Domes of Fire

  ‘Our enemy seems to be doing the same things here in Atan that he’s been doing elsewhere,’ Oscagne told them finally, ‘and he’s been adding a few twists besides. The forces from antiquity behave the same as your antique Lamorks did back in Eosia and the way those Cyrgai and their Cynesgan allies did in the forest west of Sarsos. They attack; there’s a fight, and then they vanish when their leader gets killed. Only their dead remain. The Trolls don’t vanish. They all have to be killed.’

  ‘What about these “Shining Ones”?’ Kalten asked.

  ‘There’s no way to be sure about those,’ Oscagne replied. ‘The Atans flee from them.’

  ‘They what?’ Stragen’s voice was startled.

  ‘Everybody’s afraid of the Shining Ones, Milord,’ Oscagne told him. ‘The stories about them make tales of vampires and werewolves and Ogres sound like bed-time stories.’

  ‘Could you accept a slight amendment, your Excellency?’ Ulath asked mildly. ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but Ogres are real. We see them all the time in Thalesia.’

  ‘You’re joking, Sir Ulath.’

  ‘No, not really.’ Ulath took off his horned helmet. ‘These are Ogre-horns,’ he said tapping the curved appurtenances on his headgear.

  ‘Maybe what you have in Thalesia’s just a creature you call an Ogre,’ Oscagne said dubiously.

  ‘Twelve feet tall? Horns? Fangs? Claws for fingers? That’s an Ogre, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘That’s what we’ve got in Thalesia. If they aren’t Ogres, we’ll settle for them until you can find us some real ones.’

  Oscagne stared at him.

  ‘They aren’t all that bad, your Excellency. The Trolls give us more trouble – probably because they’re meat eaters. Ogres eat anything. Actually, they prefer trees for dinner over people. They’re particularly fond of maple trees for some reason – probably because they’re sweet. A hungry Ogre will kick his way right through your house to get at a maple tree you’ve got growing in your backyard.’

  ‘Is he actually serious?’ Oscagne appealed to the others. Ulath sometimes had that effect on people.

  Tynian reached over and rapped the Ogre-horns on Ulath’s helmet with his knuckles. These feel fairly serious to me, your Excellency,’ he said. ‘And that raises some other questions. If Ogres are real, we might want to re-think our positions on vampires, werewolves and these Shining Ones as well. Under the circumstances, we might consider discarding the word “impossible” for the time being.’

  ‘But you are, Mirtai,’ Princess Danae insisted.

  ‘It’s a different kind of thing, Danae,’ the Atana told her. ‘It’s symbolic in my case.’

  ‘Everything’s symbolic, Mirtai,’ Danae told her. ‘Everything we do means something else. There are symbols all around us. No matter how you want to look at it, though, we have the same mother, and that makes us sisters.’ It seemed very important to her for some reason. Sparhawk was sitting with Sephrenia in the corner of a large room of King Androl’s house. His daughter was busy asserting her kinship with Mirtai as Baroness Melidere and Ehlana’s maid looked on.

  Mirtai smiled gently. ‘All right, Danae,’ she gave in, ‘if you want to think so, we’re sisters.’

  Danae gave a little squeal of delight, jumped into Mirtai’s arms and smothered her with kisses.

  ‘Isn’t she a little darling?’ Baroness Melidere laughed.

  ‘Yes, Baroness,’ Alean murmured. Then a small frown creased the girl’s brow. ‘I’ll never understand that,’ she said. ‘No matter how closely I watch her, she always manages to get her feet dirty.’ She pointed at Danae’s grass-stained feet. ‘Sometimes I almost think she’s got a boxful of grass hidden among her toys, and she shuffles her feet in it when my back’s turned just to torment me.’

  Melidere smiled. ‘She just likes to run barefoot, Alean,’ she said. ‘Don’t you ever want to take off your shoes and run through the grass?’

  Alean sighed. ‘I’m in service, Baroness,’ she replied. ‘I’m not supposed to give in to that sort of whim.’

  ‘You’re so very proper, Alean,’ the honey-eyed Baroness said. ‘If a girl doesn’t give in to her whims now and then, she’ll never have any fun.’

