“They are,” Talquist agreed. “But not friendly enough.” He took a sip of the golden liquid as Dranth raised a questioning eyebrow. “You will go to Golgarn, infiltrate their networks of information that make their way back to the king. And you will tell them the same fairy tale you told me—that you have incontrovertible evidence that the Bolg king is building up his army with the intent of invading them.”
“They won’t believe that any more than you did,” Dranth said darkly. “They have the mountains to protect them. The Bolg tunnels do not approach their realm within five hundred miles.”
Talquist grinned. “Yes, you are correct. If someone were to go to Beliac, the king, and tell him such a fanciful story as you told me, he would see through it immediately. Which is why you have to let him uncover the information himself.” He drained his glass, then reached for the decanter to refill it. “If documents with the authenticity of these, enhanced a little to show that the Bolg actually have tunnels with five miles, rather than five hundred, of Golgarn, were to be found in, say, a raid of an establishment of questionable loyalty—such as your brother guild—it might cause Beliac to worry enough to go investigate.”
Dranth poured himself another drink as well. “And what would he find, should he travel five miles into the mountains?”
“An encampment of Bolg preparing for war,” Talquist said.
Dranth paused in the course of raising the glass to his lips. “But there are no Bolg there.”
“There can be. At least enough to convince Beliac that he has a serious problem on his border.”
“A charade? A simulated encampment?”
“Exactly.”
“How? How will you persuade, intimidate, or capture enough Bolg to go along with such a farce? They are singularly loyal to their king and their commander, not to mention primitive and untrustworthy. I can’t imagine they would be willing to stage such a charade, even under torture or pain of death.”
Talquist took a sip, then opened his lips enough to allow air to pass over the burning liquid, filling his mouth with the vapors. He swallowed.
“Dranth,” he said, leaning forward, “no one in Golgarn has ever seen a Bolg. Not since before the Cymrian War a thousand years ago, anyway. I could dress an ox or a gorilla in a pink camisole and prop it in the mountains with an ugly mask and a spear beside it, and the Golgarn would believe they were about to be invaded.”
The guild scion stared at the regent for a moment. A hint of a smile cracked his otherwise impassive face; he saluted Talquist with his glass, then drank.
“So are you attempting to destroy Golgarn, then?” he asked. “Mislead them into attacking the Bolg?”
“Destroy Golgarn? Don’t be ridiculous, Dranth. Golgarn is an important ally, and Beliac is my friend.”
The guild scion shook his head in puzzlement. “I am not following your intent, then. Because if you convince the king of Golgarn that the Bolg are massing against him, and he attacks, the Bolg will eat him and the entire kingdom alive, literally.”
“Beliac will not attack the Bolg,” Talquist said. “At least not alone. He will turn to me. Sorbold has a force ten times the size of the army of Golgarn which, while sizable, is certainly ill prepared to act unilaterally. Beliac is an ally who doesn’t even know that he has thrown his lot in with me yet. But he will soon.”
“Your willingness to manipulate your friends so mercilessly is admirable,” Dranth said, finishing his drink and replacing the snifter on the table, where it caught the firelight and reflected it, in a golden pool, on the desk. “Not many men have the viscera for it.”
Talquist shrugged. “I’m a merchant, Dranth. You’ve heard the aphorism that we would sell our own mothers for a profit? Well, I actually did. Got a respectable price for her, too.”
“And when the king of Golgarn joins you in an alliance against a fictional Bolg invasion, what will that gain you?”
“An army worthy of my plans,” Talquist said.
“And what are those plans?”
The regent of Sorbold smiled. “I will let you figure that out,” he said amiably, rising as if to indicate that the meal, and the conversation, were over. “Rest assured, your desire to see the Bolg king pay his debt to you will more than be accomplished. But I will share one more little secret with you, guild brother to guild brother: I need a northern ally as well. The Diviner in the Hintervold—he is also my friend, a dear one. Virtually all of the prosperity I enjoyed in my career as a merchant I owe to him; he even saved my life once. And when you see how cruel the methods are that I will use to secure his allegiance to my goals, you will fully appreciate how truly worthy I am to be considered a brother to your guild.”
