatically, longing in vain for tobacco or anything smokable. His hand, in his pocket, found his special red-handled folding pocket-knife. He took it out and began whittling a twig of wood he picked up from under his feet, making it into a spiralling screw-shape. The thuds, grunts, shouts, and clashing of his men's practice session came from a paddock behind the inn, homey sounds. A sorcerer, travelling alone and inconspicuously. It occurred to Otto that this could even be long-silent Prince Sorcerer and a Qentfeman 59 Prospero, titled the Duke of Winds; in which case Otto thought he would like to know where Prospero was going and why. The door rattled. "There you are," Lunete said, smiling at him. "Here I am." His irritation over the sorcerer was balmed by Lunete's conceding to seek him. Ottaviano folded his knife away. "Are you awaiting an assignation of honor, sir?" "I was awaiting a brilliant idea, but I think the odds of one visiting me just now are low. I'll accept your briHiant smile instead," and he smiled back at her. "I was afraid you and that fellow would have brought the building down by now," she said, dropping the courtly tone to match him. Otto considered asking her to make herself agreeable to the stranger, thereby to try for more information. He reconsidered. The man had already taken too much notice of Lunete. "Did you find anything out about him?" Lunete asked, interrupting the thought and slipping her hand through his arm. "How did you knowù No. Yes. In fact I did." "Being . . . ?" "Heù" and Otto's tongue froze. Lunete waited politely. "Son of a bitch!" he exclaimed, regaining command of his vocal cords and realizing what had happened. "If you keep calling him names like that, he'll get really annoyed, Otto," Lunete said, sighing. "He'sù" and Otto found he couldn't tell her what had been done to him either. He gurgled incoherently. "I'm going to break his ribs bone by bone," he gasped. Lunete stared at him in alarm, took his shoulders, and shook him slightly. "What's wrong? What's wrong?" Otto, breathing slowly and hard now, commanded himself to calm down. There was no point in raging like this. He'd been bagged as neatly as any coney could be, a geas slapped on him to tie his tongue and lock his throat when 60 'LtizaBetd Itfittey he tried to speak of the traveller being a sorcerer from Noroison. Humiliating, it was, and infuriating. He knew just when it had been done, too: when the other had said, "You'll speak of it lo no one." And done so well Otto hadn't even suspected it. The subtlety and force of the sorcerer's workings were impressive. Otto had felt nothing of them, though they had seized him and settled on him while he was wary of just such measures. There were few, or no, sorcerers so able in Phe-yarcet, and none in Landuc, a lack due to the late King's and now the Emperor's vigorous discouragement of the Art. Who could he be? The Well, nearly inaccessible after King Panurgus's death, was supposed to be banned to new initiatesùa ban that could be evaded, Otto knew, but stillù "Otto?" "I'm all right, Lu." "You didn't look it." She still stared into his face, but took her hands from his shoulders. "You looked ready to choke." "I'm all right now. Just aùspell." Otto smiled to cover his dismay. "I think I'll stay out of that guy's business. No point messing with a strange magician when we've got a war to worry about." Could the Emperor have bargained with a new sorcerer? But this wasn't the time to consider that problem. Lunete came first. "I'm glad you've changed your mind," she said, and squeezed his hand, pleased that he'd dropped the quarrel. "Come up for dinner." After their meal, Lunete allowed Otto a single chaste kiss on her hand before closing and barring her door for the night. He bowed, smiling, over the hand, and they played their customary quest ion-game: "How long, my lady?" "Four weeks, five days, and six hours," she replied, smiling also. "It gets longer every day," he muttered, straightening. At times there were disadvantages to being a gentleman. "It does not." "It will take infinitely long, madame, for first we must live Sorcerer and a Qentkman 61 halfway until then, then half the remaining time, then half what is left againù" "I've heard that before," she said, folding her arms demurely, smiling, "and I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now. Four weeks, five days, and six hours, sir." "Good night, Your Grace. I go to lose a few hours in oblivion, counted off by the clock of my heart." He thumped his chest theatrically. "Good night, Otto." With a last smile, Lunete closed the door, then leaned against it and sighed, pressing her hand to her breast. Four weeks, five days, six hours. There was no point even thinking about it; that only made the waiting longer, she chided herself. They would ride on toward Champlys in the morning. Then it would be four weeks, five days even, and she did not believe the time could ever pass quickly enough. 