Fortune's Fool (4 page)

Armed with her information, and already wearing her fish-scale armor, Katya was ready to go.

Now, it was a curious thing with her father; he hated goodbyes. He liked the illusion that if he turned a corner, he just might come across the person that he knew very well was somewhere far, far away. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that as a young child, most of the people he had actually said goodbye to had never returned. That had been a turbulent time, when war raged between this Kingdom and the Drylanders of the south, and she could hardly fault her father for having such a reaction.

And although the rest of the family was well aware of how she served King and Kingdom, as were his advisers and other special agents, he had made it very clear that the family was not to know when and where she had gone when she took on a task for him. It could be dangerous for her, for even as cautious as they were, it was possible for something to fall in conversation where it could be overheard. As for the Court—well, since more than a few of those tasks she’d been set when she was younger had been about uncovering the true motives of one Court member or another…it was not wise to inform them, either.

As a matter of principle, she allowed herself to trust no one in the Court. Not even when her father trusted them.

So she never said goodbye to anyone. Ever. She just went.

That was what she did now; she swam to the stables to find herself a ride.

Stables
was a misnomer, really. It was really an enclosure, with walls of net strung between pylons formed of old ship masts, where various small whales and dolphins who were visiting the Palace could stay. The net kept them from drifting off when they dozed, and mullet was served to the visitors several times a day. That made it a good spot for them to relax and hang about; some to gossip with each other, some to get fed without effort, some just because they were willing to lend a fluke now and again to some task like Katya’s. Normally Katya would select a dolphin, porpoise, or a pilot whale to carry her where she needed to go, but this time, the journey would be a long one, and she needed strength, speed, and stamina. With the smaller cetaceans, you could have any combination of two, but not all three.

So she was going to have to choose something very different from her old friends, and no little bit dangerous.

She needed an orca.

When she entered the enclosure, there were three orcas there, all habitués of the Palace. Two of them were old, seasoned veterans, one with his flank scarred by the marks of squid suckers, the second with a lopped-off dorsal fin where a shark had bitten it off. The youngest was the one she was most interested in; he was known to be a fast swimmer, not because he had ever taken a rider before, but because he had won several inter-pod races. He was handsome, but not unscarred; there were the marks of combat on his flukes, a clear impression of teeth.

He was awake, too, which was good, as the other two were already dozing. Orcas tended to be testy if you woke them.

Like all the Royal Family, Katya had tasted Dragon’s Blood, that of an ancient Sea Drake that lived in a sea cave beneath the Palace itself, and woke only once every hundred years or so. She had never seen it awake, though her father had. She envied him.

She and the last four of her siblings had all tasted the blood at once. The Drake was impossibly beautiful, like an enormous cross between a Sea Serpent and a Lionfish. In sleep, it lay coiled around a stone in the center of its cave that had been worn smooth by its movements as it slept. It had an enormous frill of black-and-white striped spines, and a ridge of similar spines down its back. Both were folded flat, but moved a little as the King took a knife, nicked the membrane between two toes and collected a thick drop of blood. She had moved forward very carefully and with the others, tasted it from the point of the knife before it could wash away.

And then…then she had understood the language of the Beasts. Interestingly enough, it had also given her the Gift for understanding the various spoken and written languages of every race she had ever encountered, though it had not done so for her siblings. She had spoken first to a dolphin, and her life had seemed changed forever.

The Dragon’s Blood had unlocked the speech of every cetacean, of course. So it was no difficulty at all for her to bow to the orca and say to it, “Eagle of the Sea, I wonder if I might trouble you for a moment,” and be perfectly understood.

The orca regarded her with its right eye, round and shrewd. “The Sea King’s youngest daughter comes to have words with me, although we have never met. Presumably, you want something.”

Orcas were odd beasts. They absolutely required formality and deference from those who initially approached them, then tested them with rudeness, or sometimes even threats. It was probably because that was the way they treated each other. Big predators were always testing each other.

So she laughed. “But of course! Doesn’t everyone? This offers challenge though. An epic swim, if you will, and perhaps at the end of it, something interesting to see. Have you ever been to the place the Drylanders call Nippon?”

He rolled so that he looked at her with his other eye. “Hmm. I have not. It would be a new place to see. An epic swim, you say?” He blasted her with a jolt of sound that jarred her insides for a moment. She didn’t even flinch; definitely another test. “Such a thing would make me attractive to the females. I am looking to start a pod soon. A strong swimmer, a good hunter. Hmm.” He rolled back to the other side. “And you…you are a warrior.”

“Of sorts,” she agreed.

“You do not show fear, only proper deference.” He blew a blast of bubbles. “You would be a good companion. We will go.”

“My thanks. May I know your name?” she asked, going over to the side of the enclosure, which really served only to keep the visitors from drifting off on the currents as they slept, and as a place to hang the various sizes of traveling harness and the weapons one needed when traveling.

