OLD DREAD RETURNS

A shadow fell across the circle.  A creature of night­mare loomed.  It wore the shape of a man and a man might have lurked within that chitinous armor.  Or might have not.

"Ma!" Lang shrieked.  With club foot and half an arm he wasn't hard to catch.

Four more giants entered the clearing.  They bore naked, long black swords with razor edges and tips that glowed red hot.

"Oh Gods," the woman moaned.  "They've found me."

Berkley books by Glen Cook DREAD EMPIRE SERIES

a shadow of all night falling

october's baby all darkness met

All Darkness Met

Third in the haunting Dread Empire series by

GLEN COOK

BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

ALL DARKNESS MET

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING  HISTORY

Berkley edition / June 1980 Second printing / February 1984

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1980 by Glen Cook.

Cover illustration by Kinuko Y.  Kraft.

Frontispiece maps copyright © 1979, 1980 by Glen Cook.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

ISBN: 0-425-06541-3

A BERKLEY BOOK® TM 757,375 The name "BERKLEY" and the stylized "B" with design are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

All Darkness Met

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: The Years 980-989 After the Founding of the Empire of Ilkazar; 0 Shing, Ehelebe 1

CHAPTER TWO: Spring, 1010 AFE; Mocker 13

CHAPTER THREE: Spring, 1010 AFE; Old Friends 24

CHAPTER FOUR: Spring, 1011 AFE; Intimations 36

CHAPTER FIVE: Spring, 1011 AFE; A Traveler in Black 45

CHAPTER SIX: Spring, 1011 AFE; The Attack 51

CHAPTER SEVEN: Spring, 1011 AFE; The Old Dread Returns 61

CHAPTER EIGHT: Winter-Spring, 1011 AFE; The Prisoner 70

CHAPTER NINE: Spring, 1011 AFE; A Short Journey 79

CHAPTER TEN: The Years 989-1004 AFE; Lord of Lords 87

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Spring, 1011 AFE; Marshall and Queen 100

CHAPTER TWELVE: Spring, 1011 AFE; The Stranger in Hammerfest 109

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Spring, 1011 AFE; Regency 115

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Spring, 1011 AFE; Lady of Mystery 123

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Spring, 1011 AFE; The Stranger's Appointment 133

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Spring, 1011 AFE; Deaths and Disappearances 138

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Spring-Summer, 1011 AFE; Michael's Adventure 148 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Spring, 1011 AFE; The Unborn 161

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Summer, 1011 AFE; Funerals and Assassins 169

CHAPTER TWENTY: The Years 1004-1011 AFE; The Dragon Emperor 177

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Summer, 1011 AFE; The King Is Dead.  Long Live the King   189

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Summer, 1011 AFE; Eye of the Storm 195

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Summer, 1011 AFE; The Hidden Kingdom 204

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Summer, 1011 AFE; Kavelin A-March 211

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Summer, 1011 AFE; The Assault on Argon 221

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Summer, 1011 AFE; Battle for the Fadem 229

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Summer, 1011 AFE; Mocker Returns 238

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Summer, 1011 AFE; A Friendly Assassin 249

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Winter, 1011-1012 AFE; A Dark Stranger in the Kingdom of Dread 261

CHAPTER THIRTY: Summer, 1011-Winter, 1012 AFE; The Other Side 267

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Spring, 1012 AFE; Baxendala Redux 271

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Spring-Summer-Autumn, 1012 AFE; Defeat.  Defeat.  Defeat.  284

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Winter, 1012 Spring, 1013 AFE; Itaskia 291

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: Spring, 1013 AFE; The Road to Palmisano 301 

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: Spring, 1013 AFE; Palmisano: The Guttering Flame 312

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: Spring, 1013 AFE; Home                                                        318

ONE: 0 Shing, Ehelebe

The woman screamed with every contraction.  The demon outside howled and clawed at the walls.  It roared like a wounded elephant, smashed against the door.  The timbers groaned.

The physician, soaked with perspiration, shook like a trapped rabbit.  His skin was the hue of death.

"Get on with it!" snarled the baby's father.

"Lord!..."

"Do it!" Nu Li Hsi appeared undisturbed by the siege.  He refused even to acknowledge the possibility of fear, in himself or those who served him.  Would-be Lord of All Shinsan, he dared reveal nothing the Tervola could call weakness.

Still the physician delayed.  He was hopelessly trapped.  He couldn't win.  A demon was trying to shatter the sorceries shielding his surgery.  Inside, his master was in a rage because the mother couldn't deliver normally.  The child was just too huge.  The woman was a friend, and the surgeon doubted she could survive the operation.  The only assistant permitted him was his daughter.  No fourteen-year-old was ready to face this.

Worse, there were witnesses.  Two Tervola leaned against one wall.  These sorcerer-generals, who managed Shinsan's armies and made up her nobility, were waiting to see the product of the Dragon Prince's experiments.

The goal was a child who could develop into a super strong, super competent soldier, thinking, yet with little ability to become a personality in his own right, and immune to the magicks by which foes seized control of enemy soldiers.

"Start cutting," Nu Li Hsi said softly, with the "or else" transmitted by intonation, "before my brother's attacks become more imaginative."

For a millennium Nu Li Hsi and his twin, Yo Hsi, had battled

  for mastery of Shinsan, virtually from the moment they had murdered Tuan Hoa, their father, who had been Shinsan's founder.

"Scalpel," said the surgeon.  He could scarcely be heard.  He glanced around the cramped surgery.  The Tervola, with their masks and robes, could have been statues.  Nu Li Hsi himself moved nothing but his eyes.  His face, though, was naked.  The Princes Thaumaturge felt no need to hide behind masks.  The surgeon could read the continuing anger there.

The Dragon Prince, he realized, expected failure.

This was the Prince's eleventh try using his own seed.  Ten failures had preceded it.  They had become reflections on his virility....

The surgeon opened the woman's belly.

A half hour later he held up the child.  This one, at least, was a son, and alive.

Nu Li Hsi stepped closer.  "The arm.  It didn't develop.  And the foot...." A quieter, more dangerous anger possessed him now, an anger brought on by repeated failure.  What use was a superhuman soldier with a clubfoot and no shield arm?

That wounded elephant roar sounded again.  Masonry shifted.  Dust fell.  Torches and candles wavered.  The walls threatened to burst inward.  The door groaned again and again.  Splinters flew.

Nu Li Hsi showed concern for the first time.  "He is persistent, isn't he?" He asked the Tervola, "Feed it?"

They nodded.

The Tervola, second only to the Princes Thaumaturge themselves, seldom became involved in the skirmishes of Shinsan's co-rulers.  If the thing broke the barriers contiguous with the room's boundaries, though, it would respect neither allegiances, nor their lack.  Yo Hsi would make restitution to the surviving Tervola, expressing regrets that their fellows had been caught in the cross fire.

The Dragon Prince produced a golden dagger.  Jet enamel characters ran its length.  The Tervola seized the woman's hands and feet.  Nu Li Hsi drove the blade into her breast, slashing, sawing, ripping.  He plunged a hand into the wound, grabbed, pulled with the skill of long practice.  In a moment he held up the still throbbing heart.  Blood ran up his arm and spattered his clothing.

The screams of the doctor's daughter replaced those of the sacrifice.

From outside, suddenly, absolute silence.  The thing, for the moment, was mollified.

No one who hadn't been in the room would know that it had been there.  The spells shielding the walls weren't barriers against things of this world, but of worlds beyond, Outside.

Nu Li Hsi sighed resignedly.  "So....  I have to try again.  I know I can do it.  It works on paper." He started to leave.

"Lord!" the surgeon cried.

"What?"

The doctor indicated woman and child.  "What should I do?" The child lived.  It was the first of the experimental infants to survive birth.

"Dispose of them."

"He's your son...." His words tapered into inaudibility before his master's rage.  Nu Li Hsi had serpent eyes.  There was no mercy in them.  "I'll take care of it, Lord."

"See that you do."

As soon as the Dragon Prince vanished, the surgeon's daughter whispered, "Father, you can't."

"I must.  You heard him."

"But...."

"You know the alternative."

She knew.  She was a child of the Dread Empire.

But she was barely fourteen, with the folly of youth everywhere.  In fact, she was doubly foolish.

She had already made the worst mistake girls her age could make.  She had become pregnant.

That night she made a second mistake.  It would be more dire.  It would echo through generations.

She fled with the newborn infant.

One by one, over an hour, six men drifted into the room hidden beneath The Yellow-Eyed Dragon restaurant.  No one upstairs knew who they were, for they had arrived in ordinary dress, faces bare, and had donned black robes and jeweled beast masks only after being out of sight in a room at the head of the basement stair.

Even Lin Feng, The Dragon's manager, didn't know who was meeting.  He did know that he had been paid well.  In response he

  made sure each guest had his full ten minutes alone, to dress, before the next was admitted to the intervening room.

Feng supposed them conspirators of some sort.

Had he known they were Tervola he would have fainted.  Barring the Princes Thaumaturge themselves, the Tervola were the most powerful, most cruel men in all Shinsan, with Hell's mightiest devils running at their heels....

Waking, following his faint, Feng probably would have taken his own life.  These Tervola could be conspiring against no one but the Princes Thaumaturge themselves.  Which made him a rat in the jaws of the cruelest fate of all.

But Feng suspected nothing.  He performed his part without trepidation.

The first to arrive was a man who wore a golden mask resembling both cat and gargoyle, chased with fine black lines, with rubies for eyes and fangs.  He went over the chamber carefully, making sure there would be no unauthorized witnesses.  While the others arrived and waited in silence, he worked a thaumaturgy that would protect the meeting from the most skilled sorcerous eavesdroppers.  When he finished, the room was invisible even to the all-seeing eyes of the Princes Thaumaturge themselves.

The sixth arrived.  The man in the gargoyle mask said, "The others won't be with us tonight."

His fellows didn't respond.  They simply waited to learn why they had been summoned.

The Nine seldom met.  The eyes and spies of the Princes and uninitiated Tervola were everywhere.

"We have to make a decision." The speaker called himself Chin, though his listeners weren't sure he was the Chin they knew outside.  Only he knew their identities.  They overlooked no precaution in their efforts to protect themselves.

Again the five did not respond.  If they didn't speak they couldn't recognize one another by voice.

It was a dangerous game they played, for imperial stakes.

"I have located the woman.  The child's still with her.  The question: Do we proceed as planned?  I know the minds of those who can't be with us.  Two were for, one was against.  Show hands if you still agree."

Four hands rose.

"Seven for.  We proceed, then." Behind ruby eyepieces Chin's eyes sparkled like ice under an angry sun.  They fixed on the sole dissenter present.

A link in the circle was weakening.  Chin had misjudged the man behind the boar mask.  The absentee negative vote he understood, accepted, and dismissed.  Fear hadn't motivated it.  But the Boar...  .The man was terrified.  He might break.

The stakes were too high to take unnecessary chances.

Chin made a tiny sign.  It would be recognized by only one man.

He had convened the Nine not for the vote but to test the Boar.  He had learned enough.  His decision was made.

"Disperse.  The usual rules."

They didn't question, though meeting for so little seemed tempting Fate too much.  They departed one by one, reversing the process of entry, till only Chin and the man who had been signaled remained.

"Ko Feng, our friend the Boar grows dangerous," Chin said.  "His nerve is failing.  He'll run to one of the Princes soon."

Ko Feng, behind a bear mask, had presented the argument before.  "The cure?" he asked.

"Go ahead.  What must be, must be."

Behind the metal Bear, cruel lips stretched in a thin smile.

"He's Shan, of the Twelfth Legion.  Go now.  Do it quickly.  He could spill his terror any time."

The Bear bowed slightly, almost mockingly, and departed.

Chin paused thoughtfully, staring after him.  The Bear, too, was dangerous.  He was another mistake.  Ko Feng was too narrow, too hasty.  He might need removing, too.  He was the most ambitious, most deadly, most coldhearted and cruel, not just of the Nine, but of the Tervola.  He was a long-run liability, though useful now.

Chin began to consider possible replacements for the Boar.