7 PROSPERO'S FOLK WERE INDIFFERENT TAILORS AND stresses. Their clothing, when they wore it, was loose-draped and little decorated, pieced together from scraps of whatever cloth was to be had. Cloth was scarce; Prospero had brought in bales of woollen and linen stuffs, but there was none woven locally, and no native material save leather, mostly used for winter boots and garments worn by those who hunted. Freia, gowned, beribboned, and sandalled, her scorched hair sheared evenly and curling as it dried, trotted stiffly beside her father as he took her to meet one of the men. She looked at the stained and frayed wool and at the coarse leather on the people carrying water to the irrigation trenches of the fields. "I can make better clothes than they do," she observed, almost smug, to Prospero, "and you said I'm not very good at making clothes." "No need for thee to be so," he said. "For them, 'tis the early work of their novice hands, and I doubt not they'll 62 'Elizabeth better it in time, with experience and material. But material's in short supply. Soon I'll fare forth to the wider world for purchase of such goods as those, and other things needful to carry out my plans." "They could make cloth from the tossflowers," Freia said. "Tossflowers?" Prospero said. "The tall yellow flowers on the black stalks have long threads in the stalks," Freia said. "They stick together. I made a fish-net, and ropes, and my belt, and a map when I was in the north. I showed you my belt this morning." Prospero paused and looked at her acutely for an instant, then walked on. They met black-bearded Scudamor, and the Prince made Freia known to this man, his first-shaped and now his Seneschal. Prospero had Freia tell Scudamor of the tossflowers, and later that day the Seneschal set people to collecting the plants. Freia was shy of Scudamor, wary of all the new folk; she half-hid behind Prospero to talk to the Seneschal in a near-whisper, and the tactful Seneschal never looked at her directly, but at her feet, or the sky, or the grass. Then Prospero took Freia in tow again, and with her hand on his arm or holding on to his pocket he led her to where his Castellan Utrachet and three others were making bows and arrows. But Freia murmured that she used a better wood than that the Castellan had, and the Castellan and his helpers trotted off into the forest to find it. "Why are they making so many bows? Surely they do not all mean to hunt?" Freia asked, following Prospero along a muddy track between fields where trees had stood before she left. Her trees: the cultivated fields looked wrong to her eyes, and she tried to see only Prospero, narrowing her vision to his back, his hat, his broad shoulders dark -clad. "Time comes when they'll be needed," Prospero said. "I have chosen my time, and I shall strike down the usurper in Landuc. There's much work to be done here before then: we'll have fletchers and smiths, bowyers and armorers, ropemakers and weavers, sailors and carpenters, all manner of trades among us soon." Sorcerer and a Qentieman 63 "Why?" Prospero stopped, dipped a drink of water from a bucket by a stone-sided well at the meeting of three muddy paths. He offered her the wooden cup. "Why? Why, maid, think'st thou that Avril will return my stolen patrimony for th' asking? Though I'm the rightful ruler in Landuc, he's had long yearsùwhy, longer than thy memory runsùto drive out or murder alt contrary to him: my friends, my agents, my subjects. Even Lord Gonzalo, that Panurgus consulted in any matter of law of the realm, is banished for his service to the truth, his lands baldly stol'n, little left him but his daughter fair Miranda. Avril is a fool, and a fool's arse is ill-seated on the throne of Landuc. The realm suffers for't." Freia had listened to this, understanding not all, and waited when Prospero concluded for a further conclusion. "But, why?" she asked again, when nothing further came. Prospero dipped water, drank again. "The realm's the mirror of the kingù" "The, the sailors. The smiths. The foundries. Why those, Papa? Are they driven from Landuc?" "Nay, miss, Avril in Landuc hath armorers and smiths aplenty. And I have none. Therefore do I prepare to arm me, to arm my men, to dispute false Avril's claim." "With him?" Freia asked. "In war," Prospero said, exasperated, "in battle, Freia, art wood-headed yet? In war I'll face his men with mine, and I'll conquer them by force and sorcery, drown 'em in blood if need be; possess the city, depose the usurper, and claim my throne. In war." He shook his head at her and started off again. Freia stood, understanding at last, and then hurried after him, catching his arm. "Hereù" "There. Hast lent ear to one word of mine in a thousand, 'tis patently shown." Prospero shot her a quick grey look. "Very natural art thou indeed. Come now. I'll tell this to thee slowly once again, and this time I'll hear thee say it back to me. We go to war with Landuc, that I may be King as is right." "But, Papa, why? Aren't you happy here? You have peo- 64 ùa 'LCizaBetd 'Wifiey pie now; nobody is killing anybodyùyou told me it's wrong to kill people! Won't your people be killed too? They don't have any quarrel with these Landuc people! Won't they kill you? Please, Papaùdon't go to Landuc and have war. Everything is good here. Will you not stay here and be happy?" They had halted again amongst a terraced patch of vegetables; women and children were hoeing and weeding at the far end of it, out of earshot, peering up curiously at Freia. "Thou hast as much sense of honor as yon cabbages," Prospero declared, scowling blackly at Freia, "and as much knowledge of policy and sorcery. Tis right that I make war 'pon Landuc, by any means to hand; I'm the King, by right of blood, for the King died without naming another heir, rather murdered himself and fouled the Well with his death. Say naught of these matters thou dost not understand! The world's wagged amiss since that Avril insinuated himself