Part 2 (2/2)

”That was magic.” The pale-blue eyes with their film of white lifted to his face, as if the Archmage could still see.

Oryn drew a deep breath. ”b.u.g.g.e.r,” he said quietly. ”I was afraid you were going to say that.”

”We know of no drug that will affect crocodiles, my lord,” said Rachnis. ”Not without killing them. Moreover, they come in and go out from the lake into the lagoon within the temple enclosure. To drug them would involve drugging every beast in the lake.”

Oryn raised his brows. ”So it's been considered at some point in the past, has it?”

”That I cannot say, Lord King. It is the same with the cobras in the pit of the Serpent King. And the poison that you drank at the heart of the maze in the Temple of Time . . . no one but the single Servant of Time knows whether the cup contains poison or not, but believe me, the spells we cast forth upon you a.s.sumed that it was the deadliest venom known.”

The old man leaned forward and selected a single grape from the tray before him; his black, sharp lizardlike gaze c.o.c.ked up at the king. ”Myself, I have always suspected that the rites of consecration were originated by the Veiled Priests to screen candidates for the kings.h.i.+p. We know almost nothing of the Zali Dynasty-it was fifteen hundred years ago, and even the land was different then. Myself, I believe the Veiled Priests were in fact mages: mages whose power was not as strong as the Sun Mages who backed the Hosh monarchs who truly united the realm. As far back as our Citadel has stood-long before the rains ceased to fall and had to be summoned by the magic of our order-the Sun Mages have guided the kings through their consecrations.”

”Did my father know?”

”Your father guessed.” Archmage Hathmar folded his clawlike little hands. ”It has always been forbidden to speak of these matters to anyone. The priests of the G.o.ds hold great power among the common people, especially in the countryside. But your father came to me the night before his father's consecration with some very . . . specific . . . promises of support and alliance in return for services which neither of us clearly defined.”

”Sounds like Father.”

Summerchild, seated now beside Oryn's stool, glanced up at him worriedly. She'd been only a child when Taras Greatsword had defeated the last of the Akarian kings and had ridden in triumph through the Yellow City to crown his own father, the fat, scheming old moneybags Lord Jothek, King of the Realm of the Seven Lakes. She'd just been sold to the most prestigious Blossom House in the city, whose Mother had seen promise of beauty in her skinny seven-year-old self; from its doorway she remembered watching them ride past.

Taras Greatsword, a golden-haired kingmaker and the greatest war lord of the land. His father-officially generalissimo of the Akarian armies but in actuality merely a superb organizer-slouched in the saddle of a white warhorse and looked as if he were worrying about the cost of every rose petal strewn in their path. The current Lord Akarian, then the head of the formerly royal house's cadet branch. And among them a chubby, curly-haired, overdressed little boy clinging wretchedly to the mane of a mount too big for him, looking around in worried apprehension at the crowds who cheered the end of Akarian incompetence and graft.

That memory had been in her mind when, eleven years later, she'd been informed that Greatsword, now king, had purchased her, the youngest and most choice of the perfect Pearl Women of the realm.

The memory of that curly-haired child.

She asked now, ”Is it permitted to teach those protective spells to women, lord shadowmaster? Now that the magic that gave them strength has waned?”

”Sweet of you not to say 'failed,' child.” Hathmar extended his hand to touch her wrist with a gentle smile. ”We are all of us growing accustomed. The problem is-”

”The problem is,” concluded Rachnis grimly, ”that for most of the year we have been endeavoring to do exactly that: to teach those spells to the girl Raeshaldis without, of course, telling her how they are used. And she has so far been unable to make a single one of them work.”

Oryn closed his eyes for a moment, as if hearing words he had feared all along. Then he opened them again and said, ”By the way-where is Raeshaldis?”

The house of Chirak Shaldeth lay on Sleeping Worms Street, within a hundred feet of the rose-pink walls of the Grand Bazaar where Chirak was one of the five proctors who governed mercantile law. Like most of the great houses of the city, the lower floor of the main block was given over to warehouse s.p.a.ce and its outer courtyard to the stabling of the a.s.ses and camels on whom the family business depended. Then came the kitchen and the harem, and last of all the inner garden court, like a jewel of rest from the city's clamor and stink.

A wall circled the whole of the little compound, and around the corner from the big camel gate a small door, heavily barred, opened onto a narrow stair. Shaldis couldn't recall having come in that way more than three times in her life. The teyn porter-Two Shoes, they'd always called him, not that he or any teyn ever wore such things-opened at her father's knock and regarded her for a moment with pale-blue eyes whose slit pupils widened and retracted like a cat's.

For a moment she thought he might speak. But he only made a shuffling bow and stepped back to let them in.

Another teyn-a jenny, profoundly pregnant-was was.h.i.+ng the tiled stairs as Shaldis followed her father up: its silvery hair had been clipped all over and shaved off its arms and lower legs, to keep it clean for household tasks. Despite the blue-gray skin that showed through the cheap dust-colored tunic that many household teyn wore, in the dark of the stair it looked surprisingly human. Five Cakes, Shaldis recalled her name was.

”Father-” Habnit slowed his steps as they neared the arched s.p.a.ce of the landing, with its wide windows onto the outer court. He hesitated, and Shaldis knew exactly what he was going to say. She'd been sick to her stomach all the way here from the Citadel, wondering how she was going to deal with the situation.

