Soon Bragi saw something moving through the green glass. Another something passed beneath the dragonship. A fin cut the surface fifty yards away.
Something exploded out of the deep. It took meat, spear, and very nearly Ragnar as the sudden jerk yanked him against the rail. The water boiled, then became still. Bragi never saw what took the rotted flesh.
“There,” Ragnar said. “You see? There’s always something down there. When it’s calmest is when you’ve got to watch out. That’s when the big ones hunt.” He pointed.
A vast dark shape drifted past the dragonship, too far down to be discerned as anything but a shadow in the green. “That’s when the big ones hunt,” Ragnar said again. He began kicking and cursing his men. They decided rowing was less unpleasant than their captain’s tireless sound and fury.
Bragi flipped a clod at a weed stalk left from last year. Luck made a contact. The stalk went down.
He rose. “When the big ones hunt,” he murmured, and began walking across the hill.
He went to a rank of graves. They contained his first wife and the children he had lost in Kavelin.
Elana had been a special woman. A saint, to have followed him through his mercenary years, to have born him a child a year, to have endured his wandering eye and affection without protest. She had been the daughter of an Itaskian whore, but she had been a lady. She remained stamped upon his soul. He missed her most when he was troubled.
There was some barrier in him that prevented his sharing with Inger that way.
Fiana had been both passion and a symbol of commitment to a greater ideal. Elana had been solid, simple, family, perhaps representing that tightest, most intense and basic of human allegiances.
Strange, he thought, staring at the line of headstones. He had not given either woman his all. He was giving Inger nothing he had given them. How vast were the resources within one man?
He was not sure what he was giving his wife-queen. Something, to be sure. She seemed satisfied most of the time.
He stood there a long time, remembering his years with Elana, and the friends who had given their days that special touch.
All that was gone. He had come to the grey days, the soft, colorless days, to which his acquaintances contributed little.
Maybe he was aging. Maybe, as you grew older, the highs and lows and color faded away, and it all got so oatmealy you just decided it was time to lay down and die.
He glanced at the sun. Time had stolen away while he stretched himself on the rack of his yesterdays. Best quit fooling around, he thought. Wouldn’t do for the King to be late for his game of Captures.
He encountered the Panthers on the road. Had he been anyone else, they would have ragged him mercilessly about the Guards’ chances. The Panthers were young and exciting and on a hot streak. They were the darlings of the sweet young things who devoured winners and scorned losers. They expected to be on top for years.
One bold lad suggested as much.
Ragnarson grinned. “And you might be in for a surprise, boy. Us old dogs know a few tricks.”
Youth received his assertion with its usual disdain.
Was there ever a time when I was that young, that self-certain, that positive about my world arid my answers? he wondered. He did not remember being that way.
They parted to go to their respective castles.
The opening minutes of the game would be free of irregularities. The judges assembled the teams at their castles. They counted heads and took names. They sounded horns when the teams were ready, and winded them again to signal the opening of play.
The stretching of rules generally began after the teams spread out to defend and attack.
Bragi’s team had cheated ahead of time. It brought to Captures some of his tricks of government. In preparation for the Panthers, a hot-blooded, round-heeled spy had been deployed.
Bragi was late. He gave the judges his name and joined Trebilcock, who clung to the edge of the gang. The youth wore a hangdog look. The others were intent on their spy’s boyfriend.
“They’re gonna bull it. They’re gonna punch up the middle with everybody,” the man said. He was team captain. His friends called him Slugbait. “They’re gonna hold a deep defense of like six guys two hundred yards from their castle. The rest are gonna swamp us, then just march back with our balls. They figure they gonna hoo-miliate us on account of we’re a bunch of old buzzards and we won’t be able to keep up. We got a couple ways to go. I figure the best is we go them one better. We don’t guard our castle. We all of us go over there, swamp their defensemen, grab their balls. We have five guys sneak their balls around the flanks. All the rest of us jump them while they’re coming back. Pile on and take our balls back away. Snakeman? What you jumping about?”
“They’re going to know they been taken when they don’t find nobody in our castle, Slug. So all we’re going to do is turn the field around. Then they start running us. They’ll wear us down. Then it’s good-bye ballgame.”
Ragnarson said, “Slug’s on the right track. But so is Snake. I say play the turnaround. Only all the way. I’m thinking we could use a variation on a Marena Dimura trick to shift the odds. When we come to their defensemen, we pick them up and carry them over to the castle judge and fling them out of bounds. That puts them six players short. Then we take their balls into the woods and bury them someplace. Then we play the strong defense on their castle. It’ll confuse hell out of them. Whenever any of their people get through, the deep line can grab them and throw them out of bounds too. We just put a few strikers out to watch our balls till we get a whole bunch of them out of the game.”
“You’re talking too much running,” Michael grumbled. “I won’t get out of bed for a week.”
“You’re younger than me.”
The men liked Ragnarson’s suggestion. It was a different angle. It would put the Panthers off balance.
A judge demanded, “You people going to piddle around all day? Let’s play Captures. We want this over by sundown.”
“Go ahead and blow them horns,” Slugbait cried. “We try it the King’s way to start,” he told his team.