upon a throne too great for him, beneath a crown too heavy. The Orb and Scepter are idle in his hands. The Roads ravel, the Bounds unbind; the very vigor of the world spends itself, useless, in the wastes,. I, I have all the powers and every right to take it from him, to rule the place better than he, witling princeling, can. He's no scholar, no sorcerer, knoweth naught of the Well: he's unfit to rule. Now give me peace indeed: thy questions are a very battery of foolishness. Hearken to me, cease thy larking, thou'lt learn all needful to thee in good time." Ottaviano roused Lunete and his men an hour before the spring dawn, as the sleepy folk of the inn and village were stumbling through their waking chores. Then he hurried back to his room and finished dressing, shaving hastily but painstakingly, re-using the basin of water he had just put to a wholly different purpose. The water glimmered faintly, but with reflected candlelight, not the trapped light of the morning star, and it showed no image of Baron Ocher of Sarsemar nor his men, only Ottaviano and his razor and soap. It was stupid to waste the time, Otto thought as he Sorcerer and a gentleman 65 shaved, but a stray piece of his father's advice had gotten stuck in his head and he'd never been able to ignore it. Assume, Sebastiano had written him, in the letter stained on one corner with his blood, [hat in any confrontation you will be killed, and, when possible, prepare yourself to present a dignified and gentlemanly front to the world in death as in life. Keep cleanliness foremost among your habits. Let your attire be neat and not ostentatious. Let your nails be clean and pared, and your boots well-soled; let your face be shaven, or, if you should wear a beard, let it be washed and trimmed neatly as your hair, without extraneous matter or perfumed oils. Let your person be as free of flaws as is in your power to assure, bathed and dressed in such a way as you would not be ashamed to lie upon your bier, and then go forth and conquer any who oppose you . . . "Shit," Otto said, and emptied his basin out the window. A moment later it flew back in and splatted him in the face. "Hey!" Dripping, he looked out, knowing what he'd see. A cold and disdainful face glanced up at him for an instant from beneath a grey hat. With a sharp, tight-lipped inhalation, Otto turned red, pulled his head back in, and slammed the window shut. He was sure that this guy was working for Ocher, no matter where he claimed to be from, for his habit of following them around was disturbing and his methods of getting to their next stop before they did disconcerting. A Ley-path, Ottaviano knew, ran from Stonehill in Sarsemar to the Shrine of Stars in Lys, but it was weakened by disuse: there was a newer road, and riding on the road was easier than following the old Ley up hill and down dale. Otto supposed that old King Panurgus had probably meant to supersede the Ley with the new road, perhaps forge a new Ley; but he had died of Prospero's wound before completing the work, and 66 'EfizaBetfi Itfittey his son Emperor Avril had made small progress on any public-works projects. Picking up his saddlebags, Otto left the spartan chamber which had fallen to his lotùa quarter the size of Lunete's, which had, gallingly, been located right next to the stranger'sùand went downstairs. The men had slept above the inn's stables, and, had Lunete not been along, Otto would have been with them; but she preferred him to take an inn-room rather than a common bunk. His men were assembled in the stable-yard. Lunete, flushed with excitement, held her horse Butterfly off to one side. "Ocher's on our ass," Otto told them. "We have two goals: delay Ocher so Lady Lunete at least gets over Lys's border, behind Champlor's city walls, and get there ourselves. We'll hurry, but I expect him to overtake us and we'll have to fight. I also expect that we can beat him. Everybody got that?" They "Yes, sir'd." He told them to mount and they swept as a body out of the inn yard and onto the road for Lys at a gallop. As ever, the strange sorcerer was nowhere to be seen on the road, and Otto wished he'd lose himself or get his throat slit by the bandits who worked the woods hereabouts, though such an end seemed unlikely for so able a man. Lunete rode now in the center of the line of his armed men and they were quiet and alert. Clouds closed overhead as they arrived at a crossroads where a rutted path from the market town of Semaris joined theirs to Lys. The intersection's chipped-nosed kingstone was neglected, mossed on one side and the ground bare before it. There were no signs of passage of any other large group, which comforted Otto somewhat: he had feared Ocher would have cut through Semaris. What Otto had seen in his scrying-bowl had not been clear as to just where Ocher was, only that he was near. Perhaps the Baron of Sarsemar had turned back, accepting inevitable defeat. Would he turn back? Otto asked himself, and answered, fl Sorcerer and, a gentleman cù 67 No. Not with Lunete and Lys at stake. Not until he had lost everything trying. The forest was still, without bird or animal sounds to break the murky silence. A sweet warbling birdsong was a relief. Lunete looked overhead for the brown-backed idler, but did not see it, which was not remarkable; the new-budded leaves were plumper here in the lowlands. Another sounded a few minutes later, followed by a challenging note from across the roadùthe idlers