Talquist pulled up the linen hood of his robes of regency. “And now, Dranth, go with the chamberlain and have a rest; we have specific planning to do in the morning. I have other things to attend to. A carnival of freaks has come into town, and I have arranged for a private showing. I love oddities and the like. Good night.”
16
The sun’s departure was fading the sky to colors of cobalt and indigo at the eastern edges, turquoise where the light still touched it in the west. Talquist inhaled the evening breeze, cooler with night’s approach and with the turn of the seasons in more northern lands. In the desert of Sorbold, autumn was mostly just a slightly fresher gust of air in the morning and evening; otherwise, the endless desert sun continued to beat down, baking the dry land into sand.
From his balcony he could see the firebrands of the traveling circus burning steadily, sending light and thin trails of black smoke skyward in welcome, an invitation to him and him alone. He sighed; there was a time when he was merely a powerful merchant that he would have been able to indulge all of his darkest fantasies in such a place, but now that he was known to the world as the emperor presumptive of Sorbold, he would be constrained to merely wander between the wagons, amused, but unable to partake in some of the more sinful pleasures that traveled with such sideshows. A pity, he mused as he came away from the window and made his way down the stairs to the place where the carnival waited. Look, but don’t touch. Ah, well.
When he arrived at the gate of the circus, the Ringmaster was waiting for him.
“Your Excellency,” the Ringmaster said, bowing low, his striped silk pants bending comically as he did.
“Oh, come now, Garth, you and I have done business for years now,” Talquist admonished. “We’ve had many high times, have protected each other’s backs in several potentially deadly circumstances. There’s no need to be so formal, now that I am, well, emperor, for all intents and purposes. You may address me as ‘m’lord.’”
“Yes, m’lord,” the Ringmaster muttered, opening the gate.
He followed the emperor-to-be through the dark pathways, in and out of the tents, as Talquist admired the strange human inventory. In one tent, they stopped before the small woman with almond-shaped eyes who sat, chained by an enormous collar around her neck, on a small stool. The woman recognized Talquist, and began to tremble violently, causing both men to laugh aloud.
“Ah, the Gwadd! I had all but forgotten about her,” Talquist said. He leaned closer; the tiny woman shrank away in fear. “No need to worry, little lovely,” he murmured, “I’m afraid I’m too important to play with you anymore.” He turned to the Ringmaster as they moved along through the exhibits. “You had best be careful if you go back into Roland that the Lord Cymrian not discover you have her. Gwadd are not technically freaks; they are old-world people, an ancient race that came over with the Cymrian exodus. She is thereby one of his citizens, and he will take action to free her and imprison you if he discovers her presence in your carnival.”
“Now, how would the high and mighty Lord Gwydion do that, unless he were to be patronizing the Monstrosity himself?” the Ringmaster asked disdainfully. “My audiences don’t tend to be the type who have luncheon invitations at Haguefort where they might accidentally drop my secrets to him.”
“Too tru
e,” Talquist agreed, wandering in front of a fragile glass tank with a floating morass of wrinkled human flesh in the water. “Now, this is new. What sort of freak is this supposed to be?”
“We call it the Amazing Fish-boy,” said the Ringmaster, tapping on the glass to waken the creature, “but as you can see, it could just as easily be the Amazing Fish-girl. We don’t know what it is, exactly. I bought it from two imbecilic fishermen from Avonderre.”
“Does it have a name?” Talquist asked, peering closer into the murky green water.
The Ringmaster shrugged. “Duckfoot Sally calls it Faron,” he said.
The creature in the tank, waking and recognizing the Ringmaster, began to hiss menacingly. Its rubbery lips, fused in the center above soft, yellow teeth, gapped at the edges over its jaws, causing water to spurt out in streams of unmistakable anger.
“Good heavens,” Talquist exclaimed, chuckling. “What a horror.”
The creature hissed again, swimming forth in the tank to claw at the Ringmaster, hatred in its cloudy eyes.
