“Oh,” said the Horselady, almost faintly. “Thank you.” She went hurriedly away to the riverbank, where Pretty was making the bad mistake of trying to flirt with the camel. “Get away from it, you stupid little horse! Do you want your leg broken?”
“Now what’s the matter here?” Derk said wearily, shoving in beside Kit. Kit held the scroll out to him. Derk took it and frowned at it in the growing dusk. “Oh, dear. Oh, my poor Shona! This is ridiculous. I’ll speak to the Bardic president as soon as I can, I promise.” He sat down and put his hand on Shona’s back. “It’ll be all right. I won’t let this happen. Lords, I’m tired. Is someone seeing to the Wild Hunt tonight?”
“Me.” Kit sprang up, lashing his tail. He was still extremely angry. Derk stayed sitting beside Shona, saying comforting things, but it was fairly clear to him that Shona was not believing him.
Derk sighed. “I wish Mara could talk to her.”
“Shall I go and get her?” offered Callette.
“No, no. She’s busy.” Derk did not want Callette going all that way and seeing Mara refuse to come near him. He was fairly sure Mara had not even come near him when he was lying half dead from dragon smoke. But he did not want to think of this mystifying rift between himself and Mara just now. He was not sure he could face it. He sighed again.
“Eat something,” said Callette. “Do I sound like Lydda?”
Derk managed to laugh. “Not really. Let’s find some food. Barnabas ought to eat, too.”
“Everyone’s saying he put this camp in the wrong place,” Callette said severely.
“He did,” said Derk, “but it was where I wanted him to put it, so it doesn’t matter. Shona, will you get up and eat something, please?”
“No,” said Shona. “I couldn’t.”
She was still not eating next morning. She sat wrapped in a blanket, staring at nothing with her cheeks white and sucked inward, and did not seem to notice all the comings and goings around her. The Emperor and King Luther arrived back for a conference, and so did the Chief Werewolf. Derk thought for a moment and then put Kit in charge of everything to do with the battles. The Horselady and the man with the camel left, but the man from Chell City hung around anxiously, insisting that the Duke of Chell needed Derk, while Derk followed Barnabas about, arguing with him.
“I think you could have made an effort.”
“I did, Derk. I do. I’ve tried healers and I’ve tried spells, and none of it stops me breaking out and bingeing. But I did take care to set all the battle spells in the dome before I touched a drop this time. Those are important. You ought to let me activate them.”
“You know I hate spells that force people against their will!”
“Yes, but you’ll never get them to behave like real soldiers without. Look in that dome. They’re just lying about or beating one another up.”
“I know,” Derk said sadly. “I’d hoped to appeal to their reason, but I’m not sure they’ve got any. All right. Activate those spells then. Why are you shivering?”
“Withdrawal,” said Barnabas.
Derk looked at him closely and said, “Blade!”
They were standing right beside Shona while Blade took the cold spell off, but Shona did not seem to see or hear them. Kit’s head kept swiveling to her as he sat by the river with the Emperor and King Luther. Each time he shook with rage. Blade did not understand.
“Don’t be so dim!” Kit growled at him. “You know how you felt when Dad said you couldn’t go to the University.”
“Yes, but I feel better now, after the Oracle,” Blade said.
Kit glared. “Thickhead. Nobody took me to any oracle, did they? I feel for her. I know what it’s like not to have any future.”
Blade decided to go quietly missing after that. Kit had made him feel guilty, and he was not sure that was fair. Unfortunately Callette had noticed him slipping away among the Friendly Cows, and Derk easily caught up with him. “Don’t vanish, Blade. I need you. I’m leaving Kit in charge here while we do some translocating.”
“Where do you want to go?” Blade said rather sulkily.
“University first. I have to see Querida.”
Blade sighed and took them both there.