  ‘I’m not here to have fun, Baroness. I’m here to serve. My first employer made that very clear to me.’ She crossed the room to the two ‘sisters’ and touched Danae’s shoulder. ‘Time for your bath, Princess,’ she said.

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s such a bother. I’ll just get dirty again, you know.’

  ‘We’re supposed to make an effort to stay ahead of it, your Highness.’

  ‘Do as she tells you, Danae,’ Mirtai said.

  ‘Yes, sister dear,’ Danae sighed.

  ‘That was an interesting exchange, wasn’t it?’ Sparhawk murmured to Sephrenia.

  ‘Yes,’ the small woman agreed. ‘Has she been letting things slip that way very often?’

  ‘I didn’t quite follow that.’

  ‘She’s not really supposed to talk about symbols the way she just did when she’s around pagans.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t use that word to describe us, Sephrenia.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you?’

  ‘It sort of depends on your perspective. What’s so important about symbols that she’s supposed to hide them?’

  ‘It’s not the symbols themselves, Sparhawk. It’s what talking about them that way reveals.’

  ‘Oh? What’s that?’

  ‘The fact that she doesn’t look at the world or think about it in the same way we do. There are meanings in the world for her that we can’t even begin to comprehend.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it. Are you and Mirtai sisters now, too? I mean, if she’s Danae’s sister and you are too, wouldn’t you almost have to be?’

  ‘All women are sisters, Sparhawk.’

  ‘That’s a generalisation, Sephrenia.’

  ‘How perceptive of you to have noticed.’

  Vanion entered the room. ‘Where’s Ehlana?’ he asked.

  ‘She and Betuana are conferring,’ Sparhawk replied.

  ‘Who’s translating for them?’

  ‘One of Engessa’s girls from Darsas. What did you want to talk with her about?’

  ‘I think we’ll be leaving tomorrow. Engessa, Oscagne and I talked with King Androl. Oscagne feels that we should press on to Matherion. He doesn’t want to keep the emperor waiting. Engessa’s sending his legions back to Darsas, he’ll be going on with us, largely because he speaks Elenic better than most Atans.’

  ‘That doesn’t disappoint me,’ Mirtai said. ‘He’s my father now, and we really ought to get to know each other better.’

  ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, Vanion?’ Sephrenia said it half-accusingly.

  ‘I’ve missed it,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve been at the centre of things for most of my life. I don’t think I was meant to sit on the back shelf.’

  ‘Weren’t you happy when there were just the two of us?’

  ‘Of course I was. I’d have been perfectly content to spend the rest of my life alone with you, but we’re not alone any more. The world’s intruding upon us, Sephrenia, and we both have responsibilities. We still have time for each other, though.’

  ‘Are you sure, Vanion?’

  ‘I’ll make sure, love.’

  ‘Would you two like to be alone?’ Mirtai asked them with an arch little smile.

  ‘Later perhaps,’ Sephrenia replied quite calmly.

  ‘Won’t we be a little under-manned without Engessa’s Atans?’ Sparhawk asked.

  ‘King Androl’s making arrangements,’ Vanion said. ‘Don’t worry, Sparhawk. Your wife’s almost as important to the rest of us as she is to you. We’re not going to let anything happen to her.’

  ‘We can discount the possibility of exaggeration,’ Sephrenia said. ‘The Atan character makes that very unlikely.’

  ‘I’ll agree there,??
? Sparhawk concurred. ‘They’re warriors, and they’re trained to give precise reports.’

  Vanion and Zalasta nodded. It was evening, and the four of them were walking together outside the city in order to discuss the situation apart from Norkan and Oscagne. It was not that they distrusted the two Tamuls. It was just that they wanted to be able to speak freely about certain things which Tamuls were culturally unprepared to accept.

  ‘Our opponent is quite obviously a God,’ Zalasta said firmly.

  ‘He says it so casually,’ Vanion noted. ‘Are you so accustomed to confronting Gods that you’re becoming blase about it, Zalasta?’

  Zalasta smiled. ‘Just defining the problem, Lord Vanion. The resurrection of whole armies is beyond purely human capabilities. You can take my word for that. I tried it once and made a horrible mess of it. It took me weeks to get them all back into the ground again.’

  ‘We’ve faced Gods before,’ Vanion shrugged. ‘We stared across a border at Azash for five hundred years.’