“Sharptooth. You would be the one called Tsunami.”

That pulled her up sharply. She had never heard her Orcan name before. “Tsunami? Why am I called that?” she asked, as she fitted the harness over his nose.

He blew a string of laugh bubbles. “Because nothing at all of you shows on the surface, and only at the last moment do you reveal yourself. And those who see you are swept away.”

She had to admit, that was a fairly good encapsulation of her style. “I trust you approve and agree with such a name,” she said dryly, slowly working the traveling harness over his tall dorsal fin.

He blew another string of laugh bubbles. “I am of the People. You need to ask?”

Orcas were the fastest swimmers in the sea. Sharptooth was probably one of the fastest orcas in the Kingdom. Katya held to his harness, flattened herself down along his back to reduce resistance, and let him go. As for giving him directions—this was an orca. He had access to the best guides in the world. Other orcas, and the only great whales that could rival an orca for fierce nature, the sperm whales. He simply set out in the right general direction and began calling out his destination. Soon, someone replied. “This way.” He oriented himself on the call without slackening his pace.

Once out of the shelter of the magic around the Palace, the water had turned cold and the magic that allowed anyone to breathe water vanished as they crossed the invisible barrier, and her body had reacted by changing, just as the Sirens’ bodies did. There was one moment of icy cold, and a moment when it felt as if she was choking.

Then she was warm again, and she could breathe.

They paused to chase down, catch, and eat some salmon. She spread a purse net vertically in the water; he chased the school toward it. The school hit the net and she pulled the cord that turned it into a bag, catching enough for him with one left over for her meal.

As she sliced raw bits off and ate them, he eyed her. “There were seals,” he offered. “I did not chase them.”

She eyed him back. “If it is a choice between seal and starving…”

He blew bubbles. “Good, you are practical. I doubt you would let me take porpoise under any circumstances though….”

“I’d rather you didn’t eat my allies.” She suspected, from the tone of his voice, that he was teasing her. “It makes for bad feelings all around if you eat allies.”

“True. And we should be gone.”

“So we should.” She sliced off the fillets and stowed them in a fish-skin pouch on the harness. She was set for food now; all they had to worry about was keeping him fed. She secured herself to his harness, tucked herself down again, and they were off.

A journey like this had a curious timelessness about it. They stopped to rest when they were tired, hanging together in the featureless, empty blue that was the midocean far from any shore. When he was hungry, he would query the surrounding water until he got an answer about where the food was, and they would make a slight detour. The sun rose and set above the water; once they waited as it touched the horizon to see if they could catch the “green flash” that supposedly came as it passed beneath the waves, but neither of them saw anything. So they moved on.

Finally, there were gulls in the sky, bits of greenery on the waves, and they knew they were nearing some kind of land.

Then they saw it.

Journey’s end, but the mere beginning for Katya; though Sharptooth would be a part of this for a bit longer. First, Katya had to find the right part of what was really a very large island.

For that, they needed to listen to the seabirds.

At their first landfall, the birds were acting perfectly normally. Nothing much to complain of, it seemed, other than that someone was always stealing food. And there was the usual gull chorus: “Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!” They turned their faces southward along the coastline and plunged on, pausing long enough to give the hungry orca a meal of good mullet.

The second time, half a day later, was equally fruitless. It was a full moon, though, so they elected to cover more leagues in the search.

But the third time—as sunrise flooded the sky with light, and the seabirds rose to meet it.

“Death! Death! Death!”
cried one.

“Despair! Despair!”
cried a second.

Katya turned to look at the round, bright eye of her companion. “I think we have found the right place,”

Sharptooth had left, after giving the unusual pledge that if she needed
him
, she must summon him through the Sperm Whales or the Orca pods. She stepped out of the water and shook herself off, waiting while her body shivered in the shock of change, her lungs took in the first gasping breath of air, and she felt things subtly shift inside her.

Then, she spread her arms wide, spun out a thread of magic, and sent it questing after The Tradition. Not that The Tradition was anything like an entity, except…

Except that sometimes it acted as if it was.

Well, no matter. She knew when her magic touched it, and she promptly insinuated her will into it, cajoling.
I need to fit in here,
she told it; if there was one thing that The Tradition “liked,” it was for everything and everyone to follow down its favored and predetermined paths. This was a land full of small black-haired people who looked a certain way. She didn’t look that way, and wanted to. She sensed its interest, then its power. Quickly, before it could elect to do something annoying, and seized on that image of
fitting in
, and decided to make her fit in as a beggar, she needed to take control when the power was there.

I need to fit in here,
she told it.

And the moment when it decided that it needed to help her do that, she invoked exactly how she wanted to fit in. As a high-ranking noblewoman—with whatever was the most beautiful clothing that was available!