Michael groaned.
Bragi told him, “I’m not so fond of it either. I counted on sitting most of this one out.”
The horns honked and snorted like drowning geese.
“Out to the sides!” Slugbait growled. “We don’t want them to see us.”
A half hour later Ragnarson and Trebilcock had established their defensive position. Their backs were toward the Panther castle. “Guess they got a little cold-footed,” Bragi gasped. His lungs ached. They had pushed hard. The Panther defenders had struggled valiantly while being thrown off the field. “Leaving ten men instead of six.”
Trebilcock was sour. “They suckered you. They knew that girl was a plant. They sent five people to your castle. The rest were out in the rocks and trees seeing where their own balls were hidden. They’ll snatch them and hide them somewhere else.”
A grin spread across Ragnarson’s face. “You’d do that, Michael. But these are kids. They don’t think they have to be sneaky.” He looked around, making sure they were free of unwanted eyes and ears. “Give me a rundown on what you’re doing and what you know. And I want more than generalities.”
Michael’s expression soured even more.
“Mike, you’re a good man. One of my best. But things can’t go on this way. I can’t go to Hsung and make promises when my people won’t do what I want. I can’t make plans if you won’t tell me what the hell is going on. I didn’t give you the job so you could play hide and seek. Here’s the word. Either you play with the team, or you’re off it.”
Trebilcock stared at Ragnarson. He seemed startled.
“I mean it. Suppose you tell me about Hsung’s plans. You know what’s going on in the east. And tell me how you know.”
“How?”
“I don’t just judge information. I judge the source, too, Michael.”
Trebilcock sighed
. He appeared upset. “Part of the deal is, I can’t expose him. He’s on Hsung’s staff. He has access to conferences and documents.”
“Shinsaner or Throyen?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters a whole hell of a lot. I don’t trust snakes, and I don’t trust anybody from the other side of the Pillars of Heaven.”
“Shinsaner. But he’s trustworthy.”
“Why? They don’t commit treason.”
“Not against the empire. They’ll betray leaders they don’t like. We came up with proof that he was trying to set Mist up for a comeback. He’d be dead in a minute if we let Hsung have it. Hsung is Kuo’s brother-in-law.”
“Blackmail?” Ragnarson studied Michael. “Nu Li Hsi and Yo Hsi were brothers. They spent four hundred years trying to kill each other. How do you know the man is feeding you good information?”
“He’s right every time.”
“You’ve got checks on him, then.”
“No.” Michael stared at the leafy earth like a school kid getting it from his teacher.
“Has he told you anything important? Anything we wouldn’t have found out anyway? You going to recognize it when he feeds you the big lie they want you to believe?”
“Yeah. He told me why they’re giving Prataxis what he wants.”
“Well?”
“They expect war with Matayanga this summer. The Matayangans have been getting ready since Escalon fell. They’re as strong as they’re going to get, and the legions are still weak. They’re going to have to fight someday, so why not get in the first punch? They’ve got the Tervola worried. They don’t want trouble anywhere else, so Hsung is going to be the best friend you’ve got outside of Kavelin. He had to give up his reserve legion to the Southern Army. Kuo is stripping the whole damned empire so he can stiffen his southern posture. The only army he didn’t hit is the Eastern Army. Nobody can figure that because there isn’t anything east of them.”
“That’s more like what I want, Michael. Why couldn’t you tell me before? Why do I have to get you mad to pry anything out of you?”
Trebilcock did not respond.
“How far can we push Hsung?”
“He has orders to get along, but they’re filled with ifs, ands, and buts. Don’t push him. He has the proconsular power. He just can’t invade Kavelin without Kuo’s okay.”
“Meaning he can stir up all the trouble he wants if he doesn’t use his own troops, eh?”
“Meaning exactly that.”
“Sounds like your friend is sending a message saying leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone.”
“You could look at it that way.”
“And you’re still provoking the Throyen partisans.”
“No. I’m maintaining contact. And that’s all. We might need them someday. They give me information because they hope we’ll support them. They set up my inside man for me. Whatever else they do, they do on their own.”
There was the slightest of tremors in Michael’s voice. Ragnarson did not think it was anger. Trebilcock was holding back.
He shifted tacks. “What’s this about Mist?”
Trebilcock sensed that his interest was not casual. “It won’t amount to anything. That sort of thing’s gone on since she got here. There’ll always be cliques that want her for a figurehead.”
“Wanting and getting aren’t the same thing. She’d never settle for anything less than the imperial power. What did you think of the wizard today? Behaving a little strange?”
Trebilcock stared at the woods. “When isn’t he strange?”
“Out of character. Throwing scowls around at people. Like trying to intimidate. Like saying if you open your mouth I’m going to give you a case of the miseries to last you the rest of your life.”
“You’d have to ask him about it. I did catch something between him and Mist.”
“I talked. He didn’t have anything to say.”
Michael shrugged.
“Reason suggests a problem would not be political. Varthlokkur doesn’t get into those games. It would be something personal. And with him personal means Nepanthe. His great obsession.”