are territorial birdsùand a fraction of a second later Lunete heard other sounds, a clink and a thud, and then Ocher's men were racing out of the wood to either side, along the cleared area toward them, and Otto was shouting commands to his men. They spurred their horses and managed to fly out from between Ocher's closing lines. Lunete crouched low against her Butterfly's neck and rehearsed Otto's plan in the event of attack: she and four picked men who rode before, behind, and beside her were to flee onward and take refuge at a prearranged location; Otto would deal with Ocher and follow. It occurred to her that Otto might be killed. She had never thought of that before, and she was seized with panic on thinking it now. She would not leave him to face Ocher and death aloneùshe could fight at his sideù Idiot, Lunete interrupted herself, and he'd be killed trying to protect her. Best to stick to the plan. They were still outdistancing Ocher's men, and Otto yelled something. She tried to see ahead, but the ranks of men and horses blocked her view. "Splitting off now, m'lady!" the man next to her shouted, and she nodded; the others were parting now before them and she and her four escorts pounded through the line that, even as they passed, was re-forming and preparing to meet Ocher; she looked for Ottaviano but didn't see him, which lack twisted around her heart with her fear that she might never see him living again. And then what would she do? 68 'E&zabetk The sorcerer dismounted to collect a certain herb he had noticed at the roadside, which was valuable for its topical anaesthetic quality when prepared correctly. He heard the horses approaching and sighed to himself. His horse, which he'd bought this morning on seeing the excellent animal in the inn's stables (left as payment by a valet's straitened master), pricked his ears and looked back toward the approaching mass of men and horses. Five riders shot by at racecourse speed, and the sorcerer recognized them as belonging to the group whose route lately had coincided with his own. Wondering what was toward now, he rolled the leaves in his handkerchief and mounted again. The sorcerer urged his horse among the saplings that edged the forest. The rest of the red-cloaked, belligerent captain's force came along more slowly, passed, then wheeled about with drilled precision and took on the look of a formation. They were about to do battle, the sorcerer realized, but with whomùbrigands? And it puzzled him that he had not been attacked, for a lone rider is easy pickings. He worked a small spell to make himself less noticeable, a veil blended of air, light, and darkness, and he watched down this straight stretch of road as the red-cloaked captain's troops and the pursuing force, which bore a device of red tower, approached one another. They were outnumbered three to one at best, thought the sorcerer, and he acted without thinking further. Ottaviano yelped and hauled his horse up as the earth in front of him erupted. One of his men banged into him, wrangling his horse for footing and balanceùon the left, luckily, his sword sliding off Otto's shieldùand shouted curses came from every side. Horses whinnied shrilly, panicking. There was dirt flying up in the air, rocks, dustù Coughing, choking, Otto shouted a retreat order to his men, and they complied, disorderly but prompt. The dust was settling, although the ground in front of them still boiled in an unnatural way. It seethed, as the surface of a stew or overheating custard does; it rumbled in A Sorcerer and a Qentleman f-ù 69 many keys, the sounds of stones grinding together; it hissed and threw friction heat. The air above it shimmered as on a hot, dry summer day. Ocher faced Ottaviano. Otto could just see his moustaches beneath his helm's nosepiece across the thirty-foot-wide breadth of this no-man's-land. They glared at one another. "You bastard puppy!" screamed Ocher. "You birth-damned unclean dog . . ." The sorcerer listened, smiling, and saw the five riders returning at a cautious pace. He nudged his nervous horse out of cover without lifting the spell that veiled them and walked the horse until he was at the verge just opposite them where they had drawn up to the rear of the others. As one of the men went up to ask his fellows what had happened, the sorcerer rode toward the small party, undoing his concealment as he went. Someone was bellowing at the unsettled edge of his earthen barrier. Occasionally, an unseen tree crashed in the forest as the disturbance lengthened. The men with the lady drew their weapons and surrounded her as he approached, but she spoke and they reluctantly put up their blades and moved aside. The sorcerer and the lady in riding clothes regarded one another. There was some shouted conversation going on now over the seething earth. "What did you do?" she asked. "It was you, wasn't it?" "I? Do?" The sorcerer blinked innocently and smiled, tipping his head to one side. His hat hung at his back, suspended on a cord. Lunete's heart did three backflips and landed somewhere near her liver. "Uh," she said, and smiled also. He is a magician, a wizard, thought Lunete distractedly, but her smile was still there and so was his. He was so young! And so handsome. She'd thought wizards were centuries oldù The sorcerer lifted an eyebrow. "Your party appears to be in disarray," he observed. "Perhaps it would be best to regroup and continue on your way, madame." Lunete couldn't stop smiling. "Is