They found Querida at the conference table again, with pigeon messages spread out all over it. There was a small stove on the table, too, and a kettle singing on the stove. The room was full of the scents of several herbal teas. Querida looked up from the elegant cup in her little dry hands.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said rather guiltily. Most of the time she felt no guilt at all for anything she did, but to see Derk standing there looking drained and unwell, and the boy—Blade, that was his name—in torn and grass-stained clothes, made her slightly ashamed of what she was doing. Well, it’s in a good cause, she told herself. On with the bullying. “I suppose you’ve come here wanting me to conjure you a demon,” she hissed.
“A demon has been conjured,” Derk said carefully, and Blade looked at him, wondering why he put it like that. “But I’d be very grateful if you could do something about a god or so. Some of the tours have got quite far by now. We’re running a little short of time.”
“You can see I’m up to my eyebrows in work here!” Querida took a hand from her teacup and fluttered her fingers across the mass of papers in front of her. “But I shall give it serious thought as I work. How do you fancy a snake god with feathers on its head?”
“I think there is one of those—on Tecahua Island,” Derk said.
Querida knew there was. He was her favorite god. “So there is,” she agreed. “Bother. It is so difficult to think of a god that someone hasn’t had somewhere. But I’ll keep thinking. I’ll let you know in a week or so. Meanwhile, as you’re here, I’d like to ask you about a couple of these messages.” She put down her cup and searched across the spread of papers, finally selecting two from opposite corners. It was like that memory game where you find pairs of cards, Blade thought. It was not a game he was fond of. The griffins always won. “Here we are.” Querida held up the first paper. “This is from a farmer in the central plains, complaining that his flocks are being attacked by small carnivorous sheep. Any comments?”
“I’ve no idea how that happened,” Derk said, with perfect honesty. Blade uncomfortably studied the flagstones in the floor.
“And this,” Querida said, waving the second paper, “states that a party of men in black armor attacked a monastery near Blendish, but were beaten off by magic. Fortunately the abbot is an ex-pupil of mine. Have you been losing people, Derk?”
“No, I have,” said Blade. “They try to escape all the time.”
“Scales is going to try to round them all up,” Derk said. “Is that all? We’ve got to get down to the Emirates today, too.”
“Well—” Querida’s hand hovered over the message slips again. This was something quite different and rather worrying, which had only come in this morning. She was in two minds whether to keep it secret or not. But probably because of that slight guilt she felt, she thought she would mention it to Derk, anyway. Her hand darted to a paper that she had set aside from the others. “There’s this. Do you know a wizard called Betula?”
Derk nodded. Blade said, “She’s a friend of Mum’s.”
“Then you’ll know that she is reliable,” said Querida, “and probably that her field of study is the nature of magic itself. She says she’s finding a steady decrease in the ambient magic over quite a large area north of Costamaret. What do you make of that?”
Derk looked perplexed. “I don’t see how she can. I always thought magic was part of the very earth itself.”
“So did I. But it appears to be leaving us,” Querida said. “If Betula is right, this is going to panic everyone, including Mr. Chesney, so I must ask you not to mention it. But just keep your magic senses peeled as you go about, will you? You might discover what’s going on. Now, if you’ll forgive me—”
They left Querida sitting in front of her papers and went out into
the deserted forecourt, where Blade said, “You want to go to the Emirates? I’ve never been there. I don’t—”
“It’ll be like going to the Oracle,” Derk explained. “I’ll show you on the map. But I thought we’d go to Bardic College first and see if we can do something to help poor Shona.”
Blade took them to Bardic College, where they drew a complete blank. Derk hammered on the great locked door repeatedly, but no one answered, not even to tell them to go away.
“They knew you’d be along, Dad,” Blade said.
“So they stuck their bone-filled heads into the sand,” Derk agreed angrily.
“Do something to them,” said Blade. “Make them forget the words of all the songs. Untune all their pianos. They deserve it.”
“Yes, but it wouldn’t help Shona. Let’s get to the Emirates,” Derk said.
Blade thoroughly enjoyed the Emirates. It was wonderfully hot and dry there, which was a treat in itself after camping in frost and rain, and he liked the Emir’s palace. It was one of the hugest and silliest buildings he had ever seen. Derk chuckled as Blade stared at its ninety-four twisted towers, its red dome, and its green and yellow checkered cupolas. “I wonder if Umru has ever seen this,” he said. “He’d be green with envy. Tear yourself away, Blade. We have to find the Grand Vizir.”
