The Stricken Field (18 page)

And months until Shandie could assemble the gigantic force he seemed to think he required.

It was the coming of the millennium!

If the imperor had expected his response to soothe the nation, then he had gravely miscalculated. If he had deliberately set out to ignite a panic, then he had succeeded very well.

Dwanis was a drab, gray land, drained by the Dark River, brooded over by the grim Isdruthud Range on one hand and the even greater North Wall on the other. The straggling convoy of wagons had entered the realm of the dwarves through massively fortified gorges. Phalanxes of border guards had questioned, inspected, and grudgingly allowed it to pass.

Thereafter it had continued its snaillike progress over rutted, stony roads. Dwanish was more populated than the northern reaches of the Impire, but still bleak and stark. Its farms were lonely patches on the bleak moors, its towns squalid huddles of cramped cottages without pattern or plan. Trees were rare, flowers nonexistent. Except for waterwheels and windmill sails, everything was made of stone. Slag heaps of ancient mineworkings blighted the landscape and the air stank of smoke. Spring was an affair of mud and slush and bitter wind.

By and large the inhabitants ignored the caravan, or stared with surly, unfriendly eyes. Even the tiny children seemed uninterested, except when they caught sight of the two goblins or the young jotunn. Then they would run screaming home to their hovels.

Shandie had taken up wagon driving to keep himself from brooding over the fate of the Impire. As far as he knew, the invading armies must still be looting and destroying, for he had no information except,the negative certainty that the Covin had not intervened. Warlock Raspnex had detected no major sorcery, so the war remained mundane. The legions would be marching, and the imperor was not there to lead them. Weeks were slipping away in waste and worry.

Shifting from global view to personal was no improvement. Shandie could see no progress in his pitiful campaign against the usurper. Umpily had been captured; Acopulo had arrived in IIrane and then fallen silent. King Rap had stopped communicating, also. The counterrevolution seemed to be over before it had begun, and the remaining conspirators were resolutely marching into a trap in Dwanish. There seemed to be no way to accomplish what they had come to do without blundering into disaster.

One afternoon he was urging his weary ponies across a very boggy meadow. All Dwanishian rivers flooded in springtime, filling the air with a stench of mud. He was startled out of his black reverie by an apparition scrambling up on the bench beside him.

Young Gath was still growing at an incredible rate, visibly taller than he had been back at Kribur. His odd assemblage of clothing was worn to rags; pipestem wrists protruded from the sleeves. He walked as if his boots pinched his feet. Yet, way up there, under a mop of golden hair, his face was still absurdly boyish, despite the jotunn jaw beginning to emerge from childhood softness. He perched on the seat, adjusted his long limbs into position, and smiled nervously down at the imperor.

"You want me, sir?" His voice never strayed from its adult register now.

"I do?"

"Well, you will. You're going to hail me as I go by. I mean, you were going to."

Shandie forced a welcoming smile and scratched his bushy black beard as he disentangled that information. "I still can't understand how you do that! It's a paradox!"

"Dad used to say that, too," Gath admitted glumly. Shandie winced. The lad must be just as worried now about his father as he was about his sister.

"Well, never mind. What do you think of beautiful Dwanish?"

"I never knew the world was so big! Mom says most of it looks better than this, though."

"It certainly does. Er ... I expect you miss your friends back in Krasnegar?"

"I miss Kadie! And my friends, I suppose. Yes." "Boys or girls?"

Gath's pale face blushed bright red. "Both."

If he was trying to put the lad at ease, Shandie thought, he was doing a horrible job of it. "I wonder why I was going to call you, though?"

"You want me to tell you, sir?"

God of Madness! Conversations with Gath were like no others. "Might save time."

"You were beginning to think you needed some fresh ideas, you said ... will ... would have said, I mean." "Yes. Well, that's true. Do you like puzzles?"

The boy shrugged uncomfortably. "Not much. I either can't do them at all or I see the answer right away. No fun."

The imperor chuckled. "I don't think you'll see this one right away. It's got the warlock baffled, and the other sorcerers. I'm only a mundane, but I'm supposed to have a knack for strategy, and I'm stumped, too. Maybe if I explain it to you, it'll help me see it better myself."