The Nine were old in their conspiracy.  Long had they awaited their moment.  For centuries each had been selecting eight subordinates carefully, choosing only men who could remain loyal to the ultimate extremity and who would, themselves, build their own Nines with equal care.

Chin's First Nine had existed for three hundred years.  In all that time the organization had grown downward only to the fourth level.

Which was, in truth, a fifth level.  There was a higher Nine than Chin's, though only he knew.  Similar ignorance persisted in each subsidiary Nine.

Soon after the Bear's departure Chin faced another door.  It was so well concealed that it had evaded the notice of the others.

It opened.  A man stepped through.  He was small and old and bent, but his eyes were young, mischievous, and merry.  He was in his element here, conspiring in the grand manner.  "Perfect, my friend.  Absolutely perfect.  It proceeds.  It won't be long now.  A few decades.  But be careful with Nu Li Hsi.  He should be given information that will help us, yet not so much that he suspects he's being used.  It's not yet time for the Nines to become visible."

Chin knew this man only as the master of his own Nine, the world-spanning Master Nine, the Pracchia.  Chin, perhaps, should have paid more attention to the old man and less to his problems with his own Nine.  Evidence of the man's true identity was available, had he but looked for it.

"And the child?" Chin asked.

"It's not yet his time.  He'll be protected by The Hidden Kingdom."

That name was a mystery of the Circle of which Chin was junior member.  Ehelebe.  The Hidden Kingdom.  The Power behind all Powers.  Already the Pracchia secretly ruled a tenth of the world.  Someday, once the might of Shinsan became its tool, Ehelebe would control the entire world.

"He'll be prepared for the day."

"It is well."

Chin kept his eyes downcast, though the ruby eyepieces of his mask concealed them.  Like the Bear, he had his reservations and ambitions.  He hoped he hid them better than did Ko Feng.

"Farewell, then." The bent old man returned to his hiding place wearing an amused smile.

Moments later a winged horse took flight from behind The Yellow-Eyed Dragon, coursed across the moon into the mysteries of the night.

"Lang!  Tarn!" she called.  "Come eat." The boys glanced from their clay marbles to the crude hut, crossed gazes.  Lang bent to shoot again.  "Lang!  Tarn!  You come here right now!" The boys sighed, shrugged, gathered their marbles.  It was a conundrum.  Mothers, from the dawn of time, never had understood the importance of finishing the game.

There in the Yan-lin Kuo Forest, astride Shinsan's nebulous eastern border, they called her The Hag of The Wood even though she hadn't yet reached her twentieth birthday.  With woodcutters and charcoal-burners she plied the ancient trade, and for their wives and daughters she crafted petty charms and wove weak spells.  She was sufficiently tainted by the Power to perform simple magicks.  Those and her sex were all she had.

Her sons entered the hut, Tam limping on his club foot.

The meal wasn't much.  Boiled cabbage.  No meat.  But it was as good as the best forest people had.  In Yan-lin Kuo the well-to-do looked at poverty from the belly side.

"Anybody home?"

"Tran!" Happiness illuminated the woman's face.

A youth of seventeen pushed inside, a rabbit dangling from his left hand.  A tall man, he swept her into the bow of his right arm, planted a kiss on her cheek.  "And how are you boys?"

Lang and Tam grinned.

Tran wasn't of the majority race of Shinsan.  The forest people, who had been under Dread Empire suzerainty for a historically brief time, had a more mahogany cast of skin, yet racially were akin to the whites of the west.  Culturally they were ages behind either, having entered the Iron Age solely by virtue of trade.  In their crude way they were as cruel as their rulers.

Of his people Tran was the sole person for whom the woman felt anything.  And her feelings were reciprocated.  There was an unspoken understanding: they would eventually marry.

Tran was a woodsman and trapper.  He always provided for the Hag, asking nothing in return.  And consequently received more than any who paid.

The boys were young, but they knew about men and women.  They gobbled cabbage, then abandoned the hut.

They resumed their game.  Neither gained much advantage.

A shadow fell across the circle.  Tam looked up.

A creature of nightmare loomed over Lang.  It wore the shape of a man, and a man might have lurked within that chitinous black armor.  Or a devil.  There was no visible evidence either way.

He was huge, six inches taller than Tran, the tallest man Tam knew.  He was heavier of build.

He stared at Tam for several seconds, then gestured.

"Lang," Tam said softly.

Four more giants entered the clearing, silently as death by night.  Were they human?  Even their faces were concealed behind masks showing crystal squares where eyeholes should be.

Lang stared.

These four bore naked, long black swords with razor edges and tips that glowed red hot.

"Ma!" Lang shrieked, scampering toward the hut.

Tam shrieked, "Monsters!" and pursued Lang.

With club foot and half an arm he wasn't much of a runner.  The first giant caught him easily.

The Hag and Tran burst from the hut.  Lang scooted round and clung to Tran's leg, head leaning against his mother's thigh.

Tam squirmed and squealed.  The giant restrained him, and otherwise ignored him.

"Oh, Gods," the woman moaned.  "They've found me." Tran seemed to know what she meant.

He selected a heavy stick from her woodpile.

Tarn's captor passed him to one of his cohorts, drew his blade.  Indigo-purple oil seemed to run its length.  It swayed like a cobra about to strike.

"Tran, no.  You can't stop them.  Save yourself."

Tran moved toward the giant.

"Tran, please.  Look at their badges.  They're from the Imperial Standard.  The Dragon sent them."

Sense gradually penetrated Tran's brain.  He stood no chance against the least of Shinsan's soldiers.  No one alive had much chance against men of the Imperial Standard Legion.  That was no legion brag.  These men had trained since their third birthdays.  Fighting was their way of life, their religion.  They had been chosen from Shinsan's healthiest, stoutest children.  They were smart, and utterly without fear.  Their confidence in their invincibility was absolute.

Tran could only get himself killed.

"Please, Tran.  It's over.  There's nothing you can do.  I'm dead."

The hunter reflected.  His thoughts were shaped by forest life.  He decided.

Some might have called him coward.  But Tran's people were realists.  He would be useless to anyone hanging from a spike which had been driven into the base of his skull, while his entrails hung out and his hands and feet lay on the ground before him.

He grabbed Lang and ran.

No one pursued him.

He stopped running once he reached cover.

He watched.

The soldiers shed their armor.

They had to be following orders.  They didn't rape and plunder like foreign barbarians.  They did what they were told, and only what they were told, and their service was reward enough.

The woman's screams ripped the afternoon air.

They didn't kill Tam, just made him watch.

In all things there are imponderables, intangibles, and unpredicatables.  The most careful plan cannot account for every minuscule factor.  The greatest necromancer cannot divine precisely enough to define the future till it becomes predestined.  In every human enterprise the planners and seers deal with and interpret only the things they know.  Then they usually interpret incorrectly.

But, then, even the gods are fallible.  For who created Man?

Some men call the finagle factor Fate.

The five who had gone to the Hag's hut became victims of the unpredictable.

Tam whimpered in their grasp, remembering the security of his mother's arms when wolf calls tormented the night and chill north winds whipped their little fire's flames.  He remembered and wept.  And he remembered the name Nu Li Hsi.

The forest straddled Shinsan's frontier with Han Chin, which was more a tribal territory than established state.  The Han Chin generally tried not to attract attention, but sometimes lacked restraint.

There were a hundred raiders in the party which attacked the five.  Forty-three didn't live to see home again.  That was why the world so feared the soldiers of Shinsan.

The survivors took Tam with them believing anyone important to the legionnaires must be worth a ransom.

Nobody made an offer.

The Han Chin taught the boy fear.  They made of him a slave and toy, and when it was their mood to amuse themselves with howls, they tortured him.

They didn't know who he was, but he was of Shinsan and helpless.  That was enough.

There was a new man among those who met, though only he, Chin, and Ko Feng knew.  It was ever thus with the Nines.  Some came, some went.  Few recognized the changes.

The conspiracy was immortal.

"There's a problem," Chin told his audience.  "The Han Chin have captured our candidate.  The western situation being tense, this places a question before the Nine."

Chin had had his instructions.  "The Princes Thaumaturge have chivvied Varthlokkur till his only escape can be to set the west aflame.  I suggest we suborn the scheme and assume it for our own, nudging at the right moment, till it can rid us of the Princes.  Come.  Gather round.  I want to repeat a divination."

He worked with the deftness of centuries of experience, nursing clouds from a tiny brazier.  They boiled up and turned in upon themselves, not a wisp escaping.  Tiny lightning bolts ripped through....

"Trela stri!  Sen me stri!" Chin commanded.  "Azzari an walla in walli stri!"

The cloud whispered in the same tongue.  Chin gave instructions in his own language.  "The fate, again, of the boy...."

That which lived beyond the cloud muttered something impatient.

It flicked over the past, showing them the familiar tale of Varthlokkur, and showed them that wizard's future, and the future of the boy who dwelt with the Han Chin.  Nebulously.  The thing behind the cloud could not, or would not, define the parameters.

There were those imponderables, intangibles, and unpredicatables.

As one, Chin's associates sighed.

"The proposal before us is this: Do we concentrate on shaping these destinies to our advantage?  For a time the west would demand our complete attention.  The yield?  Our goals achieved at a tenth the price anticipated."

The vote was unanimous.

Chin made a sign before the Nine departed.

The one who remained was different.  Chin said, "Lord Wu, you're our brother in the east.  The boy will be your concern.  Prepare him to assume his father's throne."

Wu bowed.

Once Wu departed, that secret door opened.  "Excellent," said the bent old man.  "Everything is going perfectly.  I congratulate you.  You're invaluable to the Pracchia.  We'll call you to meet the others soon."

Chin's hidden eyes narrowed.  His Nine-mask, arrogantly, merely reversed his Tervola mask.  The others wore masks meant to conceal identities.  Chin was mocking everyone....

Again the old man departed wearing a small, secretive smile.

Tam was nine when Shinsan invaded Han Chin.  It was a brief little war, though bloody.  A handful of sorcerer's apprentices guided legionnaires to the hiding places of the natives, who quickly died.

The man in the woods didn't understand.

For four years Tran had watched and waited.  Now he moved.  He seized Tam and fled to the cave where he lived with Lang.

The soldiers came next morning.

Tran wept.  "It isn't fair," he whispered.  "It just isn't fair." He prepared to die fighting.

A thin man in black, wearing a golden locust mask, entered the circle of soldiers.  "This one?" He indicated Tam.

"Yes, Lord Wu."

Wu faced Tam, knelt.  "Greetings, Lord." He used words meaning Lord of Lords.  O Shing.  It would become a title.  "My Prince."

Tran, Lang, Tam stared.  What insanity was this?

"Who are the others?" Wu asked, rising.

"The child of the woman, Lord.  They believe themselves brothers.  The other calls himself Tran.  One of the forest people.  The woman's lover.  He protected the boy the best he could the past four years.  A good and faithful man."

"Do him honor, then.  Place him at O Shing's side." Again that Lord of Lords, so sudden and confusing.

Tran didn't relax.

Wu asked him, "You know me?"

"No."

"I am Wu, of the Tervola.  Lord of Liaontung and Yan-lin Kuo, and now of Han Chin.  My legion is the Seventeenth.  The

Council has directed me to recover the son of the Dragon Prince."

Tran remained silent.  He didn't trust himself.  Tarn looked from one man to the other.

"The boy with the handicaps.  He's the child of Nu Li Hsi.  The woman kidnapped him the day of his birth.  Those who came before....  They were emissaries of his father."

Tran said nothing, though he knew the woman's tale.

Wu was impatient with resistance.  "Disarm him," he ordered.  "Bring him along."

The soldiers did it in an instant, then took the three to Wu's citadel at Liaontung.

TWO:  Mocker

These things sometimes begin subtly.  For Mocker it started when a dream came true.

Dream would become nightmare before week's end.

He had an invitation to Castle Krief.  He.  Mocker.  The fat little brown man whose family lived in abject poverty in a Vorgreberg slum, who, himself, scrabbled for pennies on the fringes of the law.  The invitation had so delighted him that he actually had swallowed his pride and allowed his friend the Marshall to loan him money.