that what you advise, 70 'Llizab&th sir?" His eyes were an uncommon shade of blue. And he was quite tall, taller than Ottavianoù "My advice is always worth its price, madame." "What price will you ask for this advice?" she asked him, collecting herself. He shrugged, smiling still. "I do not engage in trade, and you have already returned more than its value, madame," he said, bowing from his saddle, and he flicked his left eyebrow again and turned away, nudging his horse toward the re-forming line of men. Ocher was trying to circumvent the disturbed, moving section of ground. Otto turned his horse to prepare for the assault and saw the sorcerer. "Son of a bitch!" he exclaimed. "You!" The other man smiled. "Is he trying to flank?" "Looks that way," Otto replied tersely. "Mm, he'll fail," decided the stranger, studying his handiwork. "It would be wisest for you to go on your way, Captain." Otto stared at him and then saw Lunete, who was gesturing urgently in apparent agreement with the stranger. "What did you do?" The magician shrugged. Otto stared at him again, narrowed his eyes, and then shouted an order to fall back to his men. Shouts of dismay were coming from Ocher's troops, mixed with the sounds of more crashing trees and the screaming of an injured horse. Ottaviano cleared his throat. "Thanks," he said. The magician shrugged again. They studied one another. "Our paths seem to coincide," Ottaviano said after another moment. "Want to ride with us?" The sorcerer thought about it. "I thank you for your offer," he said, inclining his head. "1 will join you after completing some business which that rude fellow's arrival interrupted." Otto wondered what in the names of the stars it could be, but he nodded and turned his horse, shouting "Fall in!" When he glanced back half a minute later, he saw that the Sorcerer and a (jentteman 71 man had dismounted and was picking plants by the road, ignoring the simmering ground twenty steps away. Half an hour later, the men muttered as the magician's horse overtook them and then matched their pace at the head of the troop. They were on a pleasantly wide stretch of road, its sides guarded by tall, slender straight trees just coming out in bud. Beyond the trees lay fields of turned earth, black beneath the grey sky. "Why, hello," said Lunete, smiling. "Good afternoon, madame," replied their newly-acquired companion, inclining his head. "Hello," Otto said, "you finished yourùbusiness?" The corner of the other's mouth lifted in a half-smile. "For today." "I am Lunete of Lys," said Lunete, "and this is Ottaviano, King of Ascolet." "Countess Lunete of Lys," Ottaviano corrected her, nettled by her openness. She shrugged. "Oh, well, yes." The magician managed a graceful bow to her, from horsebackùno mean feat. "I am honored to make your acquaintance, Your Grace, Your Majesty." Ottaviano heard mockery in his tone, but again Lunete spoke before he could. "Please call me Lunete." Their new companion smiled at her, bowed again, and said, "Dewar," indicating himself. An outlandish name. "Pleased to meet you," Ottaviano said. "For a change," Dewar said, catching his eye. "For a change," agreed Ottaviano. "May I ask why you did that?" "Did?" "Blew up the road." Dewar shrugged. "Certainly, you may ask," he invited Ottaviano, without a trace of sarcasm. Duckshit, thought Otto, and said, excruciatingly nicely, "Why did you blow up the road?" 72 'Elizabeth "Wittey "To get to the other side?" Lunete suggested in a light, lilting voice. "Because it was there?" wondered Dewar, and chuckled. "I don't know, Your Majesty. It amused me to do it." Otto inhaled, giving him a hot look that was just a degree removed from a glare. "I don't like being on the receiving end of favors from strange magiciansù" Dewar interrupted quickly, hardly thinking, "Then you are in luck. I am a sorcerer." "ùsorcerers because it can be notoriously expensive." "Wise of you. However, I did you no favor," Dewar said. Lunete looked at the road and felt her cheeks grow warm. Ottaviano shrugged, not noticing. "I am nol familiar with the kingdom of Ascolet," Dewar said after a short silence, "although I believe that one of the sons of Panurgus held a barony of that name, at one time ..." and his voice trailed off invitingly. It had, at least, not been mentioned in his guidebook, but the book was years old. Ottaviano looked at the road now. "Long story," he said curtly. "Prince Sebastiano was Ottaviano's father," Lunete said softly. "He is dead." "Yes," she said. "You seek to claim your patrimony, then?" Dewar asked, and something in his tone made Otto glance at him again. He wasn't condescending now; he looked interested, his brows drawn together, his voice serious, not mocking. This was, thought Otto, the stuff that spies were supposed to find out. "Something like that," Otto said. "As I said, it's a long story." "But it can be shortened," Lunete prompted him in an undertone. "In short, yes," said Otto. "Following Prince Sebastiano's death, the Emperor declared the barony extinct and took Ascolet as Crown territory," Lunete explained. Sorcerer and a (jentúeman 73 "Ah," said Dewar. "Avril the Usurper." "I don't care how he got his throne," Otto said. "He's a son of Panurgus, he was there when the old man died, he's been able to keep it, and he can have it. I don't give a damn who reigns in Landuc, but Ascolet is mine." "Yet if your father was a Prince of Landucù" Dewar said. "His mother was Queen of Ascolet," said