He read the message to Ghastain carefully, word for word.
“For Queen Mirami: A Tingawan girl believes you have an interest in five deaths in Kamfels and Ghastain. The girl has returned to Woldsgard under the protection of Hallad, Prince Orez. Since your armor is in Kamfels, perhaps you can be of assistance to her. There are no longer any Tingawan people here at the abbey. They have all gone.”
Solo Winger decided he should not send this one until Wordswell and the Tingy-away women had seen it. He put it behind one of the stones in the wall along with a great many copies of other messages sent and received. When the abbot returned, along with the librarian and the others, he would give it to them. They could decide what to do with it.
The court of King Gahls was known for its luxury in an age when a mere sufficiency satisfied most. The lands on the high plateau were fertile and well watered. Food was easily grown and harvested. There were lakes, streams, and marshes full of fish and fowl, forests full of game, fields full of grass on which sheep and cattle grazed and grew fat. The market gardeners did well, as did the poulterers who provided eggs, the dairy farmers who provided milk, cream, cheese, and butter. The court was the center of all provisioning, each circle around it feeding on the ones farther out. Hay from the outermost provided winter fodder for cattle in the next; the beef fertilized market gardeners in the next; the fancy vegetables and fruit fed the court, which paid for everything in minted gold. The gold came from the mines in the mountains, which were owned by the king. So long as there was enough of everything, everyone benefited. The system was more or less closed. Though the king’s coinage had spread throughout Norland, barter was still widely used elsewhere than in Ghastain itself. People who raised food traded it for wood, people who cut wood traded it for food, both traded to people who wove cloth. Coinage was reserved for things one could not trade for: fancy things, imported things, silks from beyond Tingawa, furs from the high north mountains, even a few manufactured things from the Edges at the center of the continent. These things delighted the court of King Gahls in Ghastain, which is what he chose to call both the city and its surroundings after he took the throne.
The city had not merely accumulated, as do most cities; it had been designed. Streets lined with well-built shops and houses and stores radiated from the center of the city, joined by circular roads that spiraled inward from the four city gates. Four simultaneous processions, one entering at each point of the compass, could, and frequently did, wind their way toward the castle at the center. The castle was not a walled fortress but an architectural triumph surrounded by a paved mosaic plaza, decked with towering spires, with stained glass windows that jeweled the refracted light, with enormous bronze-sheathed doors hammered into images of Ghastain and Huold and all the mighty warriors of past times. Inside were marble floors and columns; walls hung with tapestries; furniture made of rare, fragrant woods imported in some former time, before the Sea King had stopped the ships from the east. Windows reached from floor to ceiling, flooding the rooms with light. At night, velvet curtains were drawn across them to keep out the chill. Stoves were built into the walls, and when the weather turned cold, their isinglass windows glowed with heat. All was warm in Ghastain, all were well fed in Ghastain, all were well clothed in Ghastain, all were at the service of the king. And the queen.
On this day, however, the queen was not satisfied with the service she was receiving. Her chamberlain, Chamfray, was seriously ill, and the physicians who served the king could not tell her what it was he suffered from.
“He has no fever, Your Majesty. He has no sign of illness beyond this weakness he complains off. His skin, his heart, his lungs, all appear normal. The weakness may be subjective rather than real. We have no way to test it.”
“The weakness is real,” she snapped. “I do have ways to test it. He drops things. He stumbles. He gets dizzy.”
“He is an elderly man, Your Majesty. The symptoms you describe are those of age. Age is not an illness. It is . . . simply inescapable.”
Mirami did not believe it was inescapable. She had learned as much from the Old Dark Man. She took certain drugs herself, created them herself from the sources she had been taught to use. She had given those same drugs to Chamfray. The Old Dark Man had told her the drugs were good only for the one they were designed for originally. She had not believed him at the time, but now she was concerned. She wished she had his books. Alicia had said there were no books in the Old Dark House when she went there. What could he have done with them? The secret to the drugs had been in the books; she had seen the books, seen him referring to the books when he gave her the drugs for the first time. “Only for you, lovely,” he had said. “Only because you are so beautiful.”
Mirami was well aware she had been created to be beautiful.