Day after day, in pairs or larger groups, Shandie had been debating with the sorcerers, arguing over the problem awaiting them in Gwurkiarg. Talking about sorcery was agony for them, but gradually he had gathered up all the hints and slivers they had been able to confide. He prided himself that he had now gained an overall knowledge of sorcery that few mundanes in history had ever matched. It wouldn't hurt to enlighten the young jotunn, also, and talk out the problem.

After all, the preflecting pool had recommended Gath to him. Perhaps there was more to the prophecy than that miraculous rescue from the goblins' tortures. And Raspnex still felt the kid might be useful somehow.

"You know a lot of it already. We must enlist the help of the Directorate without alerting the Covin. If Zinixo does not have agents actually within the Council itself, he will certainly have spies near it. He has a compulsive greed to enslave every possible sorcerer into his army. He craves vengeance on his uncle Raspnex and on your father, which puts you and your mother at risk, too, of course, because he is madly vindictive. This little caravan of ours would be a real prize for him."

He paused for comments, but the clear gray eyes waited solemnly for him to continue.

"Do you know all this already-what I'm going to say?" "Pretty much, sir," Gath said politely. "But you want to talk it out."

"Er, yes." Feeling oddly foolish now, Shandie continued. "And we assume he wants to get hold of me, too, although he may be managing all right without me. So if he ever finds out where we are, then he'll probably strike with everything he's got. And that's plenty!"

Sorcerers could detect sorcery in use. That was the crux of the danger. A sorcerer could escape detection only by doing nothing. The stronger his power, the less detectable he was in action, and the better he could detect others. Even if Zinixo had no votaries nearby, the Covin could probably sense power being used almost anywhere in Pandemia. If Zinixo's agents were present and could be detected before they alerted their master, the effort of silencing them and liberating them might itself be detected ...

"This was your father's idea, you know! He was the one who invented the new protocol. He suggested we spread the word by telling mundane authorities, like the Dwanishian Directorate. Trouble is, we've picked the most difficult one to start with."

"Dwarves are hard-headed you mean, sir?"

"True, but also this is Zinixo's home territory. He's certain to have left a watch on it. Worse, there's no fast, easy road out for us afterward."

Gath thought about that for a while, scowling. "Where do we go next?"

They would be lucky to go anywhere except to Hub, as captives. The imperor cracked his whip over the team to encourage the little ponies, which were game enough, but tired by a long day. "Likely the Directorate will want us out of here as fast as possible, and that means down the Dark River, to Guwush, or Nordland."

Those cagey, hard-headed dwarves might just try to turn the fugitives in, of course, hoping to win the usurper's favor, but that was not something to worry a kid with.

"Or sell us to the Covin?" Gath was there already. "Er, yes. It's not easy to betray a warlock, though." "You didn't mention loyalty spells, sir?"

"What about them?"

"Our sorcerers don't have loyalty spells on them, and the Covin's do. So ours can see theirs even when they're not doing anything."

"You know, that had slipped my mind. Who told you that?"

"Oh, I've been talking to the goblins ... and Master Wirax. And the warlock."

Shandie should have guessed that any son of Rap's would be likely to have brains and an interest in sorcery. He wondered if the boy perhaps knew almost as much as he did.

"Good for you! Carry on."

"Beg pardon, sir. The pinto has a stone in its front right shoe."

Shandie directed his attention back to the team, doggedly plodding over their shadows in the mud. Lead left did have a faint limp, but it did not seem anything to worry about. "He's probably just tired. Couldn't have picked up a rock in this muck."

Gath said nothing, and his silence said much. "Tell me," Shandie said.

"You stop and one of us goes and gets the rock out." "Which one of us?"

The young jotunn clenched his big jaw for a moment, suddenly reminiscent of his father. He stared straight ahead at the ponies. "If I try to, you tell me to stay here and you go, to see if I've told you the truth. If I say you're going then you send me."

"You can see both futures?"

"Yes, sir." Then he blurted, "And one where you really lame that pony, too!"