Otto. "By blood, not marriage." "I do seem to recall some old tale of that species," murmured Dewar, exhuming gossip and scandal from the back of his memory. Assassinations, land-grabs, marriages of convenienceù "You seem to know a fair bit of ancient history," Otto remarked. "It is not terribly ancient," Dewar replied. "So Lys allies herself with Ascolet to seek independence from the Well-wielders?" It was an innocent-toned, though leading, question, accompanied by an amiable smile and nod to Lunete. "Not exactly," said Lunete, a delicate pink again. Ottaviano recalled referring to her as his fiancee to the sorcererùa stupid slip. "In a manner of speaking, yes," he admitted. "We, ah, the other is an incidental thing." "But the armies of Lys are well-spoken-of," murmured Dewar. "Justly so," Otto agreed. "On the other hand," Dewar said, as if thinking aloud, "plainly someone objects." Lunete blushed deeply. "It's not what you think," she said. "I'm not sure what I think it is," Dewar said, amused, glancing at Otto to check his reaction. "On the one hand, someone objects; on the other, unless I have been gravely deceived, we are travelling to Lys, not from it." "It's a long story," Otto said. "Best kind," replied Dewar, overmatching his terseness. "What are you doing up around these parts?" Otto asked. "Travelling." 74 "E&zaheth Itftftey "I always thought sorcerers had hooves, tails, horns, and yellow eyes," said Otto. "In all truth, some have," said Dewar, and he turned his attention from Otto to Lunete. "Champlys is reputed a fair city." "It is indeed lovely," said Lunete. "I have heard high praise spoken of the Shrine of Stars," said Dewar courteously. "It is the most ancient Shrine of Stars anywhere in the Empire," Lunete said, "for King Panurgus founded it first of them all and placed it in the care of my ancestor Urs, the first Count of Lys." Ottaviano held his tongue and listened as the two discoursed politely, across him, about the attractions of Lys and Champlys for the better part of an hour. "You're familiar with Champlys and Lys," he remarked to Dewar finally at a convenient break in the conversation. "The place is of some renown," Dewar said. His Mada-nese guidebook had assured him of it. Not so much as all that, thought Otto. "Have you visited there before?" he asked. "No," said Dewar. "What brings you there now?" Dewar shrugged. "I travel for my own reasons, sir, and sometimes I am hard-put to find one for travelling where I do. I might say, that Lys lies between my last location and my next, and certainly that is sufficient reason for going there." "So you're passing through?" Otto suggested. Dewar met his eyes and slowly raised his left eyebrow. "My time is at my disposal," he said blandly. "I tarry when there's something worth tarrying over." "Lys may not be a salutary spot for tourism just now," Otto said. Dewar's expression did not change. "I hope things do not go so far as that," Lunete said, trying to break the tension. "So do I," said Otto. The sorcerer shifted his gaze to Lunete. "A lady's wishes Sorcerer and a (jentfoman 75 should be granted whenever possible," he said, and inclined his head to her. Ottaviano clenched his teeth and looked ahead. They approached a crossroads with a milestone for Champlor. Beside the milestone was a watering-trough for horses and oxen and a fount for human travellers which overflowed to fill the trough. At the other side of the crossroads, hard at the edge of the road, was a man-sized pillar of rough-dressed hard white stone, a kingstone topped with a good likeness of the late Panurgus. It was in better condition than the Semaris crossroads' stone. This image looked toward Lys, not smiling but with a benign expression. "Whatever else one may say of Panurgus," Ottaviano said, "he maintained the roads." "You are a fair-minded man," said Dewar. Ottaviano ignored this, turning to inform Clay that they would stop to water the horses. "We seem to have lost Ocher, sir," Clay said. "I doubt it's permanent," Ottaviano said, "so make the halt brief." "Yes, sir." Ottaviano dismounted; Lunete got down also before he could assist her and led Butterfly to the trough. Clay, having passed the order on to the men, asked his commander where he intended to halt next. Otto drew Clay to one side, watching Lunete and the sorcerer. They were talking, he stroking his horse's neck, she nodding. "I'd planned on stopping in Champlor," Ottaviano said to his lieutenant. "However. I don't trust this sorcerer, although I'd rather keep an eye on him than not." "Maybe it would be best to push on to Champlys, then?" "Maybe." Clay looked over the men, nodding. "If we'd had to fight Ocher, sir, I'd say no, we couldn't do it. But as it is . . ." "With a feed and a rest in Champlor instead of a night, they'll make it." "The horses have been ridden long, but not too hard. Easily, we'd make it, sir." "We'll go on," decided Otto. 76 'Etizabetfi "Wittey "And when you arrive in Champlysù" "We arrive. What do you mean?" "The sorcerer," Clay said, his eyes narrowing a little. The sorcerer had turned away from Lys and led his horse across the crossroads. He appeared to be addressing the pillar, bowing and gesturing, and the men were carefully and uneasily not watching him. Lunete was, though. Dewar knelt. Ottaviano saw him pouring from his wineskin at the base of the pillar and nodded to himself. "Oh. Him. I don't know. They're tricky bastards. I'd just as soon he jogged