  ‘Now who’s blase?’ Sephrenia said.

  ‘Just defining the solution, love,’ he replied. ‘The Church Knights were founded for just such situations. We really need to identify our enemy, though. Gods have worshippers, and our enemy’s inevitably utilising his worshippers in this plan. We have to find out who he is so that we know who his adherents are. We can’t disrupt his plans until we know whom to attack. Am I being obvious?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sparhawk told him, ‘but logic always is right at first. I like the notion of attacking his worshippers. If we do that, he’s going to have to stop what he’s doing and concentrate on protecting his own people. The strength of a God depends entirely on his worshippers. If we start killing his people, we’ll diminish him with every sword-stroke.’

  ‘Barbarian,’ Sephrenia accused.

  ‘Can you make her stop doing that to me, Vanion?’ Sparhawk appealed. ‘She’s called me both a pagan and a barbarian so far today.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Maybe, but it’s not nice to come right out and say it like that.’

  ‘It’s the presence of the Trolls that has concerned me since you told me about it at Sarsos,’ Zalasta told them. ‘They are not drawn from the past, and they have but recently come to this part of the world from their ancestral home in Thalesia. I know little of Trolls, but it was my understanding that they are fiercely attached to their homeland. What could have provoked this migration?’

  ‘Ulath’s baffled,’ Sparhawk replied. ‘I gather that the Thalesians are so happy that the Trolls have left that they didn’t pursue the matter.’

  ‘Trolls don’t habitually co-operate with each other,’ Sephrenia told them. ‘One of them might have decided on his own to leave Thalesia, but he’d never have persuaded the rest to go with him.’

  ‘You’re raising a very unpleasant possibility, love,’ Vanion said.

  They all looked at each other.

  ‘Is there any way they could have got out of Bhelliom?’ Vanion asked Sephrenia.

  ‘I don’t know, Vanion. Sparhawk asked me the same question quite some time ago. I don’t know what spell Ghwerig used to seal them inside the jewel. Troll-spells aren’t the same as ours.’

  ‘Then we don’t know if they’re still inside or if they’ve somehow managed to free themselves?’

  She nodded glumly.

  ‘The fact that the Trolls banded up and left their ancestral home all at the same time suggests that something with sufficient authority over them commanded them to leave,’ Zalasta mused.

  ‘That would be their Gods, all right.’ Vanion’s face was as glum as Sephrenia’s. ‘Trolls wouldn’t obey anyone else.’ He sighed. ‘Well, we wanted to know who was opposing us. I think we may have just found out.’

  ‘You’re all full of light and joy today, Vanion,’ Sparhawk said sourly, ‘but I’d like something a little more concrete before I declare war on the Trolls.’

  ‘How did you force the Troll-Gods to stop attacking you in Zemoch, Prince Sparhawk?’ Zalasta asked him.

  ‘I used the Bhelliom.’

  ‘It rather looks as if you’ll have to use it again. I don’t suppose you happened to bring it with you, did you?’

  Sparhawk looked quickly at Sephrenia. ‘You didn’t tell him?’ he asked with a certain surprise.

  ‘It wasn’t necessary for him to know, dear one. Dolmant wanted us all to keep it more or less to ourselves, remember?’

  ‘I gather that it’s not with you then, Prince Sparhawk,’ Zalasta surmised. ‘Did you leave it in some safe place in Cimmura?’

  ‘It’s in a safe place all right, learned one,’ Sparhawk replied bleakly, ‘but it’s not in Cimmura.’

  ‘Where is it then?’

  ‘After we used it to destroy Azash, we threw it into the sea.’

  Zalasta’s face went chalk white.

  ‘In the deepest part of the deepest ocean in the world,’ Sephrenia added.

  CHAPTER 21

  ‘It is along the north coast, Ehlana-Queen,’ Norkan translated Queen Betuana’s reply. ‘These shaggy ones you call Trolls have come across the winter ice in large groups for the past two years. At first our people thought they were bears, but it was not so. They avoided us at first, and the snow and fog of winter made it hard for our people to see them clearly. When there were more of them here, they grew bolder. It was not until one of them was killed that we realised they were not bears.’

  King Androl was not present. Androl’s intellectual gifts were not profound, and he much preferred to let his wife deal with state matters. The Atan King looked very impressive, but he was at his best in ceremonial situations where no surprises were likely to come up.

