The Magician of Hoad (35 page)

“But I would,” said Carlyon. “I may be older and less skillful, for times of peace don’t encourage my particular talents. I am rather out of form, but I am still the Hero of Hoad. It is my chosen vocation. Lord King, are you prepared for battle? Are you, the man who forced peace on this city—a city molded by
conflict,
a city whose very
foundation
is war—are you really prepared to give up your dream of an artificially peaceful world and allow a more natural one to flourish?”

“After all, dear Father,” said Betony Hoad, “you knew when you went away that things would be changed. You hoped they would. You challenged Fate but failed to imagine that Carlyon and I would join against you. Even you have your limitations.”

“What do you want for yourself, Betony?” the King asked. He didn’t sound as if he was prepared to consider any proposal; he merely sounded curious. “Lord Carlyon has made his position clear.”

“I don’t know what I want,” Betony said. “But if you were to step back and allow me to become King in your place, I might have a chance to define my own ambitions. Our suggestion is that you go into voluntary exile on Cassio’s Island, which is an easy place to guard. And then Carlyon and I will rule as twin Kings in Diamond. He will be free to marry, and one imagines he would not have too much trouble fathering a dynasty. And me… I would try
to become something beyond a King. I might even become a Magician. There must be a way one can learn.” He looked at Izachel as he spoke.

“Where is Heriot Tarbas?” asked the King suddenly.

A silence fell… just for a moment neither Carlyon or Betony had anything to say.

“He has chosen to leave Diamond,” Carlyon said at last, speaking rapidly, trying to suggest the moment of silence had been irrelevant. “He has deserted you.”

But there was something of a light in the King’s eye. “You’ve lost him,” he said.

“Not before I put my mark on him,” Carlyon said. “I think he decided the city was becoming rather too fierce for him. I think he decided to retreat. After all, he is a Magician, and they’re notable for trickery, not courage.”

Looking through the narrow slot of a window, Dysart could just see the ships coming into the port below. He imagined his father disembarking and being received by Prince and Hero, imagined him finding out that Diamond was no longer his own.

They’re going to kill me,
thought Dysart.
They’re keeping me so they can negotiate with my father. All these years and they still don’t know him. He lives by history… by signs. If it’s a choice between his peace and his son, he’ll find it easier to live without me.
Turning away from the window, he didn’t so much pace around his small space as
wander
around it, pausing to touch the walls every now and then, as if, with a bit of luck, he might find a vulnerable spot, and the stone might crumble at his touch. “If I ever became King I’d watch out for the trap of the Hero,” he whispered to the wall, stroking it as tenderly as if it were the skin of the woman he loved. “But then you’d set other traps for me, wouldn’t you?” he asked, half believing the stones under his fingertips were in touch with every other stone in Diamond. “Wouldn’t you?”
Then he asked, “What time of day is it? I know I’ve slept, but for how long? My father’s out there somewhere. Is he worrying about me? Betony Hoad, Luce, me… we’ve never been much more than chess pieces in a game he was forced to play, and the game’s taken him over. Now he’s a chess piece himself. What sort of man was he before he became King? I don’t know. No one knows. Well, Lord Glass, perhaps.”

Then he thought of Linnet. And for the first time in his last hour of distracted thinking, Dysart felt he became fully himself. He stared down at his hands (
my hands
, he thought), flexed his fingers (“
my
fingers,” he muttered out loud), and was immediately pierced with an intense sadness and a certainty of doom… a feeling so fierce he had to sit on the stiff wooden chair, propping his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “I can’t betray my father. Of course, if my father was to go along with Carlyon’s wishes…” Alien forms of hope kept thrusting up through his thoughts, even when he was trying so hard to face implacable facts.…

There was a sound behind him. Someone was unbolting his door. Dysart didn’t turn when he heard that faint hush of the door opening, not wanting to gratify Betony and Carlyon by showing either expectation or hope… not wanting to betray the least interest in what was going on.

“Dysart,” said a voice. He swung around furiously, made violent by astonishment, but even as his chair tottered beneath him, before he had properly faced the door, he smelled wild grass and pine needles and found himself embraced and kissed… found himself kissing back.