Shandie reined in. "I'll do it," he said, and jumped down into the bog. The shaggy pony was a walking swamp and balked at letting him lift its leg. There was indeed a rock in the little shoe, as he discovered when he had cleaned the foot enough to locate it. By the time he slopped his way back to the wagon, he was coated in mud from collar to toes. He thought he detected a gleam in the gray faun eyes looking down at him, and wondered if he had just been manipulated into making a certain adolescent's day.

With much whip-cracking and horrible sucking noises from the wheels, the wagon began to move again. Shandie hoped the dwarves had some dry shelter in mind for the night. They had been known to pitch camp in worse terrain than this.

"Let's hear some more of your ideas."

"Sir!"

"I mean it! You talk for a while."

Gath squirmed, then said, "Well, Moon Baiter says that just because the Covin is all-powerful doesn't mean that every loyalty spell has that much power in it. So if we--our sorcerers, I mean-can corner one of theirs by himself, they may be able to free him if they all act together. And if they're lucky the Covin won't hear them. Warlock Raspnex said he'd sooner drop plate armor in chapel service, sir, but he admits it may be possible." "It's not a comfortable prospect," Shandie agreed, amused at the breathless telling.

"If we could get them into a shielded building, like that cottage at Kribur where we met with Death Bird and the general-then it would be safe, wouldn't it?"

"But we can't count on them being so stupid." "No, sir."

"Can you suggest any other plans?"

Gath chewed his lip for a minute. "I gotta question." "Let's have it, then."

"Why walk into their lair at all, sir? Why not just write them a letter?"

"It's a very good question!" Shandie said, thinking that it was an unexpectedly cold-blooded one from a fourteenyear-old. "I did write letters to Caliph Azak. I might have tried it here, too, except events sort of swept me up and brought me. And dwarves are just about as stubborn as fauns ... What's wrong?"

"I'm part faun!"

The young pup had actually clenched his fists! His faun part would matter greatly to him, of course, especially now. "Nothing wrong with that and nothing wrong with being stubborn," Shandie said. That was not much of an apology! Could it be that his all-over coat of mud was rankling him a little? "Anyway, the Directorate knows the warlock by sight and will certainly listen to him. They may be impressed by having an imperor ask for help. Or they may throw me in a dungeon, of course. We're even thinking of having your mother accompany us. Krasnegar isn't quite a neighbor, but it's a sovereign state. That's our plan, and we know it's about as safe as lion shaving. If you've got a better idea, then I'd love to hear it."

Gath thought for a while. "I know what my dad would do, sir."

"You do? What?" "He'd ask my mom."

Shandie choked back a laugh lest he hurt the boy's feelings yet again. "Your dad's a smart man, Gath," he said. So much for advice and consultation! Well, it had helped pass the time.

Shandie was not the only member of the caravan to brood. Inos had more than enough troubles of her ownKadie abducted by goblins, Rap off in Gods-know-where, inexplicably failing to report on the magic scroll, her kingdom neglected and likely tearing itself apart. Compared to those worries, the possibility that she and her son were heading into disaster tended to sit near the back of her mind.

Nevertheless, she was aware of the problem. She and Gath had become very close on this strange pilgrimage, and she soon heard all about his chat with the imperor. It taught her nothing she had not already known. Being the only woman in the group, she had a unique status. Few men of any race would resist a chat with an attractive woman once in a while. Like Shandie, Inos had passed time by talking with the sorcerers-Wirax and Frazkr the dwarves, Moon Baiter the goblin, Warlock Raspnex. The other goblin, Pool Leaper, was only a mage, but he was the youngest of the group, and a rarity-a goblin with a real sense of humor. He had told her more than he perhaps realized. Among all living mundanes, probably only she had ever visited the occult plane of the ambience, because Rap had taken her there once when he was a demigod. She knew every bit as much about sorcery as the imperor did. And she was not going to allow Gath to be used as bait.

Her friendship with Shandie was a matter of convenience. Neither sought real familiarity, and their respective responsibilities as monarchs would have made that impossible anyway. She admired his self-control, but it made him too cold and humorless for her taste. She resented very strongly his reluctance to discuss business with her. It was an attitude she had seen carried to absurdity in djinns, and she knew that goblin women were no better than slaves, but it was not normally an impish trait. She would have expected better of the imperor himself. The idea that a famous warrior might be intimidated by women never entered her head.