Dangerous Games (10 page)

“Eh?” Candlemas grumbled, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes. “What is it? You’re not with …”

He stared. The young man wore a neat outfit of black-and-white like a jaybird’s, not the shiny blues and greens of Karsus’s household. Candlemas realized what the boy resembled when he was offered a card. On it was drawn a single black P with a white star in the loop.

“Is that …?”

“Yes, milord. She bids you come right away. I’m to escort you.”

Candlemas looked for irony in the lad’s voice, found none, sighed and stood up.

“Very well, then,” Candlemas sighed. “Lead on.”

Near Castle Karsus’s main gate—they walked half a mile through three linked mansions to reach them—waited a coach-and-four. The coach was white, piped with black, as were the coachmen and footmen. The horses were black with white blazes and exact white rings around their middles. Candlemas wondered if they were bred that way or painted. He muttered, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Once Candlemas had crawled inside, the coach rattled through the streets, whip cracking to clear the way. Outside for the first time, Candlemas got his first look at the city. Below this high hill, where Castle Karsus was sprinkled like a handful of cocked dice, lay the enclave, or city, of Karsus. Candlemas knew he was atop an inverted, floating mountain, and in the far distance saw other mountains, yet he was hard put to discern the drop-off. Karsus was more like a floating mountain range. And the buildings! Towers fine as pencils, elongated tubes that arched to meet high overhead, delicate traceries like crystal spiderwebs that spun in all directions, dozens of onion-shaped minarets in a row, each more fantastic than the last. The streets were uniformly paved with even cobblestones, gasglobes stood poised to light every corner, and parks and gardens interspersed the high walls around gorgeous mansions. Public fixtures were just as beautiful, from a shimmering fountain a hundred feet tall to bridges that looked like silver jewelry.

All told, the Karsus enclave made Castle Delia look like a lily pad. And Candlemas felt like a frog atop it, backward, ugly, and ignorant. What he’d seen in Karsus’s workshops and read about in histories had humbled him. The lowest apprentice sweating in the workshops cleaning jars knew more than he ever would—probably as much as Lady Polaris had known when she was master of Castle Delia.

But he’d know more soon.

The carriage finally stopped by a black iron fence studded with white dots to resemble pearls. Beyond was a mansion of black stone and white mortar. But it took a while before Candlemas was admitted.

Oddly, the coach stopped on the wide avenue, and Candlemas was bidden out by a footman. Amidst a flurry of apologies, Candlemas was searched, groped by two white-gloved hands. Only then was he allowed inside the gate, where he was searched again by a pair of black-and-white guards, then escorted to the front doors.

Inside the mansion, the search was repeated, though more extensively. To an unbelievable degree. Braced by two guards, Candlemas was directed into a small room and ordered to strip. Wondering, he did so, even removing his loincloth. He was given a black-and-white robe, but the search continued. A maid went through his hair and beard with a comb, while a butler inspected each of his fingers, even pricking them with a needle to draw blood. Candlemas would have protested but for shock. After an inspection of his teeth, each one sounded with a tiny hammer, he was finally marched down a long corridor, handed to two more guards, marched farther, and so on.

Eventually he reached the top floor. A maid said, “Lady Polaris awaits you,” and opened the door. Wondering, Candlemas went in. He was already half shielding his eyes. Remembering how stunningly beautiful Polaris had been three centuries ago, he imagined she must resemble a goddess these days.

So his mouth fell open in shock as he entered the chamber.

The light was dim, filtered through thick white curtains. The room was vast but cluttered, mostly with couches and low tables. At the far end of the room, reposing on a wide couch heaped with pillows, was someone who reminded Candlemas, vaguely, of Lady Polaris.

Except she was huge. Massively, obscenely fat.

The formerly beautiful face was lost in rolls of suet. Jowls suited to a hog framed deep-rooted, pouchy eyes and protruding lips. Her frost-blue eyes were lost under triple lids. Her hair looked dry enough to break, like frosted grass. Her body sprawled on the cushions, propped in a dozen places by flat pillows. From under her black gown stuck an ankle like a ham.

“Candlemas!” Even her voice dripped with fat, curdled and choked, unlike her cool tones of centuries gone by. Her skin, Candlemas saw as his eyes adjusted, was blotchy and veined from years of debauchery and gout, too much wine and fatty food. “Candlemas! You wretch! Where have you been? Have you been searched?”