The Grand Vizir was a large man, with the look of someone who had suddenly gone thin—rather like Dad, Blade thought, looking from one to the other—and he was feverishly glad to see Derk. He led them at a trot through halls and passages, gasping out as he trotted, “It is terrible! You must see—see for yourselves. Here. Stand here. Watch that cross corridor. Here he comes now.”
A tall, thin man in a red hat crossed the end of the corridor where they were standing. He was walking very upright in a sort of stiff strut, holding both his arms bent rigidly at the elbows. “I am a pup-pet,” he was saying in a blank, toneless voice. “I have no mind.”
“There,” said the Grand Vizir as the Emir stalked out of sight. “Did drugs do this? A spell? Is it the red hat? The tourists all stare at him strangely. We try to keep them away from him. It will not do.”
“I’m afraid,” Derk said, panting rather from trotting in the heat, “that he’s pretending to be hypnotized. It’s my fault. I didn’t know he couldn’t act. I’ll try to sort him out, but it’s going to take a bit of time and tact. Have you got anywhere my lad here can wait while I try?”
“Certainly, certainly!” said the Grand Vizir.
Blade was slightly offended that Dad did not consider him tactful enough to help talk to the Emir, but he was entirely interested—though rather shy—when servants showed him to a room full of highly beautiful slave ladies, whose aim seemed to be to make Blade the center of their universe. They sat him on soft, sweet-smelling cushions, fanned him, brought him water to wash in with flower petals floating in it, combed his hair, and gave him a silk shirt because the one he had on was torn. Meanwhile six more ladies played music to him, almost as well as Shona might have played it, and another lady took his socks away to be washed. Instantly some of the others pounced on his dirty feet and washed those, too.
“Oh, you needn’t bother!” Blade kept saying, slightly to the side of each new lady. It was hard for him to look at them. Their clothes were so very gauzy that he knew he would stare and gape quite rudely if he once started looking properly.
“No trouble,” they answered, laughing. “Now you’ve arrived, this is our last day here, so we don’t mind a bit.”
Another pair of ladies came to Blade with a tiny cup of very sweet coffee and a wide tray of sticky cakes. “Take the green ones,” the lady with the cakes advised him. “Those are the ones the griffin said were godlike.”
Blade forgot to tell her she needn’t bother. He even looked at her. “Lydda was here?”
“Oh, yes!” they all said. “And we want you to tell us all about her. Did your father really make her?”
Blade enjoyed himself even more after that, telling them about Lydda and the other griffins, while they sat around him in a half circle with their hands clasped around their gauzy knees—except for the lady who had washed Blade’s socks, who was now darning them—and stared at him with wide, beautiful eyes. He felt as godlike as the cakes.
And then they suddenly all stood up. “We have to go now,” said the one with his socks. She passed the socks to him, neatly mended. “Tell the Emir that there are going to be no more slave girls from now on, here or anywhere else.”
“I—ah—” Blade began, thinking he ought to explain that the Emir was not behaving as if he would listen.
But they were all gone. They had not left by any of the doors. The room was simply empty apart from somebody’s silk scarf slowly fluttering to the tiled floor in a warm blast of scented air. It felt like a mass translocation to Blade. He was still wondering where they could have gone when the scarf reached the floor and became a folded piece of paper, lying on the tiles. Blade padded over and picked it up. It was, to his astonishment, a note from his mother.
Dear Blade,
Please give the Emir the message about slave girls. It’s important. I’m thinking of you a lot and looking forward to your visit here with your Pilgrim Party. And tell Derk that I’ve remembered about the dragon.
All my love,
Mara
“Where are all my slave girls?” thundered the Emir, just as Blade had finished putting on his socks. The Emir seemed quite normal now. He came rushing into the empty room with Derk behind him and stared about irately, more or less as anyone might who was suddenly minus twenty pretty ladies.
Blade, rather hesitantly, told him what the sock-darning lady had said.