“He seems to like you,” Talquist said humorously, putting up a hand to avoid the spittle as the creature pressed its body against the glass, reaching for the Ringmaster.
In the light of the tent’s lantern, his eye caught a flash of iridescent color, a quick twinge of a sparkle in the creature’s abdomen as it futilely tried to grasp the Ringmaster with its gelatinous arms. He blinked, thinking that perhaps he had caught a grain of sand from the wind in his eye, then stared harder at the wrinkled freak’s underbelly.
He had to watch for a moment, as the layers of fatless flesh undulated beneath the water, but a few seconds later he saw it again. There were spines of a sort protruding from between the skinfolds, as if they had been tucked there, the tips of oval scales that looked very much like the violet one in his possession. Talquist felt the cold rush of excitement spread through his body, the blood rushing away from his racing brain to a heart that was racing faster, leaving him weak, perspiring.
He coughed to cover his excitement. “Where did the fishermen find this—this thing?” he inquired, trying to keep his voice light, his manner nonchalant.
The Ringmaster shrugged. “They didn’t say. Probably tangled in a net somewhere. Well, come along, m’lord, and I will show you our new maneater.” He took hold of the flap of the tent’s exit.
“Wait,” Talquist said, his voice hardening at the edges. He continued to stare at the creature in the tank, but it shrank away from the glass, turning its back and glaring balefully over its skeletal shoulders at the Ringmaster.
The Ringmaster let go of the tent flap and came back to stand beside the Regent, his eyes gleaming at the sight.
“It is a truly amazing freak,” he said, frank admiration on his face. “In all my years of travel, I have not come upon one quite so grotesque, quite so hideous, that was still alive. It’s been a windfall—our gate has increased enormously ever since I bought him.”
“I want him,” Talquist said impulsively. “Name your price.”
The words knocked the Ringmaster speechless; he laughed shortly, as if he had been hit in the midsection.
“Do be serious,” he said a moment later, forgetting he was addressing the Emperor Presumptive.
“I am entirely serious,” insisted Talquist. “I will give you ten times what you paid for him.”
The Ringmaster shook his head. “I have made that back already,” he said, his face beginning to harden at the unwanted negotiation. “He is not for sale, m’lord.”
Talquist’s hands were starting to sweat. “Twenty times, then.”
The Ringmaster turned his back and walked to the tent flap again. “That thing guttles down a gallon of eels in a sitting; it has eaten all but a dozen of my breeding goldfish, thanks to Duckfoot Sally, who risks stripes across her back to give it treats. It is tremendously hard to maintain and sickly to boot. Besides, what possible use could you have for it? No, m’lord, I cannot sell him to you, and as your friend, I cannot imagine you really want him. Come along, and I will show you some new horrors almost as fascinating.” He looked over his shoulder nervously; the regent was still staring at the fishboy, entranced. Another thought occurred to him in his desperation. “I also have a new pleasure wagon; I could have the keepers stand guard if you would like some private entertainment, much as in the old days—”
Talquist turned and shot him a look that stung like an arrow in his forehead. “My final offer—twenty times what you paid for him, and your safe passage from my lands.” The threat in his voice was unmistakable.
The Ringmaster inhaled deeply, then let his breath out slowly, seething silently. “Very well. I paid two hundred gold crowns for him—plus two,” he added quickly, still rankling at the thought of the arrogant fisherman.
“You’re a liar,” Talquist said contemptuously, “but I don’t care. I will send my soldiers to get him in two hours. They will deliver your money then, but I will be paying you in gold Sorbold suns—our coins are worth two Orlandan crowns.”
“I expect you’ll want his food as well,” the Ringmaster said angrily. “You are unlikely to have the amount of fish he requires in the middle of this desert. That’ll be costly.”
“That won’t matter, keep your food,” the emperor presumptive replied, his eyes never leaving the tank. “Now leave. I want to observe my new purchase for a while without you. It’s obvious he doesn’t like you much.”
He continued to stare into the green water, watching the pale, fishlike creature, its cataract-covered eyes following the Ringmaster out of the tent and into the darkness of the Monstrosity.