Reeling with shock, the pudgy mage found it hard to respond. Slowly, he grasped her point. He and Sunbright had disappeared three hundred and fifty-eight years ago and had never been seen or heard from again (he supposed). Until today.

“Yes, I was. Um …” he groped for a chair as he groped for words, but found only piles of pillows. Begging pardon, he sank onto them. He couldn’t stop staring at his transformed liege.

“I’ve been busy,” he finally said, “in a library, lately.”

The obese lady nodded as if that made sense. Grabbing with sausagelike fingers, she crammed a handful of sugared dates into her mouth. Drool chased down her chin, but she didn’t seem to notice. “When I heard you were in town, I sent my card immediately. Have you solved my problem of the scrying glass? I’ll need it for tonight.”

“Scrying glass?” Candlemas didn’t know what she meant. The last problem she’d tossed in his lap was the flipping-bone-dice conundrum. But this…

“No, wait. That wasn’t you I assigned, was it? It was, let’s see—that dark girl. Behira.”

Oddly, this memory lapse shocked Candlemas the worst. One thing Lady Polaris had possessed above all was a keen mind that never forgot the smallest detail. Now she couldn’t even recall her hired help’s names. He watched uneasily as she picked up a mirror and finger combed her frizzled hair.

Absently she murmured, “I need the glass because there’s a new form of assassination going around. They hire desperate people to sacrifice an arm, then fashion a simulacrum concealing poison until they can close with the victim …”

Candlemas remembered each of his fingers being pricked to draw blood. Assassinations?

“… I’m a prime target, of course, the choicest of the nobility. They’re all jealous of my beauty.” She preened in the mirror as she spoke, her forearm jiggling with fat. “Everyone hates me for my beauty, but they love me too. Or pretend to. They all want my secret, but they shan’t have it. But poor Baron Onan. He was disemboweled and strangled with his own guts. Hung from the bedpost. That won’t happen to me! Have you been strip-searched?”

“Yes,” Candlemas told her again. Ye gods, was every noble in this city insane?

“Good. You’ll need to be searched each time you enter. I’ll abide no assassins near me, and you can’t trust anyone. They all hate me, and love me. But you’ll need to fashion that scrying glass. There’s a ball tonight at the House of Danett. There’ll be candle matching, and cards, and only the spyglass can help me win. I’ve got my eye on Mika’s stable of race horses.”

Candlemas nodded absently. Among the histories he’d read, he’d seen the name Polaris once or twice, marking how she’d made fabulous wagers, and often lost. Fifty years ago, she’d lost Castle Delia wagering on a yacht race. It was Castle Bello now, a hunting lodge for some other noble.

He’d read more facts, none of them pretty. Like Lady Polaris, the empire had declined immeasurably in the past three hundred years. Growing problems had been ignored, had reached the crisis point, then gone beyond.

While there had always been a huge gap between noble and peasant, lately it had grown insurmountable. A tiny cadre of wealthy and decadent archwizards brutalized the starving poor. Food riots were crushed with clubs. Down on the ground, unchecked blight, excessive taxation, and mismanaged and stolen funds had forced even prosperous folk to abandon farms and wander. In the wake of the blight came famine. Mills and mines crumbled, fields reverted to briars and weeds, and as the human populace suffered, they blamed outsiders. Dwarves, gnomes, and half-elves were persecuted atrociously, or killed outright.

Yet despite losing the source of their wealth, the Neth had grown even more callous and barbaric. They’d increased the Hunt, slaughtering whole villages and roads full of destitute pilgrims. Any sane voice of reason within the nobility had been silenced by assassination or banishment. The once proud Netherese had only three preoccupations: gambling, garnering status and wealth, and avoiding assassination, which was commonplace and ghastly.

In short, Lady Polaris was a perfect representation of the Empire of Netheril: self-consumed, bloated, ingrown, oblivious to rampant decay, and fuzzy minded.

For a while, reading, Candlemas had considered returning to Castle Delia, and his own time—if that were possible. Troubles hadn’t seemed so insurmountable back then. But the castle, his home, though he’d never thought of it that way before, was gone, sold off.

Another thing disturbed him, too. Nowhere in any book did he find any mention of his name. Which meant he’d never been famous, never amounted to anything. Which meant working for Lady Polaris had netted him exactly nothing.

Dropping her mirror for more sugared dates, she interrupted his musing. “Well, why are you sitting here? Get busy on that glass!”