“But there are always slave girls!” the Emir howled. “The tourists expect them!”
Derk was looking weary. “This is something you have to deal with yourself, Your Highness,” he said. “We have to go to Chell. Perhaps you could consider hiring some girls.” At this the Emir began shouting that hired girls were not slave girls, and Derk turned wearily to Blade. “Blade, if you would.”
Blade took hold of his father’s sleeve and brought them north a long way to where Derk had said Chell was. “They translocated,” he said as they arrived. Chell was perched in front of them on a hill, crowned with a castle and surrounded by vineyards. “Hey, it’s beautiful!” Blade said. “Are they really going to destroy it?”
“Chell and nine others,” Derk said. “That’s the tours for you. Who translocated?”
As they walked uphill between the vines to the city, Blade told Derk about the ladies. “I think the one who darned my socks must have been a wizard,” he said. “She had the feel—Oh, and she left a letter from Mum.” He passed the note to Derk.
Derk’s face sagged as he read it. “So your mother remembers that Scales burned me. Good of her.” He passed the note back.
He looked so strange that Blade said, “Are you all right, Dad?”
Derk just grunted and took hold of a bunch of grapes hanging out over the path. “Ripe,” he said. “Looks like a good vintage, too. I suppose they’re leaving them because of the siege. Barnabas would cry at this waste. I’ll see if I can save the grapes.”
“Don’t you want to talk about Mum?” asked Blade.
“No,” said Derk. “I want to see what’s wrong in Chell.”
But they could find nothing wrong in Chell. Inside the walls everyone was going cheerfully about the business of preparing arrows and making armor, just as they should have been. Derk and Blade were shown up to the castle, where they were met by the Duchess of Chell, who seemed quite resigned to losing her city and her grape harvest.
“It’s the way it goes these days, Wizard,” she said. “I’m sorry the duke’s not here to meet you himself. He’d tell you the same. Can I offer you any refreshment?”
Derk refused, on the grounds that they were both full of the Emir’s sticky cakes, and they went away again, through the city and downhill among the vines. “There is somet
hing wrong,” Derk said, “but I’m blowed if I can see what. Could you?”
“I thought,” Blade said doubtfully, “that they all seemed a bit too cheerful.”
“Me, too,” Derk agreed. “No regrets even about these grapes. But it’s nothing you can pin down. Let’s see if Prince Talithan’s noticed anything. He’s doing the besieging. He must have been and talked to them, too.”
“How do you get hold of him to ask him?” said Blade.
“He’s an elf, and he’s sworn allegiance,” Derk said. “He should come when I call him. I hope.” He stood still in the dusty rutted road between the vines and called out, “Talithan! Prince Talithan, I need you!”
After a short while, during which Blade was certain Derk was just making a fool of himself, a blue-green misty light swung toward them in the road like a door opening, and Prince Talithan stood there bowing. “Forgive me, my lord. I was far to the south, discussing the siege of Serata.”
“That’s all right,” said Derk. “If you’re on Serata, you must have been to Chell and made all the arrangements here already.”
“A week ago, lord,” Talithan said. “All seems in order, I have my list of expendables, and my elves are armed and ready. We shall sack each city between the battles at your side in Umru’s land.”
“Er—you’ll find the battlefield is actually about fifty miles south of where it should be,” Derk said. “But how was Chell? Did everything strike you as in order here?”
“I found nothing wrong.” Talithan was clearly puzzled to be asked. “Methought the duke seemed depressed, but that I understood. He was about to lose a city and a good vintage.”
“Ah, well,” said Derk. “It was worth a try. See if you can save these vines if you can.”
Talithan bowed. “I had that thought myself, Lord.”
When Prince Talithan had retreated away through his misty door, Derk shrugged. “Maybe that man from Chell was an alarmist. Back to camp, Blade.”
They returned to chillier, grayer climate and a great deal of bustle. High Priest Umru had made them a thank-you present of a set of tents. Don was galloping about showing the young priests who brought them exactly where each tent should be set up. Very priestly tents, they were, white and embroidered with the emblems of Anscher.