and guided them to where their eagle waited.' 'Just so,' replied Erimenes.
'So,' she said, turning coin-colored eyes to Fost, 'this is the property Moriana stole from you.'
'Yes.' Like her well-born comrades in the Underground, she may have lacked a sense of the realities of intrigue and insurrection, but she was a highly intelligent woman who had earned high responsibility in her father's import-export business because of her abilities. It was well for Fost to be reminded in a minor matter. It might mean his life if he didn't consider her in more ways than one.
He had to be circumspect in what he told her. Praying that Erimenes wouldn't see fit to contradict him, he explained that he and Moriana had gone off in search of some unspecified treasure, pursued all the way by Rann's bird riders. In Athalau, deep inside the glacier that called itself Guardian, they had become separated.
Fost had been trying to catch up with the princess ever since.
'I just missed her at Chanobit Creek' he said, lapsing back into truth. 'We found a survivor of her retinue. He didn't live long, but before he died he told us that Moriana was coming here. And so I came to find her.' 'But she didn't come here,' said Luranni. Fost groaned. His stomach turned over.
'Wh-where is she? Are you sure?' he demanded when he recovered from the shock.
'Synalon claims she has gone to make a compact with the Fallen Ones in Thendrun' she said. 'It might be a lie. You know what our beloved queen is like.' Fost knew. 'But my father says she appeared to be speaking the truth when she told the Council of it. She was in a rare fury. Sparks were flaming off her the way they do when she's angry, like hot wax from a taper. Poor Tromym got his side-whiskers set on fire. A servant had to pour a beaker of wine over his head.'
'How did Synalon come by this information?' Erimenes asked. 'I only enquire to expedite this discussion,' he added with a courtly bow, having insisted on being let out of his jug, 'so that Fost can get back to sampling sundry carnal delights with you as soon as possible.'
Fost winced. Luranni only smiled. The courier noted the broad patches of her areolas and the way her nipples stood erect again.
'She divined it, she said. It was hard to tell what made her more furious, her sister betraying humankind or the Dark Ones betraying her. She seemed to think they allowed the Fallen Ones to ally with Moriana in spite of promising to aid her.'
'Mightn't the Vridzish have decided to take matters into their own hands?'
Luranni shrugged, then said, 'Synalon seemed not to think so.' She went to a pewter bowl on a shelf, took up a long slender fruit and began to peel it. 'She spends most of her time brooding and trying to make contact with the Dark Ones, and occasionally torturing some poor soul to death to take her mind off her problems.'
'Synalon has grown rather exalted in her own esteem,' Erimenes remarked, 'if she thinks she can summon the Lords of Infinite Night like some lower caste djinn.' He stroked her nose with a skinny forefinger. 'But enough talk.' Luranni took a bite from the fruit she held.
'I agree' she said, reaching for Fost.
Not only did the Sky City woman not seem to mind Erimenes's appreciative presence, she went out of her way to indulge in erotic variations that left Fost gasping for breath. The philosopher was elated. To each her own, thought Fost, then settled back to enjoy.
Since then he had found himself a full member of the Underground. He had been less than enthusiastic until Luranni pointed out that Fost wanted to join forces with Moriana again, and that Moriana, one way or another, was bound for the Sky City. He might as well lend a hand in the interim both to further the princess's cause and pay for his keep among the City's resistance.
Behind his normal congeniality Luranni's father had not been overjoyed to see the courier again. Fost took it for granted that if he did nothing to justify his continued existence, the High Councillor was fully capable of having him dropped over the skywall some night when the moons were down. In fact, he suspected Uriath might not be beyond hinting to the Monitors where a prize Rann would value highly could be located, but he kept that suspicion to himself.
Fost soon found himself enjoying his role as revolutionary. The subterranean life was far from unfamiliar to him. He had spent his early years dodging the Emperor's police and the goons of the various guilds until opposition to authority had become a part of him. Wandering through the Grand Library of Medurim under the guidance of Ceratith the pedant, Fost had come upon many works on the theory and practice of revolution. He had read them with the all-consuming eagerness with which he approached all learning in that halcyon stage of his life.
