The Lower Armories were far beneath the roots of Ravenkrak. They were, with the exception of the Deep Dungeons, the deepest chambers of the fortress. It was there the Storm Kings practiced their sorceries. There their most potent theurgies lay hidden. There, also, lay the treasures of Ravenkrak, the gems and monies that paid spies, bought traitors, hired assassins, and purchased arms. There too, perfectly protected, lay the Horn of the Star Rider. The Storm Kings had tamed it only to the point where it would provide food, clothing, occasional gold, and firewood. It hadn’t become the keystone of power they had hoped.
They were dank places, the Lower Armories, filthy, smelling of old mold, dark and haunted by rats and spiders. Moisture oozed down the ancient walls, slime made the floor treacherous. The ceilings remained lost in shadow. Unlike the homely, lived in atmosphere of the upper fortress, those deep warrens smelled of something Saltimbanco believed vaguely unholy.
This was his first venture into those deep places. Slipping repeatedly in his futile effort to match Turran’s pace, he plunged into a dreadful mood wherein he foresaw evil at every turn. He expected a sudden and ignominious end. He did, however, survive the journey, which ultimately led to a dimly lighted room. The cleanliness of the place was to him as water to a thirsty man. He marveled only a moment at the strange blue lighting and the weird thaumaturgical devices ranged about the walls. These Storm Kings had been called sorcerers: here he saw the proof.
They took seats at a round table surrounded by seven chairs, waited silently. No one questioned Turran. He would speak when the time came.
Brock arrived a few minutes later. His eyes widened when he saw Saltimbanco. “What’s he doing here?”
“Nepanthe’s eating cabbage now: mutton’s bad for her complexion,” Valther replied, as if that explained everything. It did, except to Saltimbanco and the woman.
“Oh!”
Time passed. Turran grew impatient. His fingers drummed the tabletop. Brock and Valther began fidgeting. Saltimbanco, as he often did in waiting situations, began snoring.
There was a nervous shuffling beyond the door.
“Well?” Turan snapped, irritated. Then, “Oh, it’s you,” less gruffly. “Come in, Blackfang. Where is he?”
The sergeant entered warily, as if walking on coals. He was awed and frightened and vainly trying to conceal it. “Sir, Jerrad has left the castle. A bear hunt. He may not return this week.”
“This month, likely!” Turran grumbled. “I wish he’d tell somebody when he leaves. Thank you, Sergeant. You can go.”
Blackfang bowed, took a last awed look at the chamber, made his retreat.
“Nepanthe, will you waken your friend?”
Fingernail in the ribs! Bane of pleasantly dreaming men since the dawn of time. Curses heartfelt and black, also an ancient custom. Saltimbanco erupted into reality.
“Ridyeh sent a message,” Turran told them, scowling. “He says our friend bin Yousif turned up in Iwa Skolovda ten days ago. There were several killings afterwards. He vanished, reappeared in Prost Kamenets, and there were more murders there. Later, he was seen at the Red Hart Inn in Itaskia, where he passed out gold like it was water. How he managed to come by it so quick is something I’d like to know. Then he disappeared. There were another dozen murders that night. And every victim, in Iwa Skolovda, Prost Kamenets, and Itaskia, was one of Valther’s spies.”
“What?” Valther jumped up, enraged. “How?...”
“I don’t know,” Turran growled. “He must’ve gotten a list. I’ll figure it out if I have to put everybody in the castle to the question.”
“I do keep records,” Valther murmured. “Who’s where.”
“Oh? That’s not very bright, is it? You’re supposed to be the spy... What the hell did you think you were doing?”
Valther ignored his brother’s ire. “Why would he be desperate to keep us from backtracking him? He’s out free.”
“Simple,” said Nepanthe. “He’s not. He’s covering someone else. Whoever got him the list.”
“Ah...”
Saltimbanco began sweating. The wolves were closing in. He had to distract them...
Turran asked, “Valt, who could’ve gotten to your papers?”
“Anybody. Anytime. I don’t lock my door. Never thought there was any need to. Anybody who had the time could’ve made a duplicate list.”
“Well, damn it, start locking your door.”