17
GREAT HALL, THE CAULDRON, YLORC
Achmed’s suspicious nature was an entrenched part of the culture he had established in Ylorc, and occasionally it made for unusual protocols that would be unrecognizable in most courts on the continent. His leavetaking was generally a closely guarded secret; whenever the king vacated the mountain, it was done not with the pomp and ceremony favored by many monarchs, but under cover of darkness, with as little folderol as possible, to minimize the number of people who even knew he was gone. The only instance that caused a deviation from this custom was when it suited Achmed’s purposes for his known enemies, as well as his unknown ones, to be aware that he was away.
The Sergeant-Major participated in the charade willingly, knowing that it served to quiet Achmed’s raging paranoia to a small degree. He did not waste his time or breath explaining to the Bolg king that every beating heart within Achmed’s kingdom was more than aware when he left, primarily because they could feel the tension break palpably. Within a few hours of Achmed’s departure, virtually every one of his subjects that lived in the tunnels of the mountains before the Blasted Heath had felt his absence, and had breathed a little easier because of it.
Achmed himself was beginning to pick up the threads of this paradox—that the only thing his subjects feared more than his absence was his presence—and it served to make him even more irritable, even more anxious. Secretly he was looking forward to seeing Rhapsody for reasons other than the ones he had stated to Grunthor. Her natural music, the vibration she emitted into the air around her, was the one sensation he had found in his lifetime that soothed the angry nerves and exposed veins in his skin, that quieted the natural prickliness of his odd physiology. For all that his journey was one of self-interest and holding people to their promises, he was almost eager to get under way so that for a short time he might find a little bit of physical peace while extracting favors owed him.
So it was with more than a little annoyance that he found himself delayed in his own throne room, a satchel in one hand, the glass calipers in the other, by the arrival of Kubila, the Archon of Trade and Diplomacy, who nervously hovered at the entranceway to the Great Hall, awaiting permission to come in.
“What is it?” the king said crossly, gesturing for the young man to enter.
The Archon cleared his throat. “There is an ambassador here to
see you, sire.”
“An ambassador?” Achmed demanded incredulously. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“Yes, sire,” Kubila replied uncomfortably. He, like the other Archons, was not in particular fear of the king; Achmed treated them with enough respect to prevent that. But he was also aware of the import hovering in the air, and it chilled him.
“Idiot,” the king muttered, switching the satchel to his other hand. “Send him away.”
The Bolg diplomat cleared his throat again. “Sire, this man has come from very far off. It might be wise to entertain his request; he claims he needs but a moment of your time.”
“I don’t care if he sailed from the Lost Island of Serendair,” Achmed retorted. He inclined his head toward the door behind the throne; Grunthor nodded and started for it.
“Sire, this ambassador is from the Nain,” Kubila stuttered.
The sound went out of the vast room. Achmed froze in his tracks, then turned slowly to eye the trembling Archon. He inhaled deeply, and exhaled deliberately. Then he handed the satchel to Grunthor.
“I will meet you there,” he said, giving him the glass calipers. The Sergeant nodded.
Achmed waited until the giant had left the room, then turned to Kubila.
“Send him in,” he said curtly.
Kubila nodded, then returned to the main doorway. He pulled open one of the two enormous doors that had been carved and gilt with pure gold in Gwylliam’s time, then stepped out of the way.
A moment later a man strode into the room. He was broad of neck and shoulder, with a chest shaped like a wine barrel and strong, sturdy legs. His height was less than Achmed’s own by half a head, but his bearing was straight and proud enough to give the illusion that he was as tall as the king. His beard, which hung to the center of his chest, was brown at the chin, silver in the middle, and white at the curling tips. His skin was tawny with a sallow undertone, the sign of a life lived within the mountains away from the sun, yet exposed to the intense heat of forge fire. As he entered the room Achmed saw the light of the wall torches catch his face, causing the blue-yellow tapetum at the back of the man’s eyes to glow in the dim hall like those of a feral animal.