Grunting free of the pillows, Candlemas gained his feet. Bowing, he stated, “My pardon, milady, but that’s not possible. I’m in the employ of Karsus the Great now. I’m his”—not special friend—”confidant, in a matter of great importance. One that will allow him to finish his experiments.”

“You work for Karsus?” The fat lady’s voice went small as a frightened child’s. She cast about in the dim room. “Karsus? Did he send you? Are you here to assass—Get out! Get out, now, before I have you killed! Get out, get out!”

She screamed in her raw, raspy voice. Frightened by her insanity, Candlemas fled for the door. As a maid yanked it open, he sailed past and ran down the corridor. Heart pounding, he ran all the way until he stood in the evening street, bent over and wheezing. And weeping, though he didn’t know why.

Sunbright dreamt.

Before dawn, exhausted by the long, confusing day, he’d found a park and crawled under some bushes to catnap. Jumbled dreams immediately seized his mind-images of women in many forms.

Greenwillow was there, walking in an ethereal forest, first in her green shirt and black armor, then in a misty gown, then naked, as he’d seen her only once. But this was no erotic dream, for she kept moving, shifting like the mist itself, cool and serene as a mountain waterfall. Where was she?

Later, as night rolled over the vision, she grew taller, her eyes sparkling like stars, until she loomed across the sky, filling it from horizon to horizon, not smiling now but frowning. What had he done?

But suddenly she was small, scarcely coming to his breastbone, close enough to touch, yet slipping behind him again and again so he couldn’t catch her. As he stupidly craned his head, he could glimpse only one green, sparkling eye, for the other was shaded, or dull, or milky white, and she’d turned shy and hiding. What did that coyness signify?

And where was she going, this ever changing Greenwillow? Whenever Sunbright got close to her, she skipped away, light as a fawn, leading him on. On to something. But what? There wasn’t anything he wanted except Greenwillow, yet she evaded him. Was there something or someone else here? How could there be, when he knew no one in this world?

Chasing the elf’s shifting, lithe form, he begged her to wait, grabbed at her, but she slipped behind a laurel bush with a giggle. He batted it aside, brush thrashing, crashing, whipping in his face, stinging his hands—

—and woke himself up.

He lay in the park, with the sun leaking over the horizon, in a city high in the air, far from home. Alone.

As the wind died just before dawn, Sunbright halted to sniff. Something was up. Trouble brewing.

Treading the early morning streets toward the jumble of Karsus’s compound, he passed unmolested, as he had all night. The few night dwellers had steered well clear of the tall barbarian loaded with weapons and spattered with others’ blood. City guards had studied him, but his noble bearing and firm stride gave them pause, and he was leaving their blocks, which suited them fine. As the east tinged red, the roisterers of the night stumbled home under city guard escort, like vampires fearing the sun. Now the only folks abroad were merchants with pony carts or porters with barrows: fruit sellers, bakers’ apprentices, butchers’ boys, dealers in frozen fish. (How fish could be frozen solid in warm weather Sunbright didn’t understand.) They converged on the central market with its tables and corrals and stalls and kiosks, settling into traditional spots and setting out their wares. Yet filtering in came city guards in polished lobster-tail helmets and blue-green tabards emblazoned with the K for Karsus. All of them carried silver-tipped maces, and they grunted from the sides of their mouths. The merchants also whispered, uneasy at the large number of guards.

In all the nervous preparations, Sunbright was mostly ignored, and had tramped halfway across the marketplace when he felt the first hint of danger. It was a whiff, a scent, a prickling along his neck that warned him he was being watched. Something was lurking like wolves in the bush, or a panther braced to spring from a tree. The feeling was all around. Yet turning a circle, he saw only stalls and pennants and slit-eyed guards with ready maces.

Then the sun topped a mountain peak, the bright yellow splintered by a thousand distant trees. A dome upon Karsus’s mansions burned golden as if ignited by the rays.

And a roar went up from the shadows around the marketplace.

Instinctively Sunbright drew his sword, which he’d paused to hone by the light of a street globe, and surveyed his surroundings for shelter and escape routes. Behind him lay a long line of wide-eyed frozen fish. Opposite were bushels of wheat and corn, and fresh loaves of bread like fat swords. The marketplace floor was square tan cobblestones. The stalls were flimsy, mere poles and canvas, with the occasional small wagon, a maze of sticks and canvas. It was hard to pinpoint the roar—whatever it was—as it came from all around.