He and Carrie were free to come and go so long as they touched nothing and did not get underfoot. Slyly, the exotic girl explained that they could leave whenever they wanted—if they could find a way out and were ready to cross the Dragon’s Teeth in winter.
The girl was curious about Carrie, jumpy around him, and reluctant to chat. She seldom left her young man long enough for a conversation, anyway.
She impacted Babeltausque like a kick to the heart of his fantasies but he managed his weakness.
Carrie murmured, “She is incredible, isn’t she?” No doubt to remind him that in this place self-control came under the heading Life or Death.
“I saw her once when we were little. I envied her so much.”
“I won’t lie, darling. She is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. But she is more dangerous than a bushel of cobras.” She intimidated him in more than just the survival mode. The girl had a sinister psychic air that no one else seemed to notice.
The eastern Empress emerged from a transfer portal.
Lord Yuan fol owed. Mist and her Tervola henchmen had vanished shortly after their return from Kavelin, leaving King Bragi in charge. Varthlokkur had gone soon after they did.
Ragnarson seemed confused. There was nothing for him to do. He hung around with a dour, dark man from Hammad al Nakir, also supposedly a king, and with that man’s wife.
That marriage seemed total y bizarre. She was in the throes of a difficult pregnancy. She was too old to be carrying a child. The three spent hours at a time gathered together not saying a thing.
Varthlokkur’s wife kept things going.
And that man, yonder, was the Disciple? Truly? And that one was the Old Man of the Mountain? And that other one was Kuo Wen-chin, who was once Lord Protector of Shinsan?
Fortune had delivered him into such company?
Carrie murmured, “And this is her mother, which explains so much.”
Yes, indeed. Even he was smitten, though his need insisted that they be so much younger.
The Empress announced, “That’s done. Now we wait.” Babeltausque had little real idea what was happening.
Nobody explained. What he knew he figured out from what he overheard in the few conversations in languages he could understand. He was not asked to contribute. He had nothing to do. He and Carrie were putting in hours til Mist had time to swap them for a lifeguard who had gotten left behind.
Carrie was more daring than he. She tackled the crowd, engaged in conversations where she could. Her luck was limited. Few spoke her language. Those who did were inclined to shy away because she was intimate with a sorcerer.
The Ekaterina girl had implied that she and her brother had spied on their private moments. Scalza thought it a great dirty joke. Ekaterina was troubled.
These people had bigger worries. At some level each was working to end the tyranny of the Star Rider.
Just the thought sparked terror. It showed more hubris than would mocking the gods themselves. The gods did not meddle in mundane affairs anymore.
Babeltausque surveyed the crowd while hugging Carrie close, her proximity offering reassurance. If he understood correctly, these misfits had generated al the information Varthlokkur and the Empress needed.
Where had the wizard gone? He had spent time close up with the Old Man before leaving. Babeltausque thought he was on a spoiling mission unconnected with Mist’s operation.
...
Radeachar carried Varthlokkur over and around what had to be the Place of the Iron Statues. There was little to be seen: rocky hil country spotted by scraggly oaks, stunted pines, breaks of scrub brush, and dried brown grass. Varthlokkur saw no running water. He saw nothing manmade. He looked in from a variety of angles in changing light and never saw anything remarkable.
And yet he sensed the presence of something there.
No angle showed him the entrance he had been told to seek. He saw nothing even vaguely familiar. If he had visited before, that had been erased from his memory.
The echo of a memory that did haunt him was of something resembling a crowded old Itaskian graveyard, behind grey stone wal s wearing lichens and creepers.
There should be massive wrought-iron gates. Inside, there should be forests of monuments. Amongst those would be iron statues and statues in noble stone.
Varthlokkur could see no ground that looked suitable for such a graveyard.
He did discover redundant protective barriers unlike those associated with other masks for reality, such as the one surrounding the temple Ragnarson had found outside Vorgreberg.
He decided that his memories must have been distorted by an outside influence.
As Radeachar settled to earth Varthlokkur began to entertain a new concern: How to get inside if the Place had gone through a makeover and the Old Man’s recol ections were obsolete?
That one had been sure that the Star Rider would have changed nothing. There had been no need. Old Meddler was lazy. He lived in permanent crisis mode, concerned only with the disaster of the moment, seldom bothering with preventative work or the grand scale equivalent of housekeeping. When Varthlokkur asked how that gibed with the vast, complex, generations-long schemes the Star Rider wove, the Old Man just shrugged. Those were something else. They interested the Star Rider. Someone who wanted to bother could work out the psychology.
Radeachar had its own sense for the magical, if little inclination to report it.
Once Varthlokkur set his feet down he saw what he sought so exactly that he knew it must be his expectations reflected, yet could be taken as real for today’s purposes.
The one expectation the place did not meet was an aggressive defense. It did nothing even when he touched the gate. The Old Man had said that the entrance would be the most dangerous part. Once he was inside he would belong. If he did not belong he would not have been al owed in, would he?
Careful y, by the numbers, hoping the Old Man had lost nothing during his prolonged mental holiday, the wizard executed the rituals that would let him enter. The Unborn floated behind. Varthlokkur wondered if it owned a sense of time. He could recal no situation where it had become impatient.
Screaming, the gates swung in a few feet. Rust chunks broke off the hinges. Old Meddler had not come and gone here.
Inside, the Place conformed to his recol ections. It was a cemetery— where the tombstones and stelae told no tales.
Time had erased most every inscription. The rare partial survivors were incised in alien characters. There was no reason, in fact, to conclude that this was an actual burial ground. It simply resembled familiar cemeteries —and was a product of his own mind, anyway.
There were mausoleums, too, more weathered than the simpler monuments, suggesting that they were older. He was curious but did not step away from his mission. Foolish to open a box, the contents of which were unknown and might be deadly.
The few iron statues al appeared to be damaged. Several were down, overgrown, and sinking into the soil. The most damaged were also the rustiest. Those with the least rust nevertheless lacked a hand, a foot, or showed signs of having been hit violently by something at least as hard as they were.
Varthlokkur had seen iron statues in action only once.
Nothing had stopped or slowed them, but that time their advent had been a total surprise. Stil , even forewarned, he feared sorcery would not slow them. On the other hand, the efficacy of natural law was persuasive here.
He selected the least-impaired-looking statue and told Radeachar to proceed as planned.
The first chal enge was to find out if Radeachar could shift one of the damned things.
They looked heavy.
Not too heavy for Radeachar, though it did strain.
The Unborn soared til it and the statue were a speck. The Place’s boundary membrane seemed infinitely elastic from inside.
The statue ended its plunge on granite flagging, surviving better than Varthlokkur expected. No pieces flew