“Famous case of locking barn door after horse is fled,” Saltimbanco observed. “Great Lords, Lady, how many people in castle read. and write?” He had found his diversion. He would set them to chasing shadows. “Start interviewing them huh? But we don’t mention treachery. Maybe if not scared, traitor makes mistake. Maybe we plant new list. Not knowing everybody watching for him, he maybe does treasonous task again. Pounce! We get him! Hai! Big hanging party! Everybody turns out, much wine, much song, this humble one is hero for thinking of plan, has very good time...”
“Good idea,” said Turran. “But no hanging. I’ll want to question the man. Brock, tomorrow I want you to ask for men who can read and write. Say we’ve got some clerical work to do. Offer bonuses so they’ll all turn out. We can watch whoever responds. Now, for the bad half of Ridyeh’s message.”
“You mean there’s more, and worse?” Valther asked.
“Yes. Iwa Skolovda and Dvar have formed an alliance. They’re raising a mercenary army to attack Ravenkrak. They raised standard two weeks ago, and already they’ve gathered five thousand men. Remarkable, don’t you think? Especially considering that most of these mercenaries are southerners, up from Libiannin, Hellin Daimiel, and the Lesser Kingdoms. And their officers are Guildsmen.”
“Sounds like High Crag knew something ahead of time,” said Valther. “They’d actually march against Ravenkrak? How’1I they find us?”
“Our friend Haroun again. He’ll have command. Ridyeh says he visited the Kings when he was in Iwa Skolovda and Dvar.”
“But they can’t hope to take Ravenkrak...”
“They don’t know that. And we’re terribly undermanned. But that doesn’t worry me much. What does is why all that fuss is being made. Consider. Haroun bin Yousif is a man with a mission and a lot of talent. Between politicking, harassing El Murid, and advising the Itaskian General Staff, he’s been living twenty-five-hour days. Though in luxury, to be sure.”
“Why,” Valther mused, “would a man give up doing exactly what he wants in order to organize hill tribesmen?”
“That’s what I’m trying to get at. More, why, after he’d chased Nepanthe out of Iwa Skolovda, did he prematurely scatter them?” Fewer than fifty tribesmen had fallen into the trap Turran had set for bin Yousif.
“He’d finished his job.”
“Check. Somebody wanted us out of Iwa Skolovda. Enough to meet the outrageous price bin Yousif would have demanded for the job. And it wasn’t the Iwa Skolovdan Royalists. Remember, he was at work in the hills before we took over.”
“Foreknowledge,” Brock grumbled. “Necromancy.” He looked like he had just bitten into a crabapple. “The Star Rider getting even?”
“Possibly. But to the main curiosity. His killing spies while his army fore-recruited gathers. Why?”
“Something big is going on,” Valther averred.
“Brilliant. And it’s something we didn’t anticipate when we went to the flatlands. Something that started earlier and we didn’t notice. What?”
Turran spoke in a manner suggesting that his discourse was rhetorical till that final, plaintive “What?” Then it was clear that he was mystified too.
“We’d better sit back and wait till we find out,” Valther said. “We can hold out here as long as we have the Horn.” Murmuring, he added, “It must be him. Trying to get it back.”
“That’s the plan. We’re undermanned, but I doubt that they can get to us. If we can hold them off till winter, we’ll whip them. They’ll be trapped by the weather, at the end of precarious supply lines. I imagine they?
??ll pull out with the first snow and fall apart as soon as they hit the flatlands. Neither Iwa Skolovda nor Dvar can afford to keep them together. They don’t have the credit.”
“And next summer can see us down in their territory again, against weaker opposition,” Valther mused.
“Sounds good, anyway,” Brock grumbled. “But I wish we had a better idea of what’s going on.”
“You,” Turran told him, “I’m making siegemaster. Make this stonepile impregnable. Now, let’s tell the others. Be cheerful, make it a joke. Laugh because somebody is fool enough to come after us.”
Turran and his brothers went to the Great Hall, where they announced the forthcoming siege.
Saltimbanco and Nepanthe wandered through chilly hallways till they reached her quarters in the Bell Tower. Nepanthe settled onto a stool before a large frame and resumed work on her embroideries. Saltimbanco dumped his bulk into the comfort of a large, goosedown-stuffed chair facing the fireplace. Nepanthe’s serving girl brought mulled wine, then disappeared.
