Shadowplay

day and know that she is looking back at you with disgust, that she and all the other ladies of the court are marveling together at the sight of the most arrogantly foolish and pitiful idiot who ever lived.”

The prince turned away from him. Gyir seemed lost in his own secret thoughts. Ferras Vansen had no choice but to sit silently, holding his stomach as though he had been kicked.

22. A Meeting of the Guild

As a marriage gift, Silvergleam gave to Pale Daughter a box of wood, carved with the shapes of birds, and in it she put all that she could remember of her family and old home. When she opened the box, its music soothed her heart. But her father Thunder could not make music to cool the burning of his own anger. He called out to his brothers that he was afflicted, dying, that his heart was a smoldering stone in his chest. They came to him and he told them of the theft of his daughter, his dove.

—from One Hundred Considerations, out of the Qar’s Book of Regret

“I don’t like it,” Opal said. “No good can come of telling everyone.”

“I’m afraid this once I can’t agree with you.” Chert looked around the front room. Evidence of the distractions of the last days were everywhere—tools uncleaned, dust on the tabletop, unwashed bowls and cups. “I am no hero, old girl. I’ve come to the limit of what I can do.”

“No hero—is that what you say? You certainly have been acting like you thought you were one.”

“Not by choice. In all seriousness, my love, you must know that.”

She sniffed. “I’ll put the kettle on. Did you know the flue is blocked? We’ll be lucky if the smoke doesn’t kill us.”

Chert sighed and sank deeper in his chair. “I’ll see to the flue later. One thing at a time.”

He had been so tired that when the ringing began he did not at first realize what it was. Half in dream, he imagined it as the bells of the guildhall, that the great building was floating away on some underground river, being sucked down into the darkness below Funderling Town... “Is that our bell?” Opal shouted. “I’m making tea!” “Sorry, sorry!” Chert climbed onto his feet, trying to ignore the protesting twinges from his knees and ankles. No, he was definitely not a hero.

I should be settled back to carve soapstone and watch grandchildren play. But we never had children. He thought of Flint, strange Flint. Until now, I suppose.

Cinnabar’s bulky form filled the doorway. “Ho, Master Blue Quartz. I’ve come on my way back from quarry, as I promised.”

“Come in, Magister. It is kind of you.”

Opal was already waiting by the best chair with a cup of blueroot tea. “I am mortified to have visitors with the house in this state—especially you, Magister. You do us an honor.”

Cinnabar waved his hand. “Vistiting the most famous citizen of Funderling Town? Seems to me I’m the one being honored with an audience.” He took a small sip of the tea to test it, then blew on it.

“Famous...?” Chert frowned. Cinnabar had a rough and ready sense of humor, but the way he’d said it didn’t sound like a joke.

“First you find the boy himself, then when he runs away you bring him back with one of the Metamorphic Brothers holding the litter? Big folk visitors in and out? And I hear rumors even of the Rooftoppers, the little folk out of the old tales. Chert, if anyone in the town is not talking about you and Opal, they would have to be as ignorant as a blindshrew.”

“Oh. Oh, dear,” Opal said, although there was a strange undertone of something almost like pride in it. “Would you like some more tea, Magister?”

“No, I’ve still got supper waiting at home for me, Mistress Opal. It’s one thing to work late, but to come home to Quicksilver House without an appetite after my woman’s been in the kitchen all afternoon is just asking for trouble. Perhaps you could tell me what’s on your minds, if I’m not rushing you?”

Chert smiled. How different this fellow was from Chert’s own brother, who was also a Magister: Nodule Blue Quartz was not nearly so important as Cinnabar in Funderling Town, but you would never know it from the airs Nodule put on. But Cinnabar—you couldn’t fail to like a man who was so easy in himself, so uninterested in position or rank. Chert felt a little bad for what he was about to do.

“I’ll get to the point, then, Magister,” he said. “It’s about our visitor. I need your help.”

“Problems with the boy?” Cinnabar actually looked mildly concerned.

“Not the boy—or at least that’s not the visitor we mean.” He raised his voice. “You can come out now, Chaven!”

The physician had to bend at the waist to make his way through the doorway of the bedchamber, where he had been sitting with Flint. Even with his head bowed so as not to touch the ceiling, he loomed almost twice Cinnabar’s height.

“Good evening, Magister,” he said. “I think we have met.” “By the oldest Deeps.” Cinnabar was clearly amazed. “Chaven Makaros, isn’t it? You’re the physician—the one who’s supposed to be dead.”

“There are many who would like that to be true,” said Chaven with a rueful smile, “but so far they have not had their wish granted.”

Cinnabar turned to his hosts. “You surprise me again. But what is this to me?”

“To all of us, I’m beginning to think,” said Chert. “My bracing can’t take the weight of all these secrets any longer, Magister. I need your help.”

The head of the Quicksilver clan looked up at the physician, then back at Chert. “I’ve always thought you a good and honest man, Blue Quartz. Talk to me. I will listen. That much at least I can promise.”

When Ludis saw that his visitor had arrived, the Lord Protector of Hierosol gestured for his military commanders to leave. The black-cloaked officers rolled up their charts of the citadel’s defenses, bowed, and departed, but not without a few odd glances at the prisoner.

Ludis Drakava and his guest were not left entirely alone, of course: besides the Golden Enomote, half a pentecount of soldiers who never left the lord protector’s presence even when he slept, and who stood now at attention along the throne room walls, the lord protector also had his personal bodyguards, a pair of huge Kracian wrestlers who stood cross-armed and impassive on either side of the Green Chair. (The massive jade throne of Hierosol was reputed to have belonged to the great Hiliometes, the Worm-Slayer himself, and certainly was big enough to have seated a demigod. In recent centuries, more human-sized emperors had removed much of the throne’s lower foundation so they could sit with their feet close enough to the ground to spare their pride.) Ludis, a former mercenary himself, was broad enough in chest and shoulders to mount the Green Chair without looking like a child. He had once been lean and muscled as a heroic statue, but now even the light armor that he wore instead of the robes of nobility—perhaps to remind his subjects he had won the throne by force and would not give it up any other way—could not hide the thickness around his middle, nor could his spadelike beard completely obscure his softening jaw.

Ludis beckoned the prisoner forward as he seated himself on the uncushioned jade. “Ah, King Olin.” He had the rasping voice of a man who had been shouting orders in the chaos of battle all his grown life. “It is good to see you. We should not be strangers.”

“What should we be?” asked the prisoner, but without obvious rancor.

“Equals. Rulers thrown together by circumstance, but with an understanding of what ruling means.”

“You mean I should not despise you for holding me prisoner.”

“Holding you for ransom. A common enough practice.” Ludis clapped his hands and a servant appeared, dressed in the livery of House Drakava, a tunic decorated with a stylized picture of a red-eyed ram, a coat of arms that had not been hanging in the Herald’s Hall quite as many years as the other great family crests. You can make yourself emperor in one day, warned an old Hierosoline saying, but it takes five centuries to make yourself respectable. “Wine,” commanded Ludis. “And for you, Olin?”