“You’re alive. Alive!” she cried. “I came to warn you. Oh, Dysart…”

“Linnet!” he mumbled, but he was already looking across her trembling shoulder, to the shape of a familiar giant looming in his doorway… Heriot.

Heriot came into the tiny room almost shyly, followed by a Wellwisher. And though Heriot was definitely the man Dysart had known for so many years, yet he was that man transformed. His hair was cut short, his glasses were gone, and just as he used to do when he was a boy, he clapped his hand briefly over one eye in order to focus properly on Dysart. His clothes were rough and unraveling, so he was as shaggy as a bear in the King’s Zoo. But there was another, greater change. An unfamiliar power seemed to be spilling out from him, filling the room, almost as if he were giving off heat or light.

“
She’s
your true rescuer,” Heriot said, pointing at Linnet. “She set off riding through all the way from Hagen—”

Linnet interrupted him. “It was my father,” she declared in a voice half sob, half sigh. “He longs to make Hagen powerful, and it makes him… unreliable. And I had to choose.…”

“There’s a lot to say,” Heriot put in, “but right now we need to act and use our time well. The city is filled with the Hero’s men… but I think there are just as many of the King’s, all uncertain about what’s going on and what to do if it comes to a battle for Diamond. There are the men who normally guard the city, all waiting to be illuminated… waiting to be led… waiting to be told what to do. Your father just came sailing in with his troop earlier
today, but so far he has issued no instruction.”

“Why have they let this happen?” cried Dysart furiously. “Their duty is to protect Diamond—and me, for that matter.”

Heriot put his finger across his lips. “Quietly!” he said warningly. “The Hero is the twin to the King, and Betony, who was left in his father’s place, welcomed him. Attack the King’s son and you might be cutting into the King himself. Attack the Hero, and once again you’re attacking the King’s other self. It’s a finely poised dilemma, and we both know Carlyon wants to escape from the prison that being a Hero has become for him. He wants to be an active King like your father, a married King. He wants to have children.”

The Wellwisher laughed. Dysart couldn’t remember ever having heard a Wellwisher laugh, and he looked in some astonishment at the figure behind Heriot. He frowned with puzzlement that deepened into incredulity.

“Is that your boy Cayley?” he cried.

“And he isn’t a boy anymore!” said Linnet.

“I am what I am,” Cayley said quickly, in that familiar damaged voice, “And right now I’m not boy or girl! I am a Wellwisher, but not the King’s Wellwisher. I belong with the Magician, just like always.”

“Move on!” said Heriot, looking at Dysart. “Your father hesitates to command his own men, because he knows you and Lord Glass and others are hostages. We’ve already set Lord Glass free, and by now he’s in the Tower of the Swan, as safe as is possible. Defended, anyway. We’ll stroll over there now. And then—why, then we might drop in on Lord
Carlyon and Betony Hoad and point out that yet another adjustment has taken place. They’ve pushed things around over the last few days. Now it’s our turn.”

“But what about Betony?” asked Dysart. “Perhaps he has guards and supporters all the way through Guard-onthe-Rock.”

“I don’t think he has many supporters, but I’ll deal with Betony,” Heriot said. “Can’t you tell? I’m more than I was. I’m most of the way toward being what I was meant to be in the first place.”

Dysart stared at him, perplexed, half smiling, half frowning.

“I can tell you’ve changed,” he agreed at last. “What’s happened to you?”

“I’ve become a true Magician,” Heriot said. “I’m the one man now.”

“A Magician with a broken nose,” commented Dysart, grinning a little hesitantly.

“That? Well, I can still sniff out trouble. And anyhow, that’s between me and the Hero,” said Heriot, grinning too. “I’ll probably remind him of it in due course. But come on now!”

“Heriot, there’ll be guards everywhere,” Dysart said. “I think…”

“Yes,” Heriot agreed. “But Cayley and me, we walked here past them, didn’t we? Because I have the power to change what they think they’re seeing. So I’ll wrap us around in dreams, and we’ll walk by like the servants of Guard-on-the-Rock or attendants to Lady Linnet. Dysart, just tell yourself you are in charge now, because Cayley will
talk to the King’s Wellwishers, reminding them that their first and only connection is to your father, and as for you— never forget that the straggling old friend at your elbow is the Magician of Hoad.”