Nepanthe’s sitting room, perhaps the most comfortable in all Ravenkrak, was filled with womanly things. An abandoned summer frock hung in a corner, forgotten; a hastily discarded lace rebosa lay across one end of a vanity cluttered with cosmetics she seldom used. The rugs on the floors, the tapestries on the walls, the very scents in the air, all bespoke occupation by a woman.
It was a room of sleepy comfort, so peaceful and quiet that Saltimbanco couldn’t remain awake. A scant five minutes after arriving, he lapsed into gentle snoring.
Leaving her embroidery to brush her hair, Nepanthe gave her guest a look which would have surprised her had she known she wore it, and wondered about him. He seemed to have sprung into existence fully grown, sometime shortly before having entered Iwa Skolovda.
Past? Did Saltimbanco have one? Indeed, though few men would have taken pride in it, had it been theirs.
His earliest memories were of a picaresque youth spent in company with a blind, alcoholic sadhu (source of much of the misinformation integral to his present act-that holy man had been a thorough fraud) wandering between Argon, Necremnos, and Throyes, with occasional forays into Matayanga. That sadhu early inspired in him a powerful loathing for honest work, and, from the blind man and others into whose company their travels had led them, he had obtained an intimate knowledge of pickpocketry, sleight-of-hand, ventriloquism, and all the mummery he now used to lend credence to his claims to magical powers.
After evening old scores with the sadhu, in finest picaro style (the old man had treated him cruelly, almost as a slave), and having stolen and gambled his way into the enmity of half the middle east, he had fled to the west. In Altea he had joined a carnival following a gypsy life through the occidental kingdoms. Sometimes he claimed his name, Mocker, came from that of a character he had portrayed in passion plays, though that wasn’t true. When not on stage, or in his booth as “Magelin the Magician,” he had mixed with the crowds, lifting purses. He had been quite proficient.
But once he had slashed the wrong pursestrings and found his wrists seized in a painful grasp. He had found himself looking at a dusky, aquiline face, into rapacious eyes... He had jerked free, jabbed in a fashion learned in the east. They had scuffled, to no conclusion.
Later Haroun had come to talk, and Mocker had soon found himself in bin Yousif’s employ, as an agent to be insinuated into the camp of El Murid, leader of the horde of religious fanatics then besieging Hellin Daimiel.
Acting on inspiration, he had pulled off the coup of the El Murid Wars, successfully kidnapping The Disciple’s daughter Yasmid. The confusion in El Murid’s camp had allowed Haroun and his partisans the month or so necessary to break the siege of Hellin Daimiel and create a bloated bin Yousif reputation.
In later years he, Haroun, and their mutual “friend,” Bragi Ragnarson, had spent several years getting into and out of hare-brained adventures. Then Haroun’s conscience had nagged him into resuming his role of King Without A Throne, commander of the Royalists El Murid had driven from Hammad al Nakir when taking over. Then Ragnarson, the fool, had gotten married, and the fat brown man, in his later twenties, had found himself drifting around alone again, tagging along the carnival circuit or undertaking an occasional minor espionage mission. The relationship between the three had faded from others’ memories...
Then Haroun had materialized, accompanied by an old man filled with promises of vast wealth.
Mocker, a compulsive gambler, needed money desperately.
It had been a long road into the present, sometimes painful, usually dangerous, seldom happy. Here, in Ravenkrak, he was as at home and as near contentment as ever he had been. He liked these Storm Kings-yet the day would come when he would have to betray them...
SEVEN: Even the Sparrow Finds a Home
Fallen, fallen was Ilkazar, like ruin, like death. What more was there when that end had been accomplished?
Varthlokkur wandered away, depressed and lonely. His great work was complete. His goals had been fulfilled.
Already victory tasted of bile. Two decades he had paid for it, and now it seemed without point, possibly even an error. In destroying something he found vile he had also destroyed much that was good. For all its wickedness of heart, the corpus of the Empire had given common folk much for which to be thankful: peace throughout most of the west, a common law and language, relative social and physical security... Like maggots, Varthlokkur foresaw, a thousand petty lords would appear to devour the Imperial cadaver. The west would collapse into chaos.