Centuries ago the child who would become Varthlokkur had watched his mother burn at the command of the wizards of Ilkazar. The child fled into the Dread Empire and learned sorcery at the knees of Shinsan’s then tyrants, Yo Hsi and Nu Li Hsi. He had come forth from the shadow a man of vengeance and had pulled the old empire down. And when he was done he had discovered he had nothing more for which to live. Nothing except a presentiment that one day a woman would be born that he would love. If he would wait.
Waiting had become more agony than joy, for the woman, when the time came, fell in love with another man. A man who, as the fates snickered, proved to be Varthlokkur’s own son by a brief earlier, loveless marriage.
The woman was Nepanthe and the man Mocker, and they, before Mocker’s death at Ragnarson’s hand, had brought into the world a single son, Ethrian, who had fallen into the hands of enemies during the Great Eastern Wars and not been heard of again, except as the lever by which the Pracchia had compelled Mocker to attempt assassinating Ragnarson.
Ethrian. It was a name accursed.
The man who had fathered the wizard had been named Ethrian and he had been the last emperor of Ilkazar. The woman had named her child for the father, though he had shed the name upon entering the Dread Empire. And he, in his turn, had named his son Ethrian, though the child was but a babe when carried off from his parents and did not know he bore the name till later years, when he had borne the Mocker sobriquet too long to change....
Varthlokkur had, at last, attained his dream after Mocker’s death and the fourth Ethrian’s disappearance, four centuries of patience rewarded. He was obsessed with the woman, and dreadfully frightened of losing what had been so difficult to obtain.
And she? Perhaps she loved him. But she was a strange and closed and lonesome person even in a crowd, even with sworn friends, for the winds of doom sweeping the world had stolen from her everything she cherished. The last of her many brothers, Valther, Mist’s husband, had fallen at Palmisano. And the war had claimed her only son. And now she had a second child on the way and her mind was filled with a poisonous dread of what price fate would now demand....
Very softly, Michael Trebilcock said, “There is only the hint of a ghost of a rumor. My source in Throyes speaks only of matters concerning his own goals, not of Shinsan’s greater tribulations. But there is something happening in the far east. Something that has drenched the entire Tervola class in dread yet which they will not discuss even among themselves. It seems to be something they fear as much, or more, than war with Matayanga. Yet the only token of it I have been able to unearth yet is a name or title. The
Deliverer. Don’t ask! I don’t know.”
“But that’s what has the wizard all cockeyed?”
“I don’t know that. But I suspect it.”
“And he and Mist know more than they are willing to say.”
Trebilcock let one of his rare chuckles escape. “We all know more than we are willing to tell. About anything. Even you.”
Bragi considered ways to pursue the matter, possibly to dig out something Michael did not know he knew, but a grand hoot and holler broke out about a quarter mile away, somewhat toward the Guards’ castle.
“Damn!” Bragi swore. “Know what they did? Decided to stick to their plan. Come on.” He charged through the woods. Michael bounced along in his wake. In minutes Ragnarson was puffing like a wounded ox.
They joined several teammates atop a grassy slope overlooking a free-for-all. Twenty-five Panthers surrounded the Guards’ balls. A dozen Guards were trying to break their formation.
“Everybody get down,” Bragi told the half dozen men around him. “Out of sight.” He heard teammates floundering through the brush. Those idiots from the deep line had left their positions. “We’ll hit them when they get up here.” He flung himself down in the grass.
Black patches swam before his eyes. He could not breath deeply or fast enough.
The ruckus rolled closer. Bragi peeked. Not long. More men joined him. “Wait till I go,” he told them. “Give me a couple steps, then follow me.”
The Panthers had formed a wedge. Guards whooped around them like puppies yapping at a herd of cattle.
A few feet more. Now. Bragi flung himself forward, rolled into the shins of the leading Panthers. He took a half dozen down.
He heard Michael howl. He watched the lean, pale man sail into the pack. Panthers began flying out of the mob.
Bragi writhed and cursed. Somebody was twisting his arm. There was a boot under his chin. The cord of thrashing limbs atop him was growing higher.
He heard Slugbait’s ecstatic haroo. “I got one!” A portion of the melee thundered back downhill and into the woods, the Panthers baying like bloodhounds.
Two Panther ballcarriers broke loose and raced for their castle. The main whoop and holler headed that way.
Ragnarson slithered out of the pile and tackled another ball carrier. Michael grabbed his burden and did a quiet fade into the woods. Bragi yelled at and pummeled his teammates, trying to get them to eject a few more Panthers from the field.
The hulabaloo died away. Both teams faded into the woods. Panther victory horns sounded twice despite their being down so many players. From the Guards castle there was nothing but a dreary hoot indicating that one Guard ball had found its way home.
There was a lot of derisive noise from the Panther end, where their ousted players waited under the watchful eye of the goal judge.
Ragnarson and Trebilcock returned to their positions. Michael said, “Your strategy might be better suited to long Captures.”
“I think you’re right. Credence Abaca suggested it one time. Only he says when the Marena Dimura play, they tie and gag people and hang them up in the tall trees where nobody will find them. He says sometimes both sides get so busy doing that that the balls get forgotten and all of a sudden there’s not enough players to move them around.”