He arrived at the Palace gate grinning from one plump brown ear to the other, his invitation clutched in one hand, his wife in the other.

"Self, am convinced old friend Bear gone soft behind eyes, absolute," he told Nepanthe.  "Inviting worst of worse, self.  Not so, wife of same, certitude.  Hai!  Maybeso, high places lonely.  Pacificity like cancer, eating silent, sapping manhood.  Calls in old friend of former time, hoping rejuvenation of spirit."

He had been all mouth since the invitation had come, though, briefly, he had been suicidally down.  The Marshall of all Kavelin inviting somebody like him to the Victory Day celebrations?  A mockery.  It was some cruel joke....

"Quit bubbling and bouncing," his wife murmured.  "Want them to think you're some drunken street rowdy?"

"Heart's Desire.  Doe's Eyes.  Is truth, absolute.  Am same.  Have wounds to prove same.  Scars.  Count them...."

She laughed.  And thought, I'll give Bragi a hug that'll break his ribs.

It seemed ages since they had been this happy, an eon since laughter had tickled her tonsils and burst past her lips against any ability to control.

Fate  hadn't been kind to them.  Nothing Mocker tried worked.  Or, if it did, he would suffer paroxysms of optimism, begin gambling, sure he'd make a killing, and would lose everything.

Yet they had their love.  They never lost that, even when luck turned its worst.  Inside the tiny, triangular cosmos described by them and their son, an approach to perfection remained.

Physically, the years had treated Nepanthe well.  Though forty-one, she still looked to be in her early thirties.  The terrible cruelty of her poverty had ravaged her spirit more than her flesh.

Mocker was another tale.  Most of his scars had been laid on by the fists and knives of enemies.  He was indomitable, forever certain of his high destiny.

The guard at the Palace gate was a soldier of the new national army.  The Marshall had been building it since his victory at Baxendala.  The sentry was a polite young man of Wesson ancestry who needed convincing that at least one of them wasn't a party crasher.

"Where's your carriage?" he asked.  "Everyone comes in a carriage."

"Not all of us can afford them.  But my husband was one of the heroes of the war." Nepanthe did Mocker's talking when clarity was essential.  "Isn't the invitation valid?"

"Yes.  All right.  He can go in.  But who are you?" The woman before him as tall and pale and cool.  Almost regal.

Nepanthe had, for this evening, summoned all the aristo­cratic bearing that had been hers before she had been stricken by love for the madman she had married....  Oh, it seemed ages ago, now.

"His wife.  I said he was my husband."

The soldier had all a Kaveliner's ethnic consciousness.  His surprise showed.

"Should we produce marriage papers?  Or would you rather he went and brought the Marshall to vouch for me?" Her voice was edged with sarcasm that cut like razors.  She could make of words lethal weapons.

Mocker just stood there grinning, shuffling restlessly.

The Marshall did have strange friends.  The soldier had been with the Guard long enough to have seen several stranger than these.  He capitulated.  He was only a trooper.  He didn't get paid to think.  Somebody would throw them out if they didn't belong.

And, in the opinion locked behind his teeth, they pleased him more than some of the carriage riders he had admitted earlier.  Some of those were men whose throats he would have cut gladly.  Those two from Hammad al Nakir....  They were ambassadors of a nation which cheerfully would have devoured his little homeland.

They had more trouble at the citadel door, but the Marshall had foreseen it.  His aide appeared, vouchsafed their entry.

It grated a little, but Nepanthe held her tongue.

Once, if briefly, she had been mistress of a kingdom where Kavelin would have made but a modest province.

Mocker didn't notice.  "Dove's Breast.  Behold.  Inside of Royal Palace.  And am invited.  Self.  Asked in.  In time past, have been to several, dragged in bechained, or breaked—broked— whatever word is for self-instigated entry for purpose of burglary, or even invited round to back-alley door to discuss deed of dastardness desired done by denizen of same.  Invited?  As honored guest?  Never."

The Marshall's aide, Gjerdrum Eanredson, laughed, slapped the fat man's shoulder.  "You just don't change, do you?  Six, seven years it's been.  You've got a little grey there, and maybe more tummy, but I don't see a whit's difference in the man inside." He eyed Nepanthe.  There was, briefly, that in his eye which said he appreciated what he saw.

"But you've changed, Gjerdrum," she said, and the lilt of her voice told him his thoughts had been divined.  "What happened to that shy boy of eighteen?"

Gjerdrum's gaze flicked to Mocker, who was bemused by the opulence of his surroundings, to the deep plunge of her bodice, to her eyes.  Without thinking he wet his lips with his tongue and, red-faced, stammered, "I guess he growed up...."

She couldn't resist teasing him, flirting.  As he guided them to the great hall she asked leading questions about his marital status and which of the court ladies were his mistresses.  She had him thoroughly flustered when they arrived.

Nepanthe held this moment in deep dread.  She had even tried to beg off.  But now a thrill coursed through her.  She was glad she had come.  She pulled a handful of long straight black hair forward so it tumbled down her bare skin, drawing the eye and accenting her cleavage.

For a while she felt nineteen again.

The next person she recognized was the Marshall's wife,

Elana, who was waiting near the door.  For an instant Nepanthe was afraid.  This woman, who once had been her best friend, might not be pleased to see her.

But, "Nepanthe!" The red-haired woman engulfed her in an embrace that banished all misgivings.

Elana loosed her and repeated the display with Mocker.  "God, Nepanthe, you look good.  How do you do it?  You haven't aged a second."

"Skilled artificer, self, magician of renown, having at hand secret of beauty of women of fallen Escalon, most beautiful of all time before fall, retaining light of teenage years into fifth decade, provide potations supreme against ravishes—ravages?—of Time," Mocker announced solemnly—then burst into laughter.  He hugged Elana back, cunningly grasping a handful of derriere, then skipped round her in a mad, whirling little dance.

"It's him," Elana remarked.  "For a minute I didn't recognize him.  He had his mouth shut.  Come on.  Come on.  Bragi will be so glad to see you again."

Time hadn't used Elana cruelly either.  Only a few grey wisps threaded her coppery hair, and, despite having borne many children, her figure remained reasonably trim.  Nepanthe remarked on it.

"True artifice, that," Elana confessed.  "None of your hedge-wizard mumbo jumbo.  These clothes—they come all the way from Sacuescu.  The Queen's father sends them with hers.  He has hopes for his next visit." She winked.  "They push me up here, flatten me here, firm me up back there.  I'm a mess undressed." Though she tried valiantly to conceal it, Elana's words expressed a faint bitterness.

"Time is great enemy of all," Mocker observed.  "Greatest evil of all.  Devours all beauty.  Destroys all hope." In his words, too, there was attar of wormwood.  "Is Eater, Beast That Lies Waiting.  Ultimate Destroyer." He told the famous riddle.

There were people all around them now, nobles of Kavelin, Colonels of the Army and Mercenaries' Guild, and representa­tives from the diplomatic community.  Merriment infested the hall.  Men who were deadly enemies the rest of the year shared in the celebration as though they were dear friends—because they had shared hardship under the shadow of the wings of Death that day long ago when they had set aside their contentiousness and presented a common front to the Dread Empire—and had defeated the invincible.

There were beautiful women there, too, women the like of which Mocker knew only in dreams.  Of all the evidences of wealth and power they impressed him most.

"Scandalous" he declared.  "Absolute.  Desolation overtakes.  Decadence descends.  Sybariticism succeeds.  O Sin, thy Name is Woman....  Self, will strive bravely, but fear containment of opinion will be impossible of provision.  May rise to speechify same, castrating—no, castigating—assembly for wicked life.  Shame!" He leered at a sleek, long-haired blonde who, simply by existing, turned his spine to jelly.  Then he faced his wife, grinning.  "Remember passage in Wizards of Ilkazar, in list of sins of same?  Be great fundament for speech, eh?  No?"

Nepanthe smiled and shook her head.  "I don't think this's the place.  Or the time.  They might think you're serious."

"Money here.  Look.  Self, being talker of first water, spins web of words.  In this assemblage famous law of averages declares must exist one case of fool headedness.  Probably twenty-three.  Hai!  More.  Why not?  Think big.  Self, being student primus of way of spider, pounce.  Ensnare very gently, unlike spider, and, also unlike same, drain very slow."

Elana, too, shook her head.  "Hasn't changed a bit.  Not at all.  Nepanthe, you've got to tell me all about it.  What have you been doing?  How's Ethrian?  Do you know how much trouble it was to find you?  Valther used half his spies.  Had them looking everywhere.  And there you were in the Siluro quarter all the time.  Why didn't you keep in touch?"

At that moment the Marshall, Bragi Ragnarson, spied them.  He spared Nepanthe an answer.

"Mocker!" he thundered, startling half the hall into silence.  He abandoned the lords he had been attending.  "Yah!  Lard Bottom!" He threw a haymaker.  The fat man ducked and responded with a blur of a kick that swept the big man's feet from beneath him.

Absolute silence gripped the hall.  Nearly three hundred men, plus servants and women, stared.

Mocker extended a hand.  And shook his head as he helped the Marshall rise.  "Self, must confess to one puzzlement.  One only, and small.  But is persistent as buzzing of mosquito."

"What's that?" Ragnarson, standing six-five, towered over the fat man.

"This one tiny quandary.  Friend Bear, ever clumsy, unable to defend self from one-armed child of three, is ever chosen by great ones to defend same from foes of mighty competence.  Is poser.  Sorcery?  Emboggles mind of self."

"Could be.  But you've got to admit I'm lucky."

"Truth told." He said it sourly, and didn't expand.  Luck, Mocker believed, was his nemesis.  The spiteful hag had taken a dislike to him the moment of his birth....  But his day was coming.  The good fortune was piling up.  When it broke loose....

In truth, luck had less to do with his misfortunes than did compulsive gambling and an ironhard refusal to make his way up any socially acceptable means.

This crude little brown man, from the worst slum of the Siluro ghetto, had had more fortunes rush through his fingers than most of the lords present.  Once he had actually laid hands on the fabled treasure of Ilkazar.

He wouldn't invest.  He refused.  Someday, he knew, the dice would fall his way.

The fat man's old friend, with whom, in younger days, he had enjoyed adventures that would've frightened their present companions bald, guided him onto the raised platform from which his approach had been spotted.  Mocker began shaking.  A moment's clowning, down there, was embarrassing enough.  But to be dragged before the multitudes....

He barely noticed the half dozen men who shared the dais with the Marshall.  One eyed him as would a man who spotted someone he thinks he recognizes after decades.

"Quiet!" Ragnarson called.  "A little quiet here!"

While the amused-to-disgusted chatter died, Mocker consid­ered his friend's apparel.  So rich.  Fur-edged cape.  Blouse of silk.  Hose that must cost more than he scrounged in a month....  He remembered when this man had worn bearskins.

Once silence gained a hold, Ragnarson announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, I want to introduce somebody.  A man I tracked down at considerable inconvenience and expense because he's the critical element that has been missing from our Victory Day celebrations.  He was one of the unspoken heroes who guided us up the road to Baxendala, one of the men whose quiet pain and sacrifice made victory possible." Ragnarson held Mocker's hand high.  "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the world's foremost authority."

Puzzled, the ambassador from Altea asked, "Authority on what?"

Ragnarson grinned, punched Mocker's arm.  "Everything."

Mocker had never been one to remain embarrassed long.  Especially by public acclaim.  He had forever been his own greatest booster.  But here, because he had a predisposition to expect it, he suspected he was being mocked.  He flashed his friend a look of appeal.

Which, despite years of separation, Ragnarson read.  Softly, he replied, "No.  I didn't bring you here for that.  This's a homecoming.  A debut.  Here's an audience.  Take them."

The wicked old grin seared the fat man's face.  He turned to the crowd, fearing them no more.  They would be his toys.

Boldly, insolently, he examined the people nearest the dais.  The merry mayhem in his eyes sparkled so that each of them

 recognized it.  Most perked to a higher level of gaiety ere he

 spoke a word.