His responsibility troubled him deeply.
Should he terminate his tale now? Be done with his past, with having to observe and endure the consequences of what he had done?
No, he thought not. There might be something he could do to justify his existence, to redeem the evil he had done, to ease the coming pain.
He looked up. His feet were headed north. As good a direction as any when you have nowhere specific to go. He retreated to his thoughts, harrying something he’d heard from Royal.
There was a time for everything, Royal had told him. A time for birth and death, for love and hatred, for planting and reaping, for mourning and laughter, for war and peace, for construction and destruction. And a time for the love of a woman. Only a man himself could judge when his times had come. As Ilkazar fell farther behind, he realized that, in his country way, Royal had been as wise as the priests and wizards who had taught him later. Loneliness inundated him. He missed Royal and the old woman. Hatred and purpose gone, he had receded to his point of origin, alone in a lonely world.
Loneliness had never been this absolute. Solitude he had known well during his years in Shinsan, but always the intolerable existence of Ilkazar had ameliorated that.
“Fallen, fallen is Ilkazar, that was mighty among the nations...”
The loss of his mother had left him desolate, yet that had been softened by the kindness of the executioner, and of Royal. Now Ilkazar’s streets were the dwelling places of jackals. Nothing and no one needed him. His name was already legend, gothic with darkness and dread. It would grow with time and retelling. While he remained Varthlokkur, he would move in a vacuum created by fear that he would again use the Power he had revealed at Ilkazar.
And what of womankind? he asked himself. His ignorance of the other sex was as vast as his knowledge of the Power. Too many years, formative, learning years, had been squandered to purchase vengeance. Could any woman accept the Empire-Destroyer? He was sure he’d be ages finding one such. She’d have to be as alienated as he, and as unhappy, as unwise. Where could he find a female mirror of himself?
He took another name. Eldred the Wanderer became a face familiar along the roads connecting the western city-states. He became renowned as a man pursuing a dream, though no one knew its nature-least of all the Wanderer himself. He thought he had found a worthy project when he rediscovered the wretchedness of the poor. His sorcery could alleviate their misery. He raised a poor man to power in Hell
in Daimiel, to aid his fellows, but the man proved more cruel and corrupt than any hereditary monarch. In Libiannin, a man raised less high tried torturing him to compel him to give more. Eldred became a man as despised as Varthlokkur had been feared, briefly wresting the title “Old Meddler” from the less obtrusive Star Rider.
Depressed, he fled east, to the steppes behind the Mountain of M’Hand. He found his thoughts trending darkly. Had he any real reason to live? He rehearsed all the old arguments. Then one night, in a gloomy ravine beside a small creek, with the steppe wind moaning through scrawny trees overhead, he took strange instruments from his saddlebags, drew pentagrams, burned incense, sang spells, and performed a powerful divination. Demons added their voices to the mourning of the wind. Familiars of devils came and went, smoke things half-seen. Before dawn, he had had a shadowy look down the river of time.
There were two women waiting somewhere, if he could but endure. It would be a wait of centuries, and the divination had been extraordinarily cloudy. One he would use, one he would love. His love waited in a time of flux, when extraordinary powers would be malignly dipping envenomed fingers into the affairs of men. The necromancy couldn’t be clarified. Forces Varthlokkur thought of as the Fates and Norns would be squabbling amongst themselves.
Yet he elected to live, to pursue this love-destiny. The Fates, he felt, had commanded him.
Somehow, somewhere (perhaps from the Tervola or Princes Thaumaturge of the Dread Empire), he had acquired an unshakable conviction that the Fates controlled his destiny. A collateral portion of his divination troubled him deeply. Mourning llkazar, he had sworn never again to use the Power for destruction. The divination said that he would, during the coming age of confusion. That saddened him. Varthlokkur stared into his fire, lost in contemplation. He had gained command of all sorceries while in Shinsan. Spells had been put upon him. At what cost? He couldn’t remember. His selective amnesia disturbed and frightened him.) He had become ageless, though not immortal. He would die someday, when the Fates willed, but he need never age. He could reverse his aging when he wanted, to the lower limit of the age he had been when the spells were cast.