Because, after all, it was no fun being a peasant.

She had her eyes closed in order to concentrate; the magic was thick, very thick around here. No wonder the seabirds were crying doom; whatever was happening was powerful and The Tradition had taken note quite strongly.

But she was a bit taken aback when it suddenly felt as if someone had draped her in a hundred bolts of fabric all at once.

Legs muffled, arms enveloped, head bowed forward—her eyes flew open and she looked down at herself in shock.

It not only felt as if someone had draped her in a hundred bolts of fabric—it looked that way, too.

She must have been wearing six layers of clothing.

In form, the main article she was enveloped in was a heavily embroidered blue silk robe, but the rectangular, lined sleeves swept down to and along the sand, the robe itself trailed along behind her by the length of her arm, and it was bound around her by a broad, stiff, embroidered silk sash with an elaborate bow or knot that she could feel at the small of her back. Beneath this robe was another; beneath that still another—there must have been six or seven of these robes, each carefully layered so as to show a sliver of colored silk at the neckline. Her hair had been bound up and hidden beneath a wig made in a stiff mounded style with hair sticks thrust through it, and on her feet were wooden sandals so tall she was afraid to take a step in them. Not that she could have even if she had wanted to. She couldn’t move.

The clothing was beautiful but—

This was utterly ridiculous.

Would The Tradition give her another chance? She closed her eyes and tested the potential magic about her.

There was nothing there. She’d had her chance. Now she had to find some other way of getting the job done.

Drat.

With a sigh, she began divesting herself of all of the many garments. She would just have to do this the hard way.

By dusk, she was quietly moving through the underbrush at the side of a road, following her instincts into the north. She had found a peasant farmer’s house with commoner’s clothing drying on bushes outside it. Figuring that one of those silk robes was probably worth more than a hundred outfits, she left all seven of the robes neatly folded beneath the bush, with the wig on top. She kept the jeweled hair sticks, the jade ornaments attached to the sash, and the handful of trinkets she found tucked inside sleeves, in the sash. She might not need them, but you never knew.

How do women manage to do anything in this place?
she thought crossly, slipping from shadow to shadow. This did not bode well for accomplishing her father’s task quickly. If women were so confined by their clothing, what other fetters did this land put on them?

What a confounded nuisance.

The Temple was in shambles.

Katya knew it had to be a Temple; religious structures in nearly every land she had ever been in were generally very similar, though this was very small and rather humble. Perhaps it was a Shrine rather than a Temple? This place had a very large front gate, all of wood, which stood open, and a broad avenue lined with stone lanterns leading directly to the front doors, also standing open. There was a large bell and hammer to one side of the door, although one side of the bell frame was splintered and broken. The once-manicured grounds were overgrown with weeds, and the gravel paths had bits of grass sprouting in them. Katya climbed the steps leading to a porch around the entire structure, then stepped quietly through the open doors and peered around in the gloom. The exterior walls were all of wood, and the place appeared to be just one big room with a wooden floor. There was an altar with the statue of a man seated in a cross-legged pose on it. The serenity of the man’s expression was marred by the hole gouged in the statue’s forehead.

Violation of a sacred space. This is not good.

The destruction was not new; in fact, it looked very much as if it had happened many months ago, and yet there had been no attempt to repair it. The Temple looked abandoned.

She prowled around the edges of the room. It was curiously barren, but the walls behind the altar seemed to be composed of nothing but paper stretched in frames. Odd. Very odd. There were no doors, and yet there seemed to be further space beyond the paper walls.

She examined the walls further, and her curiosity increased. It appeared that the center section of each wall moved. She gave the one nearest her an experimental push.

It moved sideways with a faint sound, and she stared at the room beyond…

…and the old man sitting disconsolately in the corner. He looked up at her.

He looked like a more ancient version of the Qin sailors that she had seen, very rarely, among the crews of sailors from other lands on trading ships. He was quite small, no taller than she, and his skin was like parchment, his eyes narrow and slanted. He looked—broken. “It’s no use,” he said dully. “If you have come on
her
behalf, you might as well know that she has already taken the only valuable thing we had. If you have come for solace, there is none to be had here. I have tried my best, but I am old and hurt, and the others are all dead.”

“What others, Grandfather?” she asked, coming over to help him up as he tried to stand. “I am a stranger here—”

“I can offer you shelter for the night, but little else,” the old man said, as if he had not heard her. “My brother monks are dead, and no one comes from the village anymore. I think they may be dead, too. I have not had the strength to look.”

She helped him to his feet and at his direction, into a little building behind the shrine, which proved to be an open room with a kitchen at one end. There was a small fire burning in a brazier, with a kettle of water over it. “I have tea—” he began.