He founded the speech on the passage from the epic, and spoke with such joy, such laughter edging his voice, that hardly anyone resented being roasted.

The years had taught him something.  He was no longer indiscreet.  Though his tongue rolled inspiredly, in a high, mad babble that made the chandeliers rattle with the responding laughter, he retained sufficient command of his inspiration that,  while he accused men of every dark deed under the sun, he never indicted anyone for something whispered to be true.

In the Siluro quarter, where dwelt the quiet little men who performed the drudgework of civil service and the mercantile establishments, there were a few secrets about the mighty.

He finished with a prophecy not unlike that of the poet.  Punctuation, hellfire and brimstone.

And envoi, "Choice is clear.  Recant.  Renounce high living.  Shed sybaritic ways.  Place all burden of sin on one able to bear up under curse of same." He paused to meet eyes, including those of the sleek blonde twice.  Then, softly, seriously, "Self, would volunteer for job."

Bragi slapped his back.  People who remembered Mocker now, from the war, came to greet him and, if possible, swap a few lies about the old days.  Others, including that svelte blonde, came to praise his performance.

Mocker was disappointed by the blonde.  There was a message in her eyes, and nothing he could do.

"Oh, my," he muttered.  "That this obesity should live to see day...." But he wasn't distraught.  This was his happiest evening in a decade.  He wallowed in it, savoring every instant.

But he didn't stop observing.  He soon concluded that there were skunks in paradise.  The millennium hadn't arrived.

Three hard men in fighting leathers stood in the shadows behind the dais.  He knew them as well as he knew Ragnarson.  Haaken Blackfang, Bragi's foster brother, a bear of a man, a deadly fighter, bigger than his brother.  Reskird Kildragon, another relic of the old days, and another grim fighter, who sprang like a wolf when Bragi commanded.  And Rolf Preshka, that steel-eyed Iwa Skolovdan whose enmity meant certain death, whose devotion to Bragi's wife bordered on the morbid, and should have been a danger to her husband—except that Preshka was almost as devoted to him.

And, yes, there were more of the old comrades, in the out-of-the-ways, the shadows and alcoves of balconies and doors.  Turran of Ravenkrak, Nepanthe's brother, white of hair now but none the less deadly.  And their brother Valther, impetuous with blade and heart, possessed of a mind as convolute as that of a god.  Jarl Ahring.  Dahl Haas.  Thorn Altenkirk.  They were all there, the old, cold ones who had survived, who had been the real heroes of the civil war.  And among them were a few new faces, men he knew would be as devoted to their commander—otherwise they would be on the dance floor with the peacocks.

All was not well.

He had known that since climbing to the dais.  Two of the occupants of seats of honor were envoys from Hammad al Nakir.  From their oldest enemy, El Murid.  From that hungry giant of a nation directly south of Kavelin, behind the Kapenrung Mountains.  It had taken the combined might of a dozen kingdoms to contain that fanatic religious state in the two-decades-gone, half-forgotten dust-up remembered as the El Murid Wars.

These two had survived that harrowing passage-at-arms, as had Mocker and Bragi and most of those iron-eyed men in the shadows.  They remembered.  And knew that that argument wasn't settled.

One, in fact, remembered more than any other guest.  More, especially, than this happily self-intoxicated little brown man.

He remembered a distant day when they had last met.

He remembered whom it was who had come out of the north into the Desert of Death, using cheap mummer's tricks to establish a reputation as a wizard, to strike to the heart the hope of his master, El Murid, the Disciple.  The envoy had been a young trooper then, wild, untameable, in the rear echelon of Lord Nassef's Invincibles.  But he remembered.

A fat, young brown man had come to entertain the guardians of El Murid's family with tales and tricks—and then, one night, had slain a half dozen sentries and fled with the Disciple's treasure, his Priceless, the one thing he valued more than the mission given by God.

The fat man had kidnapped El Murid's virgin daughter.

And she had never been seen again.

It had broken El Murid—at least for the time the infidels needed to turn the tide of desert horsemen sweeping the works of the Evil One from their lands.

And he, Habibullah, who slew like a devil when his enemies came to him face to face—he had lain there, belly opened by a blow struck in darkness, and he had wept.  Not for his pain, or for the death he expected, and demanded when the Disciple questioned him, but for the agony and shame he would cause his i master.

Now he sat in the palace of the infidel, and was silent, watching with hooded eyes.  When no one was listening, he told his companion, "Achmed, God is merciful.  God is just.  God delivers his enemies into the hands of the Faithful."

Achmed didn't know how, but recognized that this embassy to the heathen had borne fruit at last.  Unexpected fruit, sweet and juicy, to judge by Habibullah's reaction.

"This charlatan, this talker," Habibullah whispered.  "We'll see him again."

Their exchange passed unnoticed.

All eyes had turned to the shadows behind the dais.  Mocker whirled in time for the advent of the Queen, Fiana Melicar Sardyga ip Krief.  He hadn't seen her for years, despite her inexplicable habit of wandering the streets to poll Vorgreberg's commons.  Time hadn't treated her kindly.  Though still in her twenties, she looked old enough to be the blonde's mother.

It wasn't that beauty had deserted her.  She retained that, though it was a more mature, promising beauty than Mocker remembered.  But she looked exhausted.  Utterly weary, and buoyed only by wholehearted devotion to her mission as mistress of the nation.

She seemed unexpected.

She came directly to Bragi, and there was that in her eyes, momentarily, which clarified Elana's bitter remark.

It was a rumor he had heard in the Siluro quarter.

Hardly anyone cared as long as her affairs of the heart didn't collide with affairs of state.

Mocker studied Rolf Preshka.  The man's pained expression confirmed his surmise.

"Your Majesty," said Bragi, with such perfected courtliness that Mocker giggled, remembering the man's manners of old.  "An unexpected honor."

The assembly knelt or bowed according to custom.  Even the ambassadors from Hammad al Nakir accorded the lady deep nods.  Only Mocker remained straight-necked, meeting her eyes across Bragi's back.

Amusement drained five years from her face.  "So.  Now I understand the hubbub.  Where did they exhume you?"

"Your Majesty, we found him in the last place anybody would look," Ragnarson told her.  "I should've remembered.  That's the first place to go when you're hunting him.  He was here in the city all the time."

"Welcome back, old friend." Fiana did one of those things which baffled and awed her nobles and endeared her to her commons.  She grabbed Mocker in a big hug, then spun him round to face the gathering.  She stood beside him, an arm thrown familiarly across his shoulders.

He glowed.  He met Nepanthe's eyes and she glowed back.  Behind the glow he felt her thinking I told you.  Oh, his stubborn pride, his fear of appearing a beggar before more successful comrades....

He grinned, laid a finger alongside his nose, did to the Queen what he had done to so many of his audience, roasting her good.

The lady laughed as hard as anyone.

Once, when she controlled herself long enough, she rose on tiptoes and whispered to Ragnarson.  Bragi nodded.  When Mocker finished, Fiana took her place in the seat that, hitherto, had been only symbolic of her presence.  She bade the merriment continue.

Winded, Mocker sat cross-legged at Fiana's feet, joining her and the others there in observing the festivities.  Once she whispered, "This's the best Victory Day we've had," and another time, "I'm considering appointing you my spokesman to the Thing.  They could use loosening up."

Mocker nodded as if the proposition were serious, then amused her by alternately demanding outrageous terms of employment and describing the way he would bully the parliament.

Meanwhile, Bragi abandoned them to dance with his wife and visit with Nepanthe, whom he soon guided to the lurking place of her brothers.  She hadn't seen them in years.

Mocker had a fine sense of the ridiculous.  There was funny-ridiculous and pathetic-ridiculous.  He, dancing with a wife inches taller, was the latter.

He had an image to maintain.

THREE:  Old Friends

It was the day after, and Mocker had remained in Castle Krief.  Merriment had abandoned everyone but himself.  Business had resumed.  Bragi took him to a meeting, he explained, so he would get an idea of what was happening nowadays, of why old friends lay back in shadows wearing fighting leather instead of enjoying a celebration of victories won.

"Self," Mocker said as they walked to the meeting, "am confessing overwhelming bambazoolment.  Have known large friend, lo, many years.  More than can count." He held up his fingers.  On those rare occasions when he wasn't proclaiming himself the world's foremost authority, he pretended to be its most ignorant child.

Ragnarson hadn't brought him because he was ignorant or foolish.  And Mocker had begun to suspect, after the Queen's entrance last night, that he hadn't been "exhumed" just because he was one of the old fighters and deserved his moment of glory.  Nor even because Bragi wanted to give him a little roundabout charity by introducing him to potential suckers.

Bragi trusted his intuitions, his wisdom.  Bragi wanted advice—if not his active participation in some fool scheme.

It was both.

Those the Marshall had gathered in the War Room were the same men Mocker had discovered in last night's shadows, plus Fiana and the ambassadors of Altea and Tamerice.  Their countries were old allies, and the ambassadors Bragi's friends.

"Mocker," Ragnarson told him after the doors were locked and guards posted, "I wanted you here because you're the only other available expert on a matter of critical importance.  An expert, that is, whose answers I trust."

"Then answer damned question."

"Huh?  What question?"

"Started to ask same in hall.  Bimbazolment?  Fingers?"

"All right.  Go ahead."

"Self, am knowing friend Bear long ages.  Have, till last night, never seen same shaven.  Explain."

The non sequitur took Ragnarson off stride.  Then he grinned.  Of that device Mocker was past master.

"Exactly what you're thinking.  These effete southerners have turned me into a ball-less woman."

"Okay.  On to question about Haroun."

Ragnarson's jaw dropped.  His aide, Gjerdrum, demanded, "How did you...?"

"Am mighty sorcerer...."

The Queen interrupted, "He gave enough clues, Gjerdrum.  Is there anybody else who calls both bin Yousif and the Marshall friend?"

Mocker grinned, winked.  Fiana startled him by winking back.

"Too damned smart, this woman," he mock-whispered to Bragi.

"Damned right.  She's spooky.  But let's stick to the point."

"Delineate dilemma.  Define horns of same." Mocker's ears were big.  He lived in a neighborhood frequented by exiles who followed El Murid's nemesis, Haroun bin Yousif, The King Without a Throne.  He knew as much of the man's doings as anyone not privy to his councils.  And he knew the man himself, of old.  For several years following the El Murid Wars, before he had grown obsessed with restoring Royalist rule to Hammad al Nakir, bin Yousif had adventured with Mocker and Ragnarson.  "Old sand rat friend up to no goods again, eh?  Is in nature of beast.  Catch up little chipmunk.  Does same growl and stalk gazelle like lion?  Catch up lion.  Does same lie down with lamb?  With lamb in belly, maybeso.  Mutton chops.  Mutton chops!  Hai!  Has been age of earth since same have passed starved lips of impoverished ponderosity, self."

Bragi prodded Mocker's belly with a sheathed dagger.  "If you'll spare us the gourmet commentary, I'll explain."

"Peace!  Am tender of belly, same being..."

Bragi poked him again.  "This's it in a nutshell.  For years Haroun raided Hammad al Nakir from camps in the Kapenrungs.  From Kavelin and Tamerice, using money and arms from Altea and Itaskia.  I've always looked the other way when he smuggled recruits down from the northern refugee centers."

"Uhm.  So?"

"Well, he became an embarrassment.  Then, suddenly, he seemed to get slow and soft.  Stopped pushing.  Now he just sits in the hills with his feet up.  He throws in a few guys now and then so's El Murid stays pissed, but don't do him no real harm.

"And El Murid just gets older and crankier.  You saw his ambassadors?"

"Just so.  Snakes in grass, or maybe sand, lying in wait with viper fangs ready...."

"They're out in plain sight this time.  They've delivered a dozen ultimatums.  Either we close Haroun down or they'll do it for us.  They haven't so far.  But they're on safe ground.  Attacking Haroun's camps would cause a stink, but nobody would go to war to save them.  Not if El Murid doesn't try converting us to the one true faith again.  It might even solve a few problems for cities with a lot of refugees.  Without Haroun keeping them stirred up, they'd settle down and blend in.  Distracting the troublemakers is the main reason Haroun gets help from Raithel."