along, but I have a feeling there's damn little I might do to encourage it." Ottaviano shrugged slightly. "I suspect that if Ocher attacks, he'll find the place less interesting than he thought, and if he sticks aroundù" He shrugged again. Clay nodded. Ottaviano moved away, leading his horse to the trough. A light, misting rain began falling as they left Champlor, which was a small, fortified city on the border of Lys and Sarsemar. The rain became more determined in the last ten miles, and the horses1 hooves splashed through puddles on the road. Dewar, who by his sorcery needed no light to know the road, carried none; a soldier riding beside Ottaviano bore a torch. By its light, Dewar glanced from time to time at the other, picking up a new detail of his bearing or face each time. He was perhaps a hand's-breadth shorter than Dewar, neither bulky nor slender, and quick in his movementsù mirroring quickness in his thoughts. Dewar considered that Ottaviano had acted rashly toward him, but admitted to himself that, were he indeed a spy of Ocher {which seemed to be what Ottaviano thought he was), Ottaviano's handling of him was shrewd enough. By picking him up, Ottaviano exerted a certain control over his movements. Dewar's curiosity was engaged by the situation into which he had ridden. His knowledge of Landuc's local politics was spotty. Who was Ocher? Why was the Countess of Lys fleeing him, with Ottaviano's assistance? What would Sorcerer and a (jentteman 77 they do in Champlys, and would it be worthwhile to stay and watch this play itself out? And he thought also that he would enjoy talking more with Lunete, or flirting with her to amuse them both. His travelling was without timetable; he could linger a few days or a month and cement an acquaintance that could prove useful later. Surly Ottaviano might object, but Dewar had the clear impression that his influence over the lady was something less than iron-banded. He glanced at Otto again; their eyes met, for Otto was studying him with the same surreptitious intensity. "I thought sorcerers hate the rain," Otto said, feeling caught out. Dewar raised his eyebrows. "Your Majesty, show me a man who will indifferently stand out in the wet and be soaked to the skin, and I will show you a man who is at least half an animal. Probably a sheep." Ottaviano blinked, then smiled, then laughed softly. "Touche." Dewar smiled and looked away, suddenly liking Otto for all his bluster. He caught sight of a milestone at the roadside in the dull torchlight. "Five to Champlys," he observed. "Or fifteen." "Five. I know where we are." Dewar nodded and sighed to himself, settling in for the last handful of mud-weighted miles. Lunete left her place in the middle of the troop of men and rode-forward to join Ottaviano as the walled city of Champlys became vaguely apparent before them in the rain and darkness. She nudged her horse between Otto's and the sorcerer's and smiled at them both, unseen in the smoky light, but the smile colored her voice. "Welcome to Lys," she said. "But i thought we had been in Lys for some miles," Dewar countered. "Champlor has been part of Lys for not more than a hundred and fifty years," Otto explained. "It was some-body-or-other's dowry." "Ah," said Dewar, "from Sarsemar . . ." "It came from the penultimate Baron of Yin, actually," 78 tú,Ciza6etfi Lunete put in. "He had five daughters, none of them inclined to religion. Champion went with the youngest, who was a spendthrift and a burden to her family. Unhappily she died just ten years later of the wasting disease, which annoyed the Baron greatlyùbut it was too late to get the city back, because it had passed to her husband, my father, by the terms of the marriage contract." "Which is why Yin today is so much smaller than it used to be," Otto said. "There's a moral there." "Don't dower your daughters with real estate," said Dewar. "But he is hardly the first to learn that the hard way." "Hmph," said Lunete. In spite of himself, Otto chuckled. Behind them, Clay yelled an order to shape up; they were half a mile from the city gate now. Lunete glanced back at the sodden line of men and shook her head slightlyùthey looked as if Ocher had beaten them soundly and harried them home. But at least, she thought, nobody was killed. Otto managed it all very neatly, and the sorcerer Dewar's fortuitous intervention came in time to prevent the one potentially lethal confrontation they had. Ocher must be apoplectic with frustration. She smiled to herself and lifted her head in the rain, which had lightened to a drizzle, as they drew near the gate. The standard-bearer blew three lamentable notes on his horn. "Open for the Countess of Lys!" bellowed Ottaviano at the watchtower. "Who calls without?" cried back the watchman, querulous. "Shsh," Lunete said to Otto, and raised her own voice and her face to the tower, pushing back her hood to be clearly seen in the torchlight. "It is I, your Countess Lunete of Lys with my escort come from Sarsemar, and if you do not know me, you are a fool," she called. "Aye, m'lady," called back the watchman, and some wet minutes later the gates swung outward, admitted them, and closed behind them. Dewar began edging away from the party as Lunete J3 Sorcerer and a QentUman cù 79 leaned down and spoke with a man who stood with a torch inside, under an archway. Lunete, however, had kept her eye on him, suspecting that Ottaviano meant to tell him to begone, and called, "Wait, Dewar." Otto sighed and wryed his mouth in his hood. "At your ladyship's command," Dewar replied. "Your company has been a welcome diversion on the road. Accept my hospitality, I beg you, and permit me to offer what comfort may be found in my house to you for your courtesy." Dewar smiled and inclined his head. "Your Grace could not have bethought herself of a more welcome nor a more generous offer," he said. Lunete smiled at him and returned to her conversation with the man, which concluded half a minute later. She nodded to Otto and nudged her horse forward; Dewar came up on her left again, Ottaviano to her right, and Otto's men followed as they clopped and splashed through the dark town, past another arch, through a wide market-square, up a modest hill to a modest castle, where they were received. 