“Grandfather, you will sit, and you will let me tend to things,” she said firmly. Princess she might be, but she was also not a stranger to every sort of work. That, too, had been part of her training, so that she could counterfeit virtually anyone of any station. Before long, she had the old man comfortable beside a much larger fire, cradling a cup of hot tea. At his direction, she had started a pot of some sort of grain cooking, then went out to survey the rest of the Temple and its grounds.

It had been pretty much ransacked, and the more she saw, the angrier she became. A great deal of the destruction was purely wanton damage. There was no reason to it, if, as the old man had said, there was only one object of value here. It appeared that five or six others had lived here with the old man in lives of quiet simplicity, which had in one day been shattered by an outside force. She did manage to find some bedding that was not too torn up, and the pallet the old man himself must have been using, and some of the same short robes and loose trews of plain dark cloth that both of them were wearing, which had been stored in a closet. That would give both of them a change of clothing.

She returned to the old man laden with her gleanings to find he had gotten enough energy to tend to the food. He looked up at her entrance, his face much more alert this time. “Little daughter, you are too kind.”

“Grandfather, it is my duty,” she replied. “Can you tell me what happened here?”

He bowed his head. “It was a witch,” he said sadly, “and we were not prepared to combat her. But we did not know. How were we to know?”

Slowly, as the grain cooked, as she made up beds for both of them near the warmth of the fire, as they ate, she pieced together the story. This was not an important shrine, but it was regularly visited by the folk of a nearby village, and the old man and his five fellow priests tended the shrine and the grounds, and the spiritual needs of the village, faithfully. The statue—she could not make out from his sometimes rambling speech whether it was of a god, or of a great priest of that god—had been unearthed accidentally several decades ago by a farmer plowing his fields, and the shrine built to house it, priests found to tend the shrine once it was completed. No one had thought that the statue was of any particular importance; the dark stone embedded in its forehead had seemed nothing more than a simple bit of ornamentation.

This old man had been one of the first group of six priests to be sent here; as old age had thinned their ranks, others had been sent to replace them. Katya gathered, as she ate the boiled grains and listened closely, that although there were branches of priests that were martial in nature and trained in combative techniques, these were not of that order, being strictly contemplative. “This was just a forest shrine,” he repeated, over and over, his bewilderment evoking her pity. “What did we have that anyone would want?”

Then, two months ago,
She
had turned up at the door.

She hadn’t been subtle, either. The way the old man described it, she hadn’t even issued a challenge. The first they had known of her arrival was when the doors had blown open, and a white-clad, white-haired woman surrounded by a whirlwind of grimacing demons strode into the sanctuary.

“A witch,” the old man called her. Katya would have called her a sorceress, but whatever you called her, it was pretty clear that she was very powerful. It was also quite clear that she was both ruthless and evil.

The old man himself had been the first to bar her way, with amulets binding both wrists and a blessed staff to protect him, he had interposed himself between the witch and the others.

Amulets and blessed staff had been utterly useless. With a simple gesture, she had flung him through the air at the bell frame just outside. And that was literally the last thing he knew until he’d woken up again, in terrible pain, lying at the foot of the bell shrine with a broken arm and cracked ribs.

He had staggered into the sanctuary to find his fellow priests dead, lying where they too had been thrown, and the stone wrenched out of the statue.

“It must have been important, some sort of amulet or talisman,” the old man said brokenly. “But we were simple priests. We never had any magic of our own, only magic in things we were given and the power of our faith. How were we to know?”

“You couldn’t,” she soothed him, as she helped him into bed. “You could not have known.”

It was clear that the attack had broken his spirit as well as his body.

The old man had cremated his fellow priests by the simple expedient of dragging their poor bodies to an unused shed, drenching them with oil, and setting fire to the place. He had then waited for someone from the village to come to send word of what had happened to his superiors.

But no one ever came, and he was too weak to make the walk himself. And by now, he had lost faith that they still lived.

“Be easy, Grandfather,” she said into the darkness. “Tomorrow this will be dealt with. I am young and strong. If there is help to be found for you nearby, I will find it. If there is none, I will take you to where help is.”

As soon as he was asleep, she got up again, and stole out.

She needed very little sleep, and right now she needed information far more than sleep. Thanks to the old man, she knew where the village should be, and the first piece of information she needed was whether or not there was anyone still alive there.

Under the cover of darkness, she sprinted down the road and before the moon was very high, she had come to the village. She had feared that what she uncovered would be “what was left” of the village, and to her intense relief found it still standing.

Easy enough to see from a distance, it was like a collection of toy houses all lit up. She caught a hint of the steep thatched roofs in the moonlight, but most of the light came from lanterns outside the doors and being carried by people milling about. The houses all seemed to be like the shrine; substantial in size, raised off the ground, and sometimes going to two or three stories.