When he couldn't finish the sentence she did so for him. ”Is he going to have a seizure if I don't wear a veil?”

They both stopped, a half-dozen steps below the landing, regarding each other in the shadows, united by the past they shared.

”He isn't used to the new ways.” He meant-Shaldis could almost hear him think it-If he goes into one of his rages, you can leave the house and have somewhere to go. He'll take it out on me.

And on your mother.

The recollection of all her submissions, all the humiliations she'd borne in silence, all the fury swallowed so that her grandfather wouldn't turn his rage on his son's wife rose chokingly to Shaldis's throat, and she trembled as if it were yesterday that she'd been required to wash her grandfather's feet and dry them with her hair. It seemed to her that she'd spent the whole of her life, since she was old enough to stand and think and speak, defending her father or her mother or her younger brothers and sisters from that harsh-voiced furious autocrat.

And it had never been enough.

”If I wanted to please him,” said Shaldis quietly, ”I'd have married that imbecile Forpen Gamert, wouldn't I?”

”For me,” coaxed Habnit, masking his dread with a charming smile.

She sighed. Her stomach hurt. ”Let's get this over with, Papa.”

FIVE.

I thought wizards were supposed to know about things like this,” Pomegranate whispered as she strained her senses to pierce the white mists that drifted above the waters of the Lake of Reeds. Her dark eyes were sharp for her sixty-three years, but even with the acute senses of magic she could see little beyond the straw hut where they crouched-she and the former Earth Wizard Soth, and Tosu, the adolescent son of the headman of Shonghu village, about a day's walk up the lakesh.o.r.e. The fogs that cloaked the Yellow City on winter mornings were a daily phenomenon here in the northern portion of the realm, even in midsummer. Pomegranate could barely discern the s.h.i.+ning line where the shrunken waters met the long wastelands of reeds and pools that had once been deep under water, and the waters covered any possibility of using her nose to detect their quarry. Listen as she would, the soft, steady lapping of the wavelets rendered other sounds beneath them indistinct.

When it came, she reflected uneasily, magic or no magic, it would be on top of them before they knew it.

”We are,” replied Soth softly. ”And we do. But the spells that originally defeated water dragons differed from region to region, and the order of Earth Wizards wasn't centralized until long after the last of them disappeared. The line of teachers of which I'm a part originated in the south. We didn't learn the more obscure rites of the northern school.”

”Pardon, Lord Wizard.” Tosu bowed to Soth as he spoke-he was a country boy and still clearly had a lot of trouble with the idea that wizards no longer had power and that women might. ”But this is not a 'water dragon' that has returned to trouble the lakesh.o.r.e. This is Hokiros.”

And he spoke the name with awe.

Soth's gingery eyebrows pulled together; he had a thin and rather clerkish face, adorned with square-lensed spectacles, and had wound his waist-length graying hair up into a warrior's knot, mostly to keep it out of the way in case Hokiros turned out to be more formidable than the two lake monsters that had emerged over the past year from the deep waters of the Lake of the Moon. ”The rites that your father repeated to me last night-they were those that defeated Hokiros before?”

”Hai, lord.” The boy spoke with the thick dialect of the northern lakes. ”In our village the rite was handed down from father to son for a thousand years. Every seven years a man's blood was shed upon the ward stone; every forty-nine years, we brought in a wizard to renew the spells, lest Hokiros wake from his sleep and destroy all the villages of the lakes. In every village along the sh.o.r.e this was done.” His voice shook a little. Shonghu village had been destroyed the night before last; villagers, teyn, livestock torn to pieces. Soth and Pomegranate had viewed the ruin yesterday from a respectful distance, for the crocodiles that infested all the lakes had crept out from the water to devour the carrion. Even through his telescope, Soth hadn't been able to tell from the tracks whether Hokiros resembled the long-necked, sinuous dragons that had legendarily inhabited the Lake of the Moon. By the accounts of the survivors, it didn't sound likely.

As close to the village as she'd dared to get, Pomegranate had put herself into a trance, her hands pressed to the earth, trying to call forth images as she'd once done from objects her daughters used to bring her to tell stories about. But the only thing that had come to her had been a sense of darkness and size and moonlight glittering off its spiny back.

”The rites he told me of sound very like those that mages in the south used to ward against the water dragons in the Lake of the Moon,” said Soth, who as a trained mage knew thousands of spells, though he was powerless now to work a single one. ”Forgive me if I speak from ignorance, Tosu. Back in the days before there were kings, when humankind first dwelled along the sh.o.r.es of the lakes, there were water dragons-”

”This is not a water dragon,” insisted the boy. ”This is Hokiros.”

The form of the name, Pomegranate sensed, was the old form used for the names of G.o.ds. . . .

And like a G.o.d, right on cue, Hokiros appeared at the speaking of his name.

Just outside the door of the hut-which was rather crowded with the three of them plus Soth's two crossbows and his satchel of implements-Pomegranate's pet pig, Pontifer, whipped his head around, sprang to his feet with a squeal of terror. At the same instant Pomegranate heard the slos.h.i.+ng rush of the waters and felt the heavy vibration in the ground. From the lakesh.o.r.e village of Hon, where Soth (and the apprehensive Hon villagers) had calculated that Hokiros would strike next, arose the wild bleating of goats and sheep, left behind in their pens when the villagers had fled inland. Darkness thickened in the light-drenched fog.

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