The golden throne room had changed. A second grand chair had been set up beside the King’s throne, and Carlyon the Hero now sat beside Betony Hoad, looking so much taller, so much more powerful than the slighter Prince. Izachel, dark as a shadow, hovered behind Carlyon, and it wasn’t difficult for those who had known him before to understand that he was a shell of what he had once been… a mere decoration. Once he had radiated force, but now, even though his face was invisible, his hunched shoulders along with his long, frail fingers revealed weakness rather than power. The King, displaced, sat in the subject’s chair in front of his son, and the Hero, who leaned forward, was speaking forcefully and eagerly.

“You see,” Carlyon was saying, “you are without allies here in Diamond.”

“I knew there were many possible dangers when I left my son in charge,” the King replied. “But for some reason I did not anticipate such a degree of treachery from you,
Carlyon. I knew that Betony longed for some impossible glory, and I thought that perhaps, if he took over the role of the King for a while, that the throne, the crown might—”

“How could you begin to think the crown or the throne would ever be enough for any man of imagination?” Betony cried passionately. “We live in a world that spins around a central mystery. And all we can do is dance and fight, gesticulate and parade ourselves like puppets stuck out on the edge of things, while up there the stars—” He broke off, shaking his head. “We play like stupid
children
,” he cried despairingly. “We’re always congratulating ourselves on our own glory and never admitting that, even at our grandest, we’re nowhere near the heart of true wonder. Even grains of dirt have more true glory than we do.”

Not only the King, but Carlyon himself, now stared at him uneasily.

“We must do what we can within our limitations,” the King said at last. “Do you fancy you could ever break out of your human condition to become a star?”

“Or a grain of dirt, for that matter,” Carlyon added.

Betony turned his head to one side, sneering at the long images of earlier Kings, stitched into tapestry and hanging on the wall. He twisted a little to look back at Izachel.

“He’s nothing but a scarecrow these days, but perhaps he could still edge me toward transformation,” he said, not, however, as if he thought there was any possibility of this. “In the meantime, you could step back from the throne, and I could play the game of Kings for a little longer. Carlyon would be my brother King, set free from all the rules that have reduced him. We could arrange a wife and probably a
war or two for him. He’d be able to ride in true glory once more.”

As he spoke, there was a curious change in the room. Its very light seemed to change… to darken a little… to take on a different quality as it stroked the gilded surfaces of the thrones, or sank into rich fabrics. Betony wasn’t looking at the figures in the tapestries or the carved faces above him, but Carlyon must have caught some movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned to stare at the wall, only to find the figures of the Kings, sewn into cloth, had all turned their stitched heads to look back at him.

“Maybe we could even arrange rebellion out in the counties,” Betony was saying, and then he broke off, for the altering light was not to be ignored. “What’s happening?” he cried to his father. “Don’t think you can—”

He was interrupted. The door of the throne room sprang open and Carlyon leaped to his feet, like a man preparing to face an enemy. Betony Hoad’s face froze, then he, too, rose, though rather more slowly. The door was swinging wide, and Heriot Tarbas, the Magician of Hoad, came into the room. He edged in quite gently, nodded to Betony Hoad and Carlyon, and then stood to one side, making way for Prince Dysart and Linnet of Hagen, who, both disheveled, both alert, crowded in close behind him.

“Well,” said Heriot, smiling and speaking into the silence at last. “Here we all are. How nice.”

Carlyon, his face twisting with fury, leaped toward him, clutching at his sword, only to find he couldn’t draw it from its sheath. And as he struggled furiously with his recalcitrant blade, he became somehow locked in on
himself. He couldn’t release the hilt and found himself staggering around in a ridiculous circle.

“Lord Carlyon,” Heriot said. “I know you can hear me, and I’ll tell you this. Move back to that throne you were occupying and sit quietly there, because I won’t let you take a step toward me or anyone else. So give up the struggle.”

“And what about me?” asked Betony Hoad. His voice trembled a little, but it was still mocking. “Do you promise to freeze me, too?”

Heriot watched Carlyon settling back into his throne, watched his cramped fingers unlocking from the hilt of the sword.