Altea's ambassador nodded.  Prince Raithel had died recently, but his policies continued.

"So.  Old friend, in newfound, secure circumstance, is asking, should same be safeguarded by selling other old friend down  river?"

"No.  No.  I want to know what he's up to.  Why he hasn't done anything the past few years.  Part I know.  He's studying sorcery.  Finishing what he started as a kid.  If that's all, okay.  But it's not his style to lay back in the weeds.

"El Murid is a sword hanging over Kavelin by a thread.  Is Haroun going to cut the thread?  You know him.  What's he planning?"

Mocker's gaze drifted to his wife's brother Valther.  Valther was the shadow man of Vorgreberg, rumored to manage Bragi's cloak and dagger people.

Valther shrugged, said, "That's all we know.  We don't have anybody in there."

"Oho!  Truth exposes bare naked, ugly fundament before eyes of virginal, foolish self.  O Pervert, Truth!  Begone!" And to Bragi, perhaps the simplest statement he had ever made: "No."

"I didn't make my proposition."

"Am greatest living necromancer.  Am reader of minds.  Am knowing blackest secret at heart of hearts of one called friend.  Am not one to be used."

Gjerdrum countered, "But Kavelin needs you!"

An appeal to patriotism?  No bolt could have flown wider of its mark.  The fat man laughed in Gjerdrum's face.  "What is Kavelin to me?  Fool.  Look.  See self.  Am clear blue-eyed Nordmen?  Am Wesson?" He glanced at Bragi, shook his head, jerked a thumb at Eanredson.

Bragi knew Mocker.  Mocker was terribly upset when he spoke this plainly.  Ragnarson also knew how to penetrate the fat man's distress.

He produced a large gold coin, pretended to examine it in a shaft of light piercing one of the narrow windows.  "How's Ethrian?" he asked.  "How's my godson?" He spun the coin on the polished tabletop inches beyond Mocker's reach.  He produced another, made a similar examination.

The fat man began sweating.  He stared at the money the way alcoholics stare at liquor after an enforced abstinence.  They were Kaveliner double nobles specially struck for the eastern trade, beautiful pieces with the twin-headed eagle and Fiana's profile in high, frosted relief.  They weren't intended for normal commerce, but for transfers between commercial accounts in the big mercantile banks in Vorgreberg.  The gold in one piece represented more than a laborer could earn in a year.

Mocker had seen hard times.  He did mental sums, calculating temptation's value in silver.  The things he could do for Ethrian and Nepanthe....

Ragnarson deposited the second coin atop the first, dropping his eye to table level while aligning their rims.  He produced another.

M ocker changed subtly.  Bragi sensed it.  He stacked the third coin, folded his arms.

"Woe!" Mocker cried suddenly, startling the group.  "Am poor old fat cretin of pusillanimity world-renowned, weak of head and muscle.  Self, ask nothings.  Only to be left alone, to live out few remaining years with devoted wife, in peace, raising son."

"I saw the place where you're keeping my sister," Turran observed, perhaps more harshly than intended.

Bragi waved a hand admonishingly.

"Hai!  Self, am not..."

"Like the old joke," said Bragi.  "We know what you are.  We're dickering price."

Mocker stared at the three gold coins.  He looked round the room.  Heads pointed his way like those of hounds eager to be loosed.

He didn't like it.  Not one whit.  But gold!  So much gold.  What he could do for his wife and son....

He had aged, he had mellowed, he had grown concerned with security.  Having to care for others can do that to a man.

He raised his left hand, jerkily, started to speak.  He looked round again.  So many narrowed eyes.  Some he didn't know.  He had things to say to Bragi, but not here, not now, not before an audience.

"Define task," he ordered.  "Not that poor old fat mendicant, on brink of old age, near crippled, agrees to undertake same.  Only purpose being to listen to same, same being reasonable request to allow before telling man to put same where moon don't glow."

"Simple.  Just visit Haroun.  Find out what he's up to.  Bring me the news."

Mocker laughed his most sarcastic laugh.  "Self, am famous dullard, admitted.  Of brightness next to which cheapest tallow candle is like sun to dark of moon.  Forget to come in from rain sometimes, maybeso.  But am alive.  See?  Wound here, here, everywhere, from listening to friends in time past.  But am favored of Gods.  Was born under lucky star.  Haven't passed yet.  Also, am aware of ways men speak.  Simple, says old friend?  Then task is bloody perilous...."

"Not so!" Ragnarson protested.  "In fact, if I knew where Haroun was, I'd go myself.  But you know him.  He's here, he's there, and the rumors are always wrong.  He might be at the other end of the world.  I can't take the time."

"Crippled.  Excuse limps like sixty-year-old arthritic."

Actually, it was unvarnished truth.  And Mocker knew it.  He rose.  "Has been enjoyable matching wits with old half-wit friend.  Father of self, longtime passing, said, 'Never fight unarmed man.' Must go.  Peace." He did an amusing imitation of a priest giving a blessing.

The inner door guard might have been deaf and blind.  Or a path-blocking statue.

"So!  Now am prisoner.  Woe!  Heart of heart of fool, self, told same stay away from palaces, same being dens of iniquitous...."

"Mocker, Mocker," said Bragi.  "Come.  Sit.  I'm not as young as I used to be.  I don't have the patience anymore.  You think we could dispense with this bullshit and get down to cases?"

Mocker came and sat, but his expression said he was being pushed, that he was about to get stubborn.  No force in Heaven or Hell could nudge a stubborn Mocker.

Ragnarson understood his reluctance.  Nepanthe was abso­lutely dead set against allowing her husband to get involved in anything resembling an adventure.  Hers was an extremely dependent personality.  She couldn't endure separations.

"Turran, could you convince Nepanthe?"

"I'll do it," Valther said.  He and Nepanthe had always been close.  "She'll listen to me.  But she won't like it."

Mocker grew agitated.  His domestic problems were being aired....

Bragi began massaging his own face.  He wasn't getting enough sleep.  The demands of his several posts were getting to him.  He considered resigning as publican consul.  The position made limited demands, yet did consume time he could use being Marshall and virtual king-surrogate.

"Why don't you list your objections—take them down, Derel—and we'll deal with them in an orderly fashion."

Mocker was appalled.  "Is end.  Is perished.  Is dead, absolute, friend of youth, wrapping self in cocoon of time, coming forth from chrysalis as perfect bureaucrat, all impatient and indifferent.  Or is imposter, taking place of true gentleman of former time?  Rising from Sea of Perdition, snakes of rules and regulations for hair—not my department, go down hall to hear same—Bastard Beast-Child of order....  Enough.  Self, am beloved get of Chaos.  Am having business of own.  Otherwheres.  Open door."

He was irked.  And Ragnarson was tempted to apologize, except he wasn't sure what to apologize for.  "Let him go, Luther.  Tell Malven to take him to his room." One by one, he palmed the double nobles.

Part of his failure came from inside, he reflected.  He had changed.  But as much blame lay with Mocker.  Never had he been so touchy. 

Michael Trebilcock, one of the faces Mocker didn't know, asked, "What now?"

Ragnarson gestured for silence.

Mocker didn't make it past Luther.  As the guard stepped aside, the fat man turned and asked musingly, "Double nobles five?" He grinned.  "Hai!  Might soothe conscience, same being sufficient to keep wife and son for year or two in eventuation of certain death of cretinic chaser-after-dreams of old friends." He then railed against the Fates for several minutes, damning them for driving him into a corner from which he had no exit but suicide.

It was all for show.  The mission Bragi had shouldn't be dangerous.

They settled it then, with Mocker to leave Vorgreberg the following morning.  The group gradually dissolved, till only Bragi and Fiana remained.

They stared at one another across a short space that, sometimes, seemed miles.

Finally, she asked, "Am I getting boring?"

He shook his head.

"What is it, then?"

He massaged his face again.  "The pressure.  More and more, I have trouble giving a damn.  About anything."

"And Elana, a little?  You think she knows?"

"She knows.  Probably since the beginning."

Fiana nodded thoughtfully.  "That would explain a lot."

Bragi frowned.  "What?"

"Never mind.  You have trouble with your conscience?"

"Maybe.  Maybe."

She locked the door, eased into his lap.  He didn't resist, but neither did he encourage her.  She nuzzled his ear, whispered, "I've always had this fantasy about doing it here.  On the table.  Where all the important laws and treaties get signed."

There were some things Ragnarson just couldn't say, and first among them was "no" to a willing lady.

Later, he met with Colonel Balfour, who commanded the Guild regiment being maintained in Ravelin till the country produced competent soldiers of its own.  High Crag was growing a little arrogant, a little testy, as the inevitable withdrawal of the regiment drew closer.  Each year the Guild grew less subtle in its insistence that the regiment's commission be extended.

There were mercenaries and Mercenaries.  The latter belonged to the Guild, headquartered at High Crag on the western coast just north of Dunno Scuttari.  The Guild was a brotherhood of free soldiers, almost a monastic order, consisting of approximately ten thousand members scattered from Ipopotam to Iwa Skolovda, from the Mountains of M'Hand to Freyland.  Ragnarson and many of his intimates had begun their adulthood in its ranks and, nominally, remained attached to the order.  But the connection was tenuous, despite High Crag's having awarded regular promotions over the years.  Because the Citadel recognized no divorce, it still claimed a right to demand obedience.

The soldiers of the Guild owned no other allegiance, to men, nations, or faith.  And they were the best-schooled soldiers in the west.  High Crag's decision to accept or reject a commission often made or broke the would-be employer's cause without blows being struck.

There were suspicions, among princes, that the Citadel— High Crag's heart, whence the retired generals ruled—was shaping destiny to its own dream.

Ragnarson entertained those suspicions himself—especially when he received pressure to extend the regiment posted to Ravelin.

Ragnarson had, on several occasions, tried to convince the Guild factors that his little state just couldn't afford the protection.  Ravelin remained heavily indebted from the civil war.  He argued that only low-interest loans and outright grants from Itaskia were keeping the kingdom above water.  If El Murid died or were overthrown, that aid would end.  Itaskia would lose its need for a buffer on the borders of Hammad al Nakir.

Following the inevitable bitter argument with Balfour, Bragi spoke to the Thing, doing his best to shuffle his three hats without favoring any one.  Still, as chief of the armed forces, he concentrated on an appropriations measure.

The bill was for the maintenance of the Mercenary regiment.  The parliament supported its hire even less enthusiastically than Ragnarson.

Such matters, and personal problems, distracted him so much during subsequent months that he took little notice of the enduring absence of his fat friend, whom he had instructed to disappear, so to speak, anyway.

His immediate goal, Mocker decided, had to be Sedlmayr.  Ravelin's second largest city nestled between the breasts of the

Kapenrungs within days of Haroun's primary camps.  He would make inquiries there, alerting Haroun's agents to his presence.  Their response would dictate his latter activities.

There were a dozen moving camps within fifty miles.  He might end up wandering from one to another till he located Haroun.

The rooftops of Vorgreberg had just dipped behind the horizon when he heard the clop-clop of a faster horse coming up behind him.  He glanced back.  Another lone rider.

He slowed, allowing the rider to catch up.  "Hail, friend met upon trail."

The man smiled, replied in kind, and thereafter they rode together, chance-met companions sharing a day's conversation to ease the rigors of the journey.  The traveler said he was Sir Keren of Sincic, a Nordmen knight southbound on personal business.

M ocker missed the signs.  He had taken Bragi at his word.  No danger in the mission.  He didn't catch a whiff of peril.

Until the four ambushers sprang from the forest a half day further south.

The knight downed him with a blow from behind as he slew a second bushwhacker with a sword almost too swift to follow.  Half conscious, he mumbled as they bound him, "Woe!  Am getting old.  Feeble in head.  Trusting stranger.  What kind fool you, idiot Mocker?  Deserve whatever happens, absolute."

The survivors taunted him, and beat him mercilessly.  Mocker marked the little one with the eye-patch.  He would undergo the most exquisite tortures after the tables turned.

Mocker didn't doubt that they would.  His past justified that optimism.