His first suggestion had been resisted vigorously by Uriath and the senior members of the Underground. Fost wanted the resistance to be broadened to include middle and lower classes as well as the noble-born.
'I'm a sorceror,' Fost told Uriath, 'and I can teach your people the secret of invisibility.' By that, he explained, he meant that the Underground was ignoring the best source of intelligence in the entire City.
'Who pays attention to servants? More than that, who heeds the glaziers who repair broken windows, the workmen who clean and polish the building stones, the maids who dust Queen Synalon's bedchamber?'
Uriath looked skeptical. Grinning, Fost gestured past the High Councillor. Plying a feather duster over the elaborate wooden screens hung on the walls stood a servant in the yellow and blue livery of Uriath's own household. Uriath turned a deeper red and agreed to try Fost's scheme.
It had borne fruit. Through workers in the barracks of the bird riders, the Underground had made contact with malcontents in the City's military, the first such breakthrough in the movement's history. Actual armed insurrection against Synalon became for the first time more than a dream as unreal as any evoked by the Golden Barbarians' drugs.
His spectacular rescue of Princess Moriana from the Vicar of Istu gave Fost a reputation with the Underground. It was enhanced by rumors of his victory over a war eagle, which he saw no need to balance by pointing out that the bird had smacked its own fool head against a building. When in spite of initial sullen resistance to the idea of recruiting members of the service class into the movement Fost's outrageous scheme produced results, he could do no wrong.
He'd made further innovations. The Underground's internal security was little more than wishful thinking. As far as Fost could judge, the only reason it survived was that Rann was too occupied with planning and executing Synalon's grand scheme of conquest to give much mind to the business of spying on Sky Citizens. Additionally, the leaders of the movement were too highly placed and valuable to the running of the City bureaucracy for Synalon to arrest without concrete evidence. So far, all the Undergound members had died before revealing the names of anyone important. But it was only a matter of time.
In the existing organization, the damage was done; each member knew the identities of too many comrades. For new recruits, including servants and disgruntled soldiers, Fost introduced a cell system. An individual never knew anyone outside his own three-person cell and those whom he or she recruited. Contact with superiors was done through those who had recruited the cell members themselves, and the recruiters kept their own identities secret. In this way the damage would be minimized if a captured rebel lived long enough to spill his figurative guts along with his literal ones.
While Fost played rebel leader, Erimenes consulted with various mages in the Underground about means of short-circuiting Rann's magical surveillance net. By using captive fire elementals, Palace sorcerors spied on any events near the direct glow of fire. It netted a fair number of disaffected citizens overly fond of sitting down before their evening fire and spouting off about the oppressions of the crazy queen.
Since that was unlikely to remain the only trick in the secret police's repertory, the fifteen-hundred-year-old sage was also trying to foresee and forestall new approaches of the opposition and to come up with ideas of his own. Though Erimenes's powers were limited, only coming into full potency when he was near his natal city of Athalau, he possessed what Fost grudgingly had to admit to be an excellent knowledge of the theory and practice of Athalar magic, magic involving the intrinsic powers of one's own brain. The Athalar, and Erimenes, were less knowledgeable about extrinsic magic involving the manipulation of powers external to oneself, such as elemental or demons. But even here Erimenes was a fount of useful lore.
To all appearances Erimenes was enjoying his role as hugely as Fost was his. He didn't even seem to mind that his labors and researches prevented him from watching the carnal antics of Fost and the willing Luranni, which grew increasingly more frantic as time passed and the inevitable but as yet unscheduled confrontation neared. Through the grapevine Fost heard intriguingly lubricous rumors about orgies among the younger mages and apprentices fomented by Erimenes. He didn't ask the spirit if there was truth in them. If there was, Erimenes would tell him in vastly more detail than he cared to hear.