8 TWO MEN SIT IN A TAVERN where the lighting is bad and the clientele worse. They are in the back, at a table barely big enough for their forearms and steins, but of a perfect size to lean head-to-head and dice, as they are doing. The room's low ceiling is simply the floorboards of the second storey, supported on timbers as thick as a big man's thigh. It is stained from above and below in a free-form mosaic of blood, urine, beer, wine, water, and smoke-circles. There are names, initials, and occult signs carved into the crossbeams, so many that the beams are nowhere square. The corbels and braces at each wall-end of each beam were decorated early in the inn's history and have been acquiring a patina of adornment since; some have become buxom figurehead-like women (some with addi- 80 ù=> 'Ltizabetfi Wittey tional heads where their breasts should be); others are fantastically Priapic expressions of wishful thinking (around these are carved many exhortations and insults); and fully half are deformed gargoyles and sheila-na-gigs. The broad-brimmed plumed hat of one of the two gamblers hangs from a set of male genitalia at half-mast over his head, getting smoked by a greasy lamp below. The walls are sparsely adorned by such lamps, whose chimneys are dirty and wicks ill-tended; they have black-striped and greyed the graffiti-laced walls with their soot over the years, and the few tiny high-placed window-panes are nearly opaque from their accumulation of grease-cemented smuts. But little light is desired by the patrons for their pursuits. The drinkers, both sullen and boisterous, prefer the dimness and fug to bright clean air; the prostitutes working the crowd, or being worked in the corners and booths, consider the bad light an ally; the host saves pennies on oil; and many gamblers' stratagems are covered by the shadows. The gambling between the two men at the small table in the rear, however, is as clean as a pair of loaded dice on one side and a touch of sorcery on the other could make it. Unlike the other gamblers, those two make little noise; the movements of their hands and coins is nearly automatic, with only perfunctory emotion expressed at a win or loss. Both are well-armed and both wear heavy leather jackets with no device; they both have well-broken-in boots and bulky, weatherproof, weathermarked cloaks in nondescript tweeds. One wears his sword across his back and the other at his side; the former, very dark but with bright cold grey eyes, is bearded and the latter, brown-haired and blue-eyed, approximately clean-shaven. "This offer of yours is a little strange," said the brown-haired man, resuming the conversation after a meditative lull. "So may't seem," his companion murmured, "yet my client, though peculiar, is able to afford such whims." He dropped the dice back into the wooden cup they were using as a shaker. "I'd like to know what your client gets out of me and my Sorcerer and a Cjentteman 81 men heading in and raising hell. I'm suspicious of a deal this sweet." "Captain Golias, I shall emphasize: nothing granted for nothing done. 'Tis required to do real damage, to face true opposition." "I'm being used as a cat's-paw, then, and I don't like it." "There's no need to engage; indeed 'twere counter to the purpose. Ride and harry." "Decoying. Decoying. They'll be after me pretty damn quick." "An it please you, take Vilamar for the winter," said the man, shrugging. "Catch them by surprise, and you're well-set for a long siege." Golias studied him: aquiline nose, elegant short beard, tanned face, callused hands clearly accustomed to lifting more than dice; yet his speech was of the Court, the old Court of Panurgus's days, and his arrogance fit his speech. The captain was perturbed by his inability to place the man's face in memory, and a prickling consciousness that the other was not what he seemed made Golias cautious. "This sounds like a load of shit to me, and I'm not touching it without hearing the full story first," said the captain. "From the man who's hiring." He was beginning to guess who the employer might be: there were few nobles alive with a long purse and a long grudge who could locate the captain in his chosen refuge. "You may hear it from me, but if you refuse the commission afterward . . ." The dark man's voice dropped ominously. "Oh?" said the captain softly. "Aye," said the other. They stared at one another. "So why have someone attack Preszheanea? Grudge?" tried the captain. "Of a sort." "Against someone specific?" The dark man's eyes were low-lidded, and they watched $, the captain's hands. He lowered his head slightly. f; "Some Court feud," speculated the captain. 82 ù=> 'Elizabeth