After dark, following back-ways and forest trails, his captors took him southeastward, into the province of Uhlmansiek.  So confident were they that they didn't bother concealing anything from him.

"A friend of mine," said the knight, "Habibullah the ambassador, sent us."

"Is a puzzlement.  Self, profess bambizoolment.  Met same two nights passing, speaking once to same, maybeso.  Self, am wondering why same wants inconsequential—though ponder­ous, admit—self snapped up like slave by second-class thugs pretending to entitlement?"

Sir Keren laughed.  "But you've met before.  A long time ago.

You gutted him and left him for dead the night you kidnapped El Murid's daughter."

That put a nasty complexion on the matter.  Mocker felt a new, deeper fear.  Now he knew his destination.

They would have a very special, very painful welcome for him at Al Rhemish.

But Fate was to deprive him of his visit to the Most Holy Mrazkim Shrines.  They were somehwere in the Uhlmansiek Kapenrungs when it happened.

They rounded a bend.  Two horsemen blocked their path.  One was Guild Colonel Balfour, the second an equally hard and scarred Mercenary battalion chieftain.  Mocker remembered both from the Victory Day celebration.

"Hai!" he cried, for, if Sir Keren had made any mistake at all, it had been leaving him ungagged.  "Rescue on hand.  Poor old fat fool not forgotten...." The little fellow with an eye missing belted him in the mouth.

Sir Keren's rogues were old hands.  Despite his circum­stances, Mocker found himself admiring their professionalism.  They spread out, three against two.  There was no question of a parley.

The currents of intrigue ran deep.

The one-eyed man moved suddenly, a split second after Sir Keren and his comrade launched their attack.  His blade found a narrow gap below the rim of Sir Keren's helmet.

Balfour's companion died at the same moment, struck down

(by Sir Keren's companion.  Balfour himself barely managed to survive till the one-eye skewered the remaining man from behind.

Mocker's glee soon became tempered by a suspicion that his rescue wasn't what it seemed.  It might, in fact, be no rescue at all.  He seized the best chance he saw.

Having long ago slipped his bonds, he wheeled his mount and took off.

They must be ignorant of his past, he reflected as forest flew past.  Otherwise they would've taken precautions.  Escape tricks were one way he had of making his meager living.

He managed two hundred yards before the survivors noticed.  The chase was on.

It was brief.

Mocker rounded a turn.  His mount stopped violently, reared, screamed.

A tall, slim man in black blocked the trail.  He wore a golden cat-gargoyle mask finely chased in black, with jeweled eyes and fangs.  And while words could describe that mask, they couldn't convey the dread and revulsion it inspired.

Mocker kicked his mount's flanks, intending to ride the man down.

The horse screamed and reared again.  Mocker tumbled off.  Stunned, he rolled in the deep pine needles, muttered, "Woe!  Is story of life.  Always one more evil, waiting round next bend." He lay there twitching, pretending injury, fingers probing the pine needles for something useful as a weapon.

Balfour and the one-eyed man arrived.  The latter swung down and booted Mocker, then tied him again.

"You nearly failed," the stranger accused.

Balfour revealed neither fear nor contrition.  "They were good.  And you've got him.  That's what matters.  Pay Rico.  He's served us well: He deserves well of us.  I've got to get back to Vorgreberg."

"No."

Balfour slapped his hilt.  "My weapon is faster than yours." He drew the blade a foot from its scabbard.  "If we can't deal honorably amongst ourselves, then our failure is inevitable."

The man in black bowed slightly.  "Well said.  I simply meant that it wouldn't be wise for you to return.  We've made too much commotion here.  Eyes have seen.  The men of the woods, the Marena Dimura, are watching.  It would be impossible to track all the witnesses.  It'll be simpler for you to disappear."

Balfour drew his blade another foot.  Rico, unsure what was happening, moved to where he could attack from the side.

The thin man carefully raised his hands.  "No.  No.  As you say, there must be trust.  There must be a mutual concern.  Else how can we convert others to our cause?"

Balfour nodded, but didn't relax.

Mocker listened, and through hooded eyes observed.  His heart pounded.  What dread had befallen him?  And why?

"Rico," the stranger said, "Take this.  It's gold." He offered a bag.

The one-eyed man glanced at Balfour, took the sack, looked inside.  "He's right.  Maybe thirty pieces.  Itaskian.  Iwa Skolovdan."

"That should suffice till the moves have begun and it's safe for you to return," said the masked man.

Balfour sheathed his weapon.  "All right.  I know a place where no one could find us.  Where they wouldn't think of looking.  You need help with him?" He nudged Mocker with a toe.

The fat man could feel the wicked grin behind that hideous mask.  "That one?  That little toad?  No.  Go on, before his friends hear the news."

"Rico, come on."

After Balfour and Rico had departed, the tall man stood over Mocker, considering.

Mocker, being Mocker, had to try, even knowing it futile.

He kicked.

The tall man hopped his leg with disdainful ease, reached, touched....

Mocker's universe shrank to a point of light which, after a momentary brightness, died.  After that he was lost, and time ceased to have meaning.

FOUR: Intimations

Ragnarson dismounted, dropped his reins over a low branch.  "Why don't you guys join me?" he asked as he seated himself against an oak.  A cool breeze whispered through the Gudbrandsdal Forest, a Royal Preserve just over the western boundary of the Siege of Vorgreberg.  "It's restful here."

He narrowed his eyes to slits, peered at the sun, which broke through momentary gaps in the foliage.

Turran, Valther, Blackfang, Kildragon, and Ragnarson's secretary, a scholar from Hellin Daimiel named Derel Prataxis, dismounted.  Valther lay down on his belly in new grass, a strand of green trailing from between his teeth.  Ragnarson's foster brother, Blackfang, began snoring in seconds.

This had begun as a boar hunt.  Beaters were out trying to kick up game.  Other parties were on either flank, several hundred yards away.  But Bragi had left the capital only to escape its pressures.  The others understood.

"Sometimes," Ragnarson mused, minutes later, "I think we were better off back when our only problem was our next meal."

Kildragon, a lean, hard brunet, nodded.  "It had its good points.  We didn't have to worry about anybody else."

Ragnarson waved a hand in an uncertain gesture, reflecting his inner turmoil.  "It's peaceful out here.  No distractions."

Kildragon stretched a leg, prodded Blackfang.

"Uhn?  What's happening?"

"That's it," said Bragi.  "Something." Peace had reigned so long that the first ripples, subtle though they were, had brought him worriedly alert.  His companions, too, sensed it.

Valther grumbled, "I can't put my finger on it."

Everyday   life  in  Vorgreberg  had  begun  showing  little stutters, little stumbles.  A general uneasiness haunted everyone, from the Palace to the slums.

There was just one identifiable cause.  The Queen's indisposition.  But Bragi wasn't telling anyone anything about that.  Not even his brother.

"Something's happening," Ragnarson insisted.  Prataxis glanced his way, shook his head gently, resumed scribbling.

The scholars of Hellin Daimiel took subservient posts as a means of obtaining primary source material for their great theses.  Prataxis was a historian of the Lesser Kingdoms.  He kept intimate accounts of the events surrounding the man he served.  Someday, when he returned to the Rebsamen, he would write the definitive history of Kavelin during Ragnarson's tenure.

"Something is piling up," Bragi continued.  "Quietly, out of sight.  Wait!"

He gestured for silence.  One by one, the others saw why.  A bold chipmunk had come to look them over.  As time passed and the little rascal saw no threat, he sneaked closer.  Then closer still.

Those five hard men, those battered swords, veterans of some of the grimmest bloodlettings that world had ever seen, watched the animal bemusedly.  And Prataxis watched them.  His pen moved quietly as he noted that they could take pleasure in simple things, in the natural beauties of creation.  It wasn't a facet of their characters they displayed in the theater of the Palace.  The Palace was a cruel stage, never allowing its actors to shed their roles.

The chipmunk finally grew bored, scampered away.

"If there was anything to reincarnation, I wouldn't mind being a chipmunk next time around," Turran observed.  "Except for owls, foxes, hawks, and like that."

"There's always predators," Blackfang replied.  "Me, I'm satisfied here on top of the pile.  Us two-leggers, we're Number One.  Don't nothing chomp on us.  Except us."

"Haaken, when did you take up philosophizing?" Bragi asked.  His foster brother was a taciturn, stolid man whose outstanding characteristic was his absolute dependability.

"Philosophizing?  Don't take no genius to tell that you're in the top spot being people.  You can always yell and get a bunch of guys to gang up on any critter that's giving you trouble.  How come there's no wolves or lions in these parts anymore?  They all went to Ipopotam for the season?"

"My friend," said Prataxis, "you strip it to its bones, but it remains a philosophical point."

Blackfang regarded the scholar narrowly, not sure he hadn't been mocked.  His old soldier's anti-intellectual stance was a point of pride.

"We can't get away from it," said Ragnarson.  "But the quiet may help us think.  The subject at hand, my friends.  What's happening?"

Valther spat his blade of grass.  While searching for another, he replied, "People are getting nervous.  The only thing I know, that's concrete, is that they're worried because Fiana has locked herself up at Karak Strabger.  If she dies..."

"I know.  Another civil war."

"Can't you get her to come back?"

"Not till she's recovered." Bragi examined each face.  Did they suspect?

He wished the damned baby would hurry up and the whole damned mess would get done with.

His thoughts slipped away to the night she had told him.

They had been lying on the couch in his office, on one of those rare occasions when they had the chance to be together.  As he had let his hand drift lightly down her sleek stomach, he had asked, "You been eating too much of that baclava?  You're putting on a little...."

He had never been a smooth talker, so he wasn't surprised by her tears.  Then she whispered, "It's not fat.  Darling....  I'm pregnant."

"Oh, shit." A swarm of panic-mice raged round inside him.  What the hell would he do?  What would Elana say?  She was suspicious enough already....

"I thought....  Doctor Wachtel said you couldn't have any more.  After Carolan you were supposed to be sterile."

"Wachtel was wrong.  I'm sorry." She'd pulled herself against him as if trying to crawl inside.

"But....  Well....  Why didn't you tell me?" She had been well along.  Only skilled dress had concealed it.

"At first, I didn't believe it.  I thought it was something else.  Then I didn't want you to worry."

Well, yes, she had saved him that, till then.  Since, he'd done nothing but worry.

Too many people could get hurt: Elana, himself, his children, Fiana, and Ravelin—if the scandal became a cause celebre.  He spent a lot of time cursing himself for his own stupidity.  And a little admitting that his major objection was having gotten caught.  He'd probably go right on bedding her if he got through this on the cheap.

Before it showed enough to cause talk, Fiana had taken trusted servants and Gjerdrum and had moved to Karak Strabger, at Baxendala, where Ragnarson had won the battle Kavelin celebrated on Victory Day.  Her plea of mental exhaustion wasn't that difficult to believe.  Her reign had been hard, with seldom a moment's relief.

Horns alerted him to the present.

"Game's afoot," Kildragon observed, rising.

"Go ahead," Bragi said.  "Think I'll just lay around here and loaf."

Haaken, Reskird, Turran, and Valther were habituated to action.  They went.  They would get more relaxation from the hunt.

"And you, Derel?"

"Are you joking?  Fat, old, and lazy as I am?  Besides, I never did see any point to hounding some animal through the woods, and maybe breaking my neck."

"Gives you a feeling of omnipotence.  You're a god for a minute.  'Course, sometimes you get taken down a peg if the game gives you the slip or runs you up a tree." He chuckled.  "Damned hard to be dignified when you're hanging on a branch with a mad boar trying to grab a bite of your ass.  Makes you reflect.  And you figure out that what Haaken said about us being top critter isn't always right."

"Can you manage this charade another two months?"

"Eh?"

"My calculations say the child will arrive next month.  She'll need another month to make herself presentable...."

Ragnarson's eyes became hard and cold.

"Too," said Prataxis, who hadn't the sense to be intimidated, because in Hellin Daimie scholars could make outrageous, libelous remarks without suffering reprisals, "there's the chance, however remote, that she'll die in childbirth.  Have you considered possible political ramifications?  Have you taken steps?  Kavelin could lose everything you two have built."

