Part 44 (1/2)

'Why should I do that, Sparhawk?' she asked. 'I think Sir Kalten's come up with a very appropriate course of action.'

'You're a savage, little mother,' he accused.

'So?'

Later that afternoon, Sparhawk and Kalten had joined the other knights in the gleaming great hall of the counterfeit Elene castle. The knights had put aside their formal armour and now wore doublets and hose.

'It wouldn't take very much,' Sir Bevier was saying. 'The walls are really very st.u.r.dy, and the fosse is already in place. The drawbridge is functional, though the capstans that raise it need some grease. All we really need to finish it off are sharpened stakes in the fosse.'

'And a few barrels of pitch?' Ulath suggested. 'I know how much you Arcians enjoy pouring boiling pitch on people.'

'Gentlemen,' Vanion said disapprovingly, 'if you start reinforcing the defences of this place, our hosts may take it the wrong way.' He thought about it for a moment. 'It might not hurt to quietly lay in a goodly supply of stakes, though,' he added, 'and maybe a number of barrels of lamp-oil. It's not quite as good as pitch, but it won't attract so much attention when we bring it inside. I think we might also want to start un.o.btrusively bringing in provisions. There are quite a lot of us, so concealing the fact that we're filling storerooms shouldn't be too hard. Let's keep it all fairly low-key, though.'

'What are you contemplating, Vanion?' Emban asked.

'Just a few simple precautions, your Grace. Things are unstable here in Tamuli, and we have no way of knowing what might happen. Since we've got a perfectly good castle, we might just as well give it a few finis.h.i.+ng touches-just in case.'

'Is it just my imagination, or does it seem to anybody else that this is a very, very long summer,' Tynian asked suddenly.

Sparhawk became very alert. Someone had been bound to notice that eventually, and if they really pursued the matter and started counting days, they'd be certain to uncover the fact that someone had been tampering with time. 'It's a different part of the world, Tynian,' he said easily. 'The climate's bound to be different.'

'Summer is summer, Sparhawk, and it's not supposed to last forever.'

'You can never tell about climate,' Ulath disagreed, 'particularly along a sea-coast. There's a warm current that runs up the west coast of Thalesia. It can be the dead of winter in Yosut on the east coast, and only mid-autumn in Horset.'

Good old Ulath, Sparhawk thought with some relief.

'It still seems a little strange to me,' Tynian said dubiously.

'Lots of things seem strange to you, my friend,' Ulath smiled. 'You've turned down any number of invitations I've sent you to go Ogre-hunting with me.'

'Why kill them if you're not going to eat them?' Tynian shrugged.

'You didn't eat any of those Zemochs you killed.'

'I didn't have a good recipe for cooking them.'

They all laughed and let the subject drop, and Sparhawk breathed a bit easier. Talen came into the hall then. As usual, he had almost routinely shaken off the agents of the prime minister that morning and gone out into the city.

'Surprise, surprise,' he said dryly. 'Krager's finally made it to Matherion. I was starting to worry about him.'

'That does it!' Sparhawk burst out, slamming his fist down on the arm of his chair. 'That man's starting to make me very tired.'

'We didn't really have the time to chase him down before, my Lord,' Khalad pointed out.

'Maybe we should have taken the time. I was sure of that when we saw him back in Sarsos. We're settled in now, though, so let's devote a little time and energy to rooting him out. Draw some pictures of him, Talen. Spread them around and promise a reward.'

'I know how to go about it, Sparhawk.'

'Do it then. I want to put my hands on that drunken little weasel. There's all kinds of information inside that sodden skin of his, and I'm going to wring him out until I've got the very last drop of it.'

'Testy, isn't he?' Tynian said mildly to Kalten.

'He's been having a bad day,' Kalten shrugged. 'He discovered a streak of brutality in his women-folk, and it upset him.'

'Oh?'

'There's a n.o.bleman in Cimura who needs killing. When I get home, I'm going to slice off his ears before I butcher him. The ladies all thought it was a wonderful idea. Their approval shattered a number of Sparhawk's illusions.'

'What's the fellow done?'

'It's a private matter.'

'Oh. Well, at least Sephrenia agreed with him.'

'No, as a matter of fact, she was even more bloodthirsty than the rest. She went so far as to offer some suggestions later on that even made Mirtai turn pale.'

'The fellow really must have done something awful.'

'He did indeed, my friend, and I'm going to give him hours and hours to regret it.' Kalten's blue eyes were like ice, and his nostrils were white and pinched with suppressed fury.

'I didn't do it, Kalten,' Tynian told him, 'so don't start looking at me like that.'

'Sorry,' Kalten apologised. 'Just thinking about it makes my blood boil.'

'Don't think about it then.'

Their accents were still rough, Sephrenia had seen to that, but their understanding of the Tamul language was very nearly perfect. 'Are we ready?' Sparhawk asked his tutor one evening.

'Unless you plan to make speeches, Prince Sparhawk,' Emperor Sarabian, who was paying them another of those whirlwind visits, said. 'Your accent is really vile, you know.'

'I'm going out there to listen, your Majesty,' Sparhawk told him, 'not to talk. Sephrenia and Zalasta are hiding our proficiency behind the accents.'

'I wish you'd told me you could do this, Zalasta,' Sarabian said just a bit wistfully. 'You could have saved me months of time when I was studying languages, you know.'

'Your Majesty was keeping your studies a secret,' Zalasta reminded him. 'I didn't know you wanted to learn other tongues.'

'Caught by my own cleverness then,' Sarabian shrugged. 'Oh, well. What precisely are we planning?'

'We're going to winnow through your court, your Majesty,' Vanion told him. 'Your government's compartmentalised, and your ministers keep secrets from each other. That means that no one really has a grasp of the whole picture. We're going to fan out through the various compartments and gather up everything we can find. When we put it all together, we might be able to see some patterns starting to emerge.'

Sarabian made a sour face. 'It's my own fault,' he confessed.

'Please don't be cryptic, Sarabian,' Ehlana told him. The two monarchs were good friends by now, largely because the emperor had simply pushed all formalities aside and had spoken directly and had insisted that Ehlana do the same.

'I blundered, Ehlana,' he said ruefully. 'Tamuli's never faced a real crisis before. Our bureaucrats are more clever than the subject peoples, and they have the Atans to back them up. The imperial family's always been more afraid of its own government than of outsiders. We don't encourage co-operation between the various ministries. I seem to be reaping the fruit of a misguided policy. When this is all over, I think I'll fix it.'