  ‘Ask her if they’ve seen any Trolls farther south,’ Sparhawk murmured to his wife.

  ‘Why don’t you ask her?’

  ‘Let’s keep things sort of formal, Ehlana. This is technically a conversation between the two of you. I don’t think the rest of us are supposed to join in. Let’s not take a chance of violating a propriety we don’t know about.’

  Ehlana posed the question, and Oscagne translated.

  ‘No,’ Norkan repeated Betuana’s answer. ‘The Trolls appear to have settled in the forests along the north slopes. So far as we know, they haven’t come deeper into Atan.’

  ‘Warn her that Trolls are very good at hiding in forests,’ Ulath advised.

  ‘So are we,’ the reply was translated.

  ‘Ask her if some advice on tactics would offend her,’ the Genidian Knight said then. ‘We Thalesians have had many experiences with Trolls – most of them bad.’

  ‘We are always willing to listen to the voice of experience,’ came the Atan queen’s reply.

  ‘When we encounter Trolls in Thalesia, we usually stay back a ways and shoot some arrows into them,’ Ulath informed Ehlana. ‘It’s hard to kill them with arrows, because their fur and their hides are so thick, but it’s a good idea to slow them down if you can. Trolls are much, much quicker than they look, and they have very long arms. They can snatch a man out of his saddle quicker than the man can blink.’

  Ehlana went through the formality of repeating his words.

  ‘What does the Troll do then?’ Betuana’s expression was curious.

  ‘First he pulls off the man’s head. Then he eats the rest of him. Trolls don’t like to eat heads for some reason.’

  Ehlana choked slightly on that.

  ‘We do not use the bow in war,’ Norkan translated Betuana’s flowing Tamul. ‘We only use it in the hunt for creatures we intend to eat.’

  ‘Well,’ Ulath said a bit dubiously, ‘you could eat a Troll if you wanted to, I guess. I won’t guarantee the flavour, though.’

  ‘I refuse to repeat that, Sir Ulath!’ Ehlana exclaimed.

  ‘Ask her if javelins would be acceptable in the Atan culture,’ Tynian suggested.

  ‘Javelins would be quite all right,’ Norkan replied. ‘I’ve seen the Atans practising with them.
’

  Betuana spoke to him rapidly and at some length.

  ‘Her Majesty’s asked me to translate in narrative,’ Norkan told them. ‘The sun is well up, and she knows you should be on the road. Oscagne tells me that you’re planning to take the road leading to Lebas in Tamul proper. Atan society’s organised along clan lines, and each clan has its own territory. You’ll be passed along from clan to clan as you ride east. It’s a breach of etiquette for one clan to intrude on the territory of another, and breaches of etiquette are avoided at all costs here in Atan.’

  ‘I wonder why,’ Stragen murmured.

  ‘Oscagne,’ Norkan said then, ‘as soon as you reach civilisation, send me a score or so of imperial messengers with fast horses. Her Majesty wants to keep in close contact with Matherion during the crisis.’

  ‘Very good idea,’ Oscagne agreed.

  Then Betuana rose, towering over all of them. She affectionately embraced Ehlana and then Mirtai, clearly indicating that it was time for them to continue their journey eastward.

  ‘I will cherish the memory of this visit, dear Betuana,’ Ehlana told her.

  ‘And I will as well, dearly-loved sister-queen,’ Betuana replied in almost flawless Elenic.

  Ehlana smiled. ‘I wondered how long you were going to hide your understanding of our language, Betuana,’ she said.

  ‘You knew?’ Betuana seemed surprised.

  Ehlana nodded. ‘It’s very hard to keep your face and your eyes from revealing your understanding while you’re waiting for the translation. Why do you keep your knowledge of Elenic a secret?’

  ‘The time the translator takes to convert your words into human speech gives me time to consider my reply,’ Betuana shrugged.

  ‘That’s a very useful tactic,’ Ehlana said admiringly. ‘I wish I could use it in Eosia, but everybody there speaks Elenic, so I couldn’t really get away with it.’

  ‘Bandage your ears,’ Ulath suggested.

  ‘Does he have to do that?’ Ehlana complained to Sparhawk.