"Derel, you walk a thin line.  Take care."

"I know.  But I know you, too.  And I'm speaking now only because the matter needs to be addressed and every eventuality considered.  The Lesser Kingdoms have been stricken by deaths lately.  Prince Raithel last year.  He was old.  Everybody expected it.  But King Shanight, in Anstokin, went during the winter, in circumstances still questionable.  And now King Jostrand of Volstokin has gone, leaving no one but a doddering Queen Mother to pick up the reins."

"You saying there's something behind their deaths?  That Fiana might be next?  My God!  Jostrand was dead drunk when he fell off his horse."

"Just trying to make a point.  The Dark Lady stalks amongst the ruling houses of the Lesser Kingdoms.  And Fiana will be vulnerable.  This pregnancy shouldn't have happened.  Bearing the Shinsan child ruined her insides.  She's having trouble, isn't she?"

It took a special breed not to be offended by the forthrightness of the scholars of Hellin Daimiel.  Ragnarson prided himself on his tolerance, his resilience.  Yet he had trouble dealing with Prataxis now.  The man was speaking of things never discussed openly.

"Yes.  She is.  We're worried." We meant himself, Gjerdrum, and Dr.  Wachtel, the Royal Physician.  Fiana was scared half out of her mind.  She was convinced she was going to die.

But Bragi ignored that.  Elana had had nine children now, two of whom hadn't lived, and she had gone through identical histrionics every time.

"To change the subject, have you thought about Colonel Oryon?"

"That arrogant little reptile?  I'm half tempted to whip him.  To send him home with his head under his arm."

He found Balfour's replacement insufferably abrasive.  High Crag's recent threat to call in Kavelin's war debts had done nothing to make the man more palatable.  And Bragi thought he was kicking up too much dust about Balfour's disappearance.

Ragnarson wondered if that were related to High Crag's threats.  Though ranked General on its rosters, he had had little to do with the Mercenaries' Guild the past two decades.  High Crag kept promoting him, he suspected, so a tenuous link would exist should the Citadel want to exploit it.  He wasn't privy to the thinking there.

"Actually," he said, "you've conjured enough into the Treasury to pay them off.  They don't know yet.  My notion is, they want to do to us what they've done to some of the little states on the coast.  To nail us for some property.  Maybe a few titles with livings for their old men.  That's their pattern."

"Possibly.  They've been developing an economic base for a century."

"What?"

"A friend of mine did a study of Guild policies and practices.  Very interesting when you trace their monies and patterns of commission acceptance.  Trouble is, the pattern isn't complete enough to show their goals."

"What do you think?  Would it be better to give them a barony or two?  One of the nonhereditary titles we created after the war?"

"You could always nationalize later—when you think you can whip them heads up."

"If we pay there won't be much left for emergencies."

"Commission renewal is almost here.  There won't be much favorable sentiment in the Thing."

"Ain't much in my heart, either." Ragnarson watched the sun play peekaboo through the leaves.  "Hard to convince myself we need them when we haven't had any trouble for seven years.  But the army isn't up to anything rough yet."

The real cost of the war had been the near-obliteration of Kavelin's traditional military leadership, the Nordmen nobility.  Hundreds had fallen in the rebellion against Fiana.  Hundreds had been exiled.  Hundreds more had fled the kingdom.  There was no lack of will in the men Bragi had recruited since, simply an absence of command tradition.  He had made up somewhat by using veterans he had brought to Kavelin back then, forming several sound infantry regiments, but the diplomatically viable military strength of the state still hinged on the Guild presence.  Their one regiment commanded more respect than his native seven.

Kavelin had greedy neighbors, and their intentions, what with three national leaderships having changed within the year, remained uncertain.

"If I could just get the Armaments Act through...."

Soon after war's end Fiana had decreed that every free man should provide himself with a sword.  Ragnarson's idea.  But he had overlooked the cost.  Even simple weapons were expensive.  Few peasants had the money.  Distributing captured arms had helped only a little.

So, for years, he had been pushing legislation which would enable his War Ministry to provide weapons.

He wanted the act so he could dispense with the Mercenaries.  The Thing wanted rid of the Mercenaries first.  An impasse.

Bragi was finding politics a pain in the behind.

Reskird and Haaken returned, then Turran and Valther.  Empty-handed.  "That kid Trebilcock, and Rolf, got there first," Reskird explained.  "Tough old sow anyway."

"Sour grapes?" Bragi chuckled.  "Valther, you heard anything from Mocker yet?  Or about him?"

Most of a year had passed since he had sent the fat man south.  He hadn't heard a word since.

"It's got me worried," Valther admitted.  "I made it top priority two months ago, when I heard that Haroun had left his camps.  He's gone north.  Nobody knows where or why."

"And Mocker?"

"Practically nothing.  I've scoured the country clear to Sedlmayr.  He never made it there.  But one of my men picked up a rumor that he was seen in Uhlmansiek."

"That's a long way from Sedlmayr...."

"I know.  And he wasn't alone."

"Who was he with?"

"We don't know.  Nearest thing to a description I have is that one of them was a one-eyed man."

"That bothers you?"

"There's a one-eyed man named Wilis Northen, alias Rico, who's been on my list for years.  We think he works for El Murid."

"And?"

"Northen disappeared about the right time."

"Oh-oh.  You think El Murid's got him?  What're the chances?"

"I don't know.  It's more hunch than anything."

"So.  Let's see.  Mocker goes to see Haroun.  El Murid's agents intercept him.  Question.  How did they know?"

"You've got me.  That bothers me more than where Mocker is.  It could cost us all.  I've tried every angle I can think of.  I can't find a leak.  I put tagged information through everybody who was there when we conned Mocker into going.  Result?  Nothing."

Ragnarson shook his head.  He knew those men.  He had bet his life on their loyalties before.

But the word had leaked somehow.

Had Mocker told anybody?

Thus the spy mind works.  There had to be a plot, a connection.  Coincidence couldn't be accepted.

Habibullah hadn't had the slightest idea of Mocker's mission.  He had simply set his agents to kidnap a man, acting on news, which was common talk in the Siluro quarter, that he was traveling to Sedlmayr.  Mocker had spread that story himself.  The man in black had other resources.

"Keep after it.  In fact, get in touch with Haroun's people."

"Excuse me?"

"Haroun has people here.  I know a little about your work.  I've done some in my time.  Admit it.  You know them and they know you.  Ask them to find out.  Or you could go through our friends from Altea.  They're in direct contact.  Even if you find out they don't know anything, we're ahead.  We'd know Mocker didn't reach the camps.  Oh.  Ask the Marena Dimura.  They know what's happening in the hills."

"That's where I got my Uhlmansiek rumor."

The Marena Dimura were the original inhabitants of Ravelin, dwelling there before Ilkazar initiated the wave of migrations which had brought in the other three ethnic groups: the Siluro, Wessons, and Nordmen.  The semi-nomadic Marena Dimura tribes kept to the forests and mountains.  A fiercely independent people—though they had supported her during the civil war—they refused to recognize Fiana as legitimate monarch of Kavelin.  Centuries after the Conquest they still viewed the others as occupying peoples....  They put little effort into altering the situation, though.  They took their revenge by stealing chickens and sheep.

It was early spring.  The sun rolled west.  The afternoon breeze rose.  The air grew cooler.  Shivering, Bragi announced, "I'm heading back to town.  Be damned cold by dark." It would take that long to get home.

Prataxis and Valther joined him.  They had work to do.

"You ought to go see your wife sometime," Ragnarson told Valther.  "I had a wife who looked like that, I wouldn't go out for groceries."

Valther gave him an odd look.  "Elana isn't bad.  And you leave her alone all the time."

Guilt ragged Ragnarson's conscience.  It was true.  His position was opening a gulf between him and Elana.  And he hadn't only neglected her.  The children, too, were growing up as strangers.  He stopped chiding Valther.  The man's marriage was even more successful than Mocker's.

"Yeah.  Yeah.  You're right.  I'll take a couple days off soon as I get the new armaments thing lined up.  Maybe dump the kids on Nepanthe and take Elana somewhere.  There's some pretty country around Lake Turntine."

"Sounds perfect.  And Nepanthe would love having them.  She's going crazy, bottled up with Ethrian."

Nepanthe was staying at the Palace.  There were no children her son's age at Castle Krief.

"Maybe she should move out to my place?" Ragnarson's family occupied the home of a former rebel, Lord Lindwedel, who had been beheaded during the war.  It was so huge that his mob of kids, and servants, and Haaken when he stayed over, couldn't fill it.

"Maybe," Valther murmured.  "My place would be better." His wasn't far from Ragnarson's.

The head of an intelligence service doesn't always tell his employer all he knows.

FIVE: A Traveler in Black

North of the Kratchnodians, at the Trolledyngjan mouth of the Middle Pass, stood the inn run by Frita Tolvarson.  It had been in his family since the time of Jan Iron Hand.  The main trade road from Tonderhofn and the Trolledyngjan interior passed nearby, spanned the mountains, formed a tenuous link with the south.  For travelers it was either the first or last bit of comfort following or preceding a harrowing passage.  There was no other hospice for days around.

Frita was an old man, and a kindly soul, with a child for almost every year of his marriage.  He didn't demand much more of his customers than reasonable payment, moderate behavior, and news of the rest of the world.

There was a custom at the inn dating back centuries.  Every guest was asked to contribute a story to the evening's entertainment.

Winding down from the high range, a path had been beaten in the previous night's snow.  The first spring venturers were assaulting the pass from the south.  The path made a meandering ribbon of shadow once it reached the drifted moor, its depths unplumbed by the light of a low-hanging, full Wolf Moon.  A chill arctic wind moaned through the branches of a few skeletal trees.  Those gnarled old oaks looked like squatting giants praising the sky with attenuated fingers and claws.

The wind had banked snow against the north wall of Frita's establishment.  The place looked like a snowbound barrow from that direction.  But on the south side a traveler could find a welcoming door.

One such was crossing the lonely moor, a shivering black silhouette against the moonlit Kratchnodians.  He wore a dark great cloak wrapped tightly about him, its hood pulled far forward to protect his face.  He stared down dully, eyes watery.  His cheeks burned in the cold.  He despaired of reaching the inn, though he saw and smelled the smoke ahead.  His passage through the mountains had been terrible.  He wasn't accustomed to wintery climes.

Frita looked up expectantly as a cold blast roared into the inn.  He put on a smile of welcome.

"Hey!" a customer grumbled.  "Close the goddamned door!  We aren't frost giants."

The newcomer surveyed the common room: There were just three guests.

Frita's wife bade him quit gawking and offer the man something to drink.  He nodded to his oldest daughter.  Alowa slipped off her stool, quickly visited the kitchen for mulled wine.  "No!" she told a customer as she passed him on her way to the newcomer.  Frita chuckled.  He knew a "yes" when he heard it.

The newcomer accepted the wine, went to crouch before the fire.  "There'll be meat soon," Alowa told him.  "Won't you let me take your cloak?" Her blonde hair danced alluringly as she shook it out of her face.

"No." He gave her a coin.  She examined it, frowned, tossed it to her father.  Frita studied it.  It was strange.  He seldom saw its like.  It bore a crown instead of a bust, and intricate characters.  But it was real silver.

Alowa again asked the stranger for his cloak.

"No." He moved to the table, leaned forward as if to sleep on his forearms.

There'll be trouble now, Frita thought.  She won't rest till she unveils the mystery.  He followed her to the kitchen.  "Alowa, behave yourself.  A man deserves his privacy."

"Could he be the one?"

"The one what?"

"The one the Watcher is waiting for?"

Frita shrugged.  "I doubt it.  Mark me, girl.  Let him be.  That's a hard man." He had caught a glimpse of the man's face as he had turned from the fire.  Fortyish, weathered, thin, dark-eyed, dusky, with a cruel nose and crueler lines around his mouth.  There was a metallic sound when he moved.  The worn hilt of a sword protruded through the part in his cloak.  "That's no merchant trying to be first to the prime furs."

