“Wait!” The impassive Eel looked up from his food and stared at the elfess in amazement. “You know where the Master lives?”
“I can guess,” the elfin princess replied reluctantly. “The Master, if he controls beings like the Messenger and endows his servants with such powerful magic, must be in a place where there is a concentration of immense power. And in a place like that, an artifact attuned to someone else would create such powerful turbulence in the flow of magic that the Master would be deprived of his powers and abilities for a long time. Therefore they have to destroy the bonds first, and only a highly experienced shaman can do that.”
“A place of power, the House of Power,” I muttered to myself, recalling the phrase that the messenger had spoken to Lafresa.
“What did you say?” Miralissa asked sharply.
I raised my eyes from my plate and looked at the elfess in surprise. She was gripping the edge of the table so hard that her knuckles had turned white.
“I said ‘the House of Power’… do you know something about it?”
I spotted the swift glance that Miralissa exchanged with Kli-Kli.
“The question is: Where did
“In my dream,” I said with a shrug, and then recited the list: “House of Power, House of Pain, House of Love. House of Fear…”
The swarthy elfess’s skin turned paler and paler with every name. Kli-Kli choked on his custard pie and started coughing. Deler thumped the goblin on the back with all the generosity that his dwarf heart could muster.
“I do not like your dreams, Harold! What else have you discovered?”
“Well … nothing,” I said, rather surprised at the fervent insistence of this lady who was always so calm.
“Are you sure?” The amber eyes drilled into me, trying to draw out the innermost secrets of my soul.
“Yes,” I replied quite honestly, without turning my eyes away.
She suddenly went limp and seemed to age. Wrinkles of fatigue appeared on her forehead and in the corners of her mouth; the fingers with the black nails reluctantly released their grip on the tabletop.
“What did I say?”
“That would take too long to explain, Harold. We don’t have time for it just at the moment,” Kli-Kli said hastily.
Was that a note of nervous tension I heard in the little goblin’s voice?
I cleared my throat and stared down at my plate, still mechanically stirring my soup with the spoon and thinking that the jester and Miralissa had far more business and secrets in common than they showed.
Secrets.
Nothing but secrets. They were dancing and prancing around me like the shadows from a flaming torch, but there was no way I could get a grip on them. More and more secrets, so many that soon I would drown in the murky stream. Who is the Master? Who is Influential, or Player? Why does the Master want the Horn? Is he the Nameless One’s enemy, too? Why does the Master take such pleasure in playing cat and mouse with us? Who is the Messenger? What is that world of Chaos that I entered in my dream? What kind of strange dreams are these? What are the Houses of Power, Pain, Love, and Fear? And a thousand and one other questions that I don’t know the answers to.
I didn’t ask the elfess and the goblin any questions—Miralissa would only have fobbed me off with a seductive smile, and Kli-Kli would have pretended to be a total fool.
I had lost my appetite, but I stoically finished my soup, feeling the elfess’s searching glance on me as I ate. …
“We need to have a talk, thief,” Alistan Markauz said drily when I got up from the table.
“Of course, milord.”
“Follow me.”
He started up the stairs to the second floor of the inn, without even looking to make sure I was following. I walked up after him. Egrassa and Miralissa were already waiting for us in the room. Ell wasn’t there; he had taken on the job of keeping an eye on Bass, who at that moment was dining in the hall and trying to teach Lamplighter how to play some card game or other.
“Have a seat, Harold,” said Egrassa, pointing to a chair. “A glass of wine?”
“Yes, thank you.”
I was immediately on my guard. The dark elves had never offered me a drink in their company before. Miralissa’s cousin was exceptionally courteous today. And they say that elves are spiteful, wicked creatures.
But then, so they are.
Men have never really lived at peace with the dark elves of Zagraba or the light elves of the Forests of I’alyala. There has always been friction, through all the thousands of years that our two races have known each other. Fortunately, things have never gone as far as open war, but border skirmishes have been common, especially during the period after men first appeared in Siala.
The dark elves had concluded a treaty of peace and friendship with our kingdom, but before that the yellow- eyed race had never shown any great fondness for the inhabitants of Valiostr. And even now the elves were not helping us to resist the Nameless One out of the sheer kindness of their hearts. Elves have about as much kindness in their hearts as their closest relatives, the orcs.
That is, none.
The silence in the room dragged on. I eventually cleared my throat and asked:
“What did you want to see me about?”
The question sounded a little impolite, but what can they expect from a thief? Fine manners? I don’t have them.… Or, rather, I do (thanks to For), but I didn’t want to use them at that moment. They’re going to ask me again what it was that saved me in Hargan’s Wasteland or how I found out about the houses.
“Be patient, thief,” said Alistan Markauz, who was standing at the window. “We’ll start as soon as Kli-Kli gets here…”
“Kli-Kli’s already here. You can start, Your Grace!” The jester slipped in through the door, winked at me, and sat down on the bed. He was relaxed now, playing the fool, nothing like the lad sitting at the table downstairs who had suddenly tensed up when he heard my innocent phrase about the House of Power.
“Well now … I didn’t talk about this downstairs, your friend is there, Harold.”
“I think he should be locked up for the time being,” Egrassa said with a glint of his fangs. “It’s ridiculous that we should suffer the inconvenience of hiding in our own home.”
“Everyone else already knows the news, so you and the Garrakian are the only ones left,” Alistan Markauz continued, although it was clear that he shared the elf’s opinion concerning Bass. “Ah, and here he is…”
Eel entered the room silently, nodded politely, and froze, leaning back against the upright of the door frame in a pose that reminded me of a statue from the beginning of the Age of Dreams.
With this latest arrival, the small room suddenly felt rather crowded.
“We have found out who owns the estate and where the Key is,” Markauz said sternly, turning away from the window.
“Are you sure that it’s still there?”
“It is in the city,” the elfess answered for him.
“I beg your pardon, Tresh Miralissa, but how can you be sure of that?”
“I applied the bonds to the Key. I can sense it. If it was not in the city … But then you should sense it, too, as the one to whom the Key is bound.”
“You must be mistaken, I don’t feel anything apart from fatigue and the need to sleep,” I muttered discontentedly.
“It’s just that you’re as thick-skinned as a herd of mammoths, Harold!” said Kli-Kli, taunting me as usual.
“Perhaps it’s not there yet, but it will come. Especially when you find yourself close to the artifact. It’s like a kind of itch. And the house where they are hiding it belongs to Count Balistan Pargaid.”
When the elfess said that, Milord Markauz glared at me, as if he was expecting some kind of immediate response.