Frita returned to the common room.  It lay silent.  The handful of customers were waiting for the newcomer to reveal something of himself and his business.  Frita's curiosity grew.  The man wouldn't push back his hood.  Was his face so terrible?

Time passed, mostly in silence.  The newcomer had dampened the mood that had prevailed earlier, when there had been singing, joking, and good-natured competition for Alowa's favors.  The stranger ate in silence, hidden in his hood.  Alowa, gradually, moved from mystification to hurt.  Never had she encountered a man so oblivious to her charms.

Frita decided the time for tales had come.  His guests had begun drinking to fill the time.  The mood was growing sour.  Something was needed to lighten it before drink led to unpleasantness.  "Brigetta, get the children." Nodding, his wife rose from her needlework, stirred the younger children from their evening naps and the older from the kitchen.  Frita frowned at the youngsters when they began playing with one of the traveler's dogs.

"Time for tales," he announced.  There were just seven people at the table, including himself.  Two of the others were his wife and Alowa.  "A rule of the house.  Not required.  But he who tells the best pays no keep." His eyes lingered on the one they called the Watcher, a small, nervous, one-eyed rogue.  He had arrived nearly a year ago, in company with a gentleman of means, who had behaved like a fugitive.  The gentleman had left the Watcher and had hurried northward as if his doom pursued him.  Yet nothing had ever come of it.

Frita didn't like the Watcher.  He was a sour, evil, small-minded little man.  His only redeeming feature was a fat purse.  Alowa made him pay for what she gave everyone else freely, and hinted that his tastes were cruel.

One guest said, "I'm from Itaskia, where I was once a merchant sailor." And he told of grim sea battles with corsairs out of the Isles, with no quarter given nor taken.  Frita listened with half an ear.  The feud of Itaskia's shipping magnates with the Red Brotherhood was a fixture of modern history.

The second visitor began his tale, "I once joined an expedition to the Black Forest, and there I heard this tale." And he spun an amusing yarn about a toothless dragon who had terrible problems finding sufficiently delicate meals.  The smaller children loved it.

Frita had heard it before.  He hated to declare an old story the winner.

But, to his surprise, the Watcher volunteered a tale.  He hadn't bothered for months.

He stood, the better to fix his audience's attention, and used his hands' freely while speaking.  He had trouble moving his left arm.  Frita had seen it bare.  He had taken a deep wound in the past.

"Long ago and far away," the Watcher began, in the storyteller's fashion, "in a time when elves still walked the earth, there was a great elf-king.  Mical-gilad was his name, and his passion, conquest.  He was a mighty warrior, undefeated in battle or joust.  He and his twelve paladins were champions of the world till the events whereof I speak."

Frita frowned, leaned back.  A story new to him.  A pity its teller had little feel for the art.

"One day a knight appeared at the gates of the elf-king's castle.  His shield bore an unknown coat of arms.  His horse was twice as big as life and black as coal.  The gate guards refused him passage.  He laughed at them.  The gates collapsed."

Yes, Frita thought, it would make a tale in the mouth of a competent teller.  The Watcher described the elf-king's encoun­ter with He Who Laughs, after the stranger had slain his twelve champions.  He then fought the king himself, who overcame him by trickery, but couldn't kill him because of the unbreachable spells on his armor.

Frita thought he saw where it was going.  He had heard so many tales that even the best had become predictable.  It was a moral tale about the futility of trying to evade the inevitable.

The elf-king had his opponent thrown on a dung heap outside his castle, whereupon He Who Laughs promised another, more terrible meeting.  And, sure enough, the next time the elf-king went a-conquering, he found the knight in black and gold riding with his enemies.

As he talked, the Watcher nervously played with a small gold coin.  It was a tick Frita no longer noticed.  But the newcomer seemed mesmerized by the constant tumble of the gold piece.

In the end, He Who Laughs ran the elf-king down and slew him.

The ex-sailor from Itaskia said, "I don't understand.  Why was the king afraid of him if he wasn't afraid of anybody else?"

For the first time the newcomer uttered more than a monosyllable.  "The knight is a metaphor, my friend.  He Who Laughs is one of the names of the male avatar, the hunter aspect, of Death.  She sets that part of herself to stalk those who would evade her.  The elves were supposed to have been immortal.  The point of the story was that the king had grown so arrogant in his immortality that he dared challenge the Dark Lady, the Inevitable.  Which is the grossest form of stupidity.  Yet even today men persist in the folly of believing they can escape the inevitable."

"Oh."

All eyes were on the newcomer now.  Especially that of the Watcher.  The remark about the inevitable seemed to have touched his secret fears.

"Well then," said the innkeeper.  "Which wins?  The pirate?  The dragon?  Or the lesson of the elf-king?"

Half a dozen little ones clamored for the dragon.

"Wait," said the newcomer.  His tone enforced instant silence.  "I would like a turn."

"By all means," Frita nodded, eager to please.  This man had begun to frighten him.  Yet he was surprised.  He hadn't expected this dour, spooky stranger to contribute.

"This is a true story.  The most interesting usually are.  It began just a year ago, and hasn't yet ended.

"There was a man, of no great stature or means, completely unimportant in the usual ways, who had the misfortune to be a friend of several powerful men.  Now, it seems the enemies of those men thought they could attack them through him.

"They waylaid him one day as he was riding through the countryside...."

From beneath his hood the newcomer peered at the Watcher steadily.  The one-eyed man tumbled his coin in a virtual blur.

"Just south of Vorgreberg...." the stranger said, almost too softly for any but the one-eyed man's ears.

The Watcher surged up, a whimper in his throat as he dragged out a dagger.  He hurled himself at the stranger.

One finger protruded from the newcomer's sleeve.  He said one word.

Smoke exploded from the Watcher's chest.  He flew backward, slammed against a wall.  Women and children screamed.  Men ducked under the table.

The stranger rose calmly, bundled himself tightly, and vanished into the frigid night.

Frita peeked from beneath the table.  "He's gone now." He joined his surviving guests beside the body.

"He was a sorcerer," the sailor muttered.

"Was that the man he was watching for?" Alowa asked.  Her excitement was pure thrill.

"I think so.  Yes.  I think so." Frita opened the Watcher's shirt.

"Who was he?" the sailor asked.

"This here fellow's version of He Who Laughs, I reckon, the way he went on."

"Look at this," said the other man.  He had recovered the coin the dead man had dropped when going for his knife.  "You don't see many of these.  From Hammad al Nakir."

"Uhm," Frita grunted.  The silver coin the stranger had given him had been of the same source, but of an earlier mintage.

Bared, the dead man's chest appeared virtually uninjured.  The only mark was a small crown branded over his heart.

"Hey," said the ex-sailor.  "I've seen that mark before.  It's got , something to do with the refugees from Hammad al Nakir, doesn't it?"

"Yes," Frita replied.  "We shared our meal with a celebrity.  With a king."

"Really?" Alowa's eyes were large.  "I touched him...."

The sailor shuddered.  "I hope I never see him again.  Not that one.  If he's who I think you mean.  He's accursed.  Death and war follow him wherever he goes...."

"Yes," Frita agreed.  "I wonder what evil brought him to Trolledyngja?"

SIX: The Attack

Three men lurked in the shadows of the park.  They appeared to be devotees of the Harish Cult of Hammad al Nakir.  Dusky, hawk-nosed men, they watched with merciless eyes.  They had been there for hours, studying the mansion across the lane.  Occasionally, one had gone to make a careful circuit of the house.  They were old hunters.  They had patience.

"It's time," the leader finally murmured.  He tapped a man's shoulder, stabbed a finger at the house.  The man crossed the lane with no more noise than the approach of midnight.  A dog woofed questioningly behind the hedges.

The man returned five minutes later.  He nodded.

All three crossed the lane.

They had been studying and rehearsing for days.  No one was out this time of night.  There was little chance anyone would interfere.

Four mastiffs lay rigid on the mansion's lawn.  The three dragged them out of sight.  Poisoned darts had silenced them.

The leader spent several minutes examining the door for protective spells.  Then he tried the latch.

The door opened.

It was too easy.  They feared a trap.  A Marshall should have guards, enchantments, locks and bolts protecting him.

These men didn't know Kavelin.  They couldn't have comprehended the little kingdom's politics had they been interested.  Here political difficulties were no longer settled with blades in darkness.

They searched the first floor carefully, smothering a maid, butler, and their child.  They had orders to leave no one alive.

The first bedroom on the second floor belonged to Inger,

Ragnarson's four-year-old daughter.  They paused there, again using a pillow.

The leader considered the still little form without remorse.  His fingers caressed a dagger within his blouse, itching to strike with it.  But that blade dared be wielded against but one man.

To the Harish Cult the assassin's dagger was sacred.  It was consecrated to the soul of the man chosen to die.  To pollute the weapon with another's blood was abomination.  Deaths incidental to a consecrated assassination had to be managed by other means.  Preferably bloodless, by smothering, drowning, garroting, poisoning, or defenestration.

The three slew a boy child, then came to a door with light showing beneath it.  A murmur came through.  Adult voices.  This should be the master bedroom.  The three decided to save that room for last.  They would make sure of the sleeper on the third floor, Ragnarson's brother, before taking the Marshall himself, three to one.

The plans of mice and men generally are laid without considering the fbibles of fourteen-year-old boys who have been feuding with their brothers.

Every night Ragnar booby-trapped his door certain that some morning Gundar would again sneak in to steal his magic kit....

Water fell.  A bucket crashed and rattled over an oaken floor.  From the master bedroom a woman's frightened voice called, "Ragnar, what the hell are you up to?" Low, urgent discussion accompanied the rustle of hasty movement.

A sleepy, "What?" came from behind the booby-trapped door, then a frightened, "Ma!"

Ragnar didn't recognize the man in his doorway.

The intruder pawed the water from his eyes.  His followers threw themselves toward the master bedroom.  The door was locked, but flimsy.  They broke through.

Inside, a man desperately tried to get into his pants.  A woman clutched furs to her nakedness.

"Who the hell...  ?" the man demanded.

An assassin flicked a bit of silken handkerchief.  It wrapped the man's throat.  A second later his neck broke.  The other intruder rushed the woman.

They were skilled, these men.  Professionals.  Murder, swift and silent, was their art.

Their teachers had for years tried to school them to react to the unexpected.  But some things were beyond their teachers.

Like a woman fighting back.

Elana hurled herself toward the bodkin laying on a nearby wardrobe, swung it as the assassin rounded the bed.

He stopped, taken aback.

She moved deftly, distracting with her nakedness.  Seeing him armed with nothing more dangerous than a scarf, she attacked.

He flicked that scarf.  It encircled her throat.  She drove the dagger in an upward thrust.  He took it along his ribs.

Gagging, Elana stabbed again, opened his bowels.

Ragnar suddenly realized that death was upon him.  He scrambled to the shadowed corner where he had hidden the weapons Haaken had been training him to use.  They were there by sheer chance.  He had been too lazy to return them to the family armory after practice, and Haaken had forgotten to check on him.

He went after the assassin in the wild-swinging northman fashion before the man recovered from the drenching.  His blows were fierce but poorly struck.  He was too frightened to fight with forethought or calculation.

The assassin wasn't armed for this.  He retreated, skipping and weaving and picking up slash wounds.  He watched the boy's mad eyes, called for help.  But there would be none.  Through the door of the master bedroom he saw one of his comrades down.  The other wrestled with a woman....  And someone was stirring upstairs.

The man.  though, was dead.  He lay halfway between bed and door, silk knotted round his throat.

The night was almost a success.  The primary mission had been accomplished.

The leader fled.

Ragnar chased him to the front door before he realized that his mother was fighting for her life.  He charged back upstairs.  "Ma!  Ma!"

The house was all a-scream now.  The little ones wailed in the hall.  Haaken thundered from the third floor, "What's going on down there?"

Ragnar met the last assassin coming from the bedroom.  His mouth and eyes were agape in incredulity.

Ragnar cut him down.  For an instant he stared at the bodkin in the man's back.  Then he whipped into his parents' bedroom.  "Ma!  Papa!  Are you all right?"

No.