will hang by our heels.”
“They’ll have to catch us first,” said Turko ominously.
This wing of her father’s palace had been furnished under the supervision of Delia, and I relished that. Even so, I was not enamored of the great palace of Vondium. Delia’s vision had created apartments of great beauty, but still the chill of the imperial presence came through. Rafik’s inn offered a change, at the very least. I just hoped Bargom at the Rose of Valka did not hear I had stayed at some other hostelry than his own. But, then, a few words and he would understand.
The capital city hummed with news. The emperor was returning in state and bringing with him as an honored guest to the Empire of Vallia none other than the famous Queen of Lome. Everyone was agog to see this fabled woman. The reports of her beauty and wealth had spread over this part of the world, dazzling men with impossible dreams. Everyone gave a curse and said how fortunate the emperor was, and how they’d like to be in his shoes. And some of them, saying that, would laugh and add words to the effect that his shoes would be fine and dandy —
One item of encouragement, and of alarm too, we had in those days. Balass received a report that among a group of his countrymen from Xuntal, traders and merchants down in the wharfside area of the city, a man had been heard to speak of the Black Feathers when he’d been drunk. I said, “Then it is up to you, Balass. You are Xuntalese. You can mingle. May the Curved Sword of Xurrhuk guard you.”
“Amen to that, my Prince. By my hopes of entering Xanachang! My people are a fearsome people if they think they are spied upon.”
“It’s of little comfort to tell you that almost any people resent spying. But look at it in a different light. You go to root out evil. Make no mistake, Xurrhuk of the Curved Sword finds no favor in the hearts of the Chyyanists.”
Balass’s firmly muscled body glistened black and silver in the light of the suns streaming in through the high windows, for we met and talked in this small enclosed arena set up within our part of the palace. The silver-sanded floor slid and shushed to the quick scrape of feet as we foined and parried with wooden swords. Turko, I knew, had put in a good many burs of practice with his new parrying-stick, and he handled the klattar now with a sureness that pleased me. Mind you, I’d be the last to suggest it was but a small step to go on to handling a weapon very much like a parrying-stick with one blade and with sharp edges. Its name would be a sword. And Turko, the High Kham, would have none of them. Oby came in, throwing off his tunic, getting ready to have a bout with anyone willing to stand against the liquid cunning of his long-knife. He left the lenken door partly open and Naghan, about to shout out about people being born in bars, stopped. A flunky sailed in through the door. He wore the fancy and immodestly ridiculous court dress for servitors, for we were forced to accept the services of other servants than our own from Valka. He was not a slave. His red and silver and yellow clothes billowed about him as he flew through the air.
I turned to make sure Turko really stood by me. If he had not been I’d have sworn he was the fellow outside thus casually hurling importunate servitors about.
But it was no man.
Through the pushed-open door strode a strappingly handsome girl. Her face was only lightly stained with a flush of blood under the tanned skin from her little exercise. She was clad in tights, with a body-hugging tan tunic strapped about with a lesten-hide belt from which swung rapier and dagger, buckled up in a way which showed she was ready to draw in a twinkling. Her weapons swung in that cunning way I had seen an infinitely more glorious girl scabbard her own rapier and dagger. So, forewarned by the weaponry and the demeanor of this girl, I knew from whom she came. She wore her light brown hair cut short. Her face held that open, frank look of the girl who knows she is a girl and is prepared to treat men as men because that is their misfortune. I liked the look of her. Over her heart an embroidered red rose, twined about with gold threads, resembled very much the little red and gold brooch, fashioned in the shape of a rose, Delia had given me in return for the brooch like a hubless spoked wheel I had given her.
“Llahal and Lahal, Prince Majister,” said this girl, marching straight up to me with a swing of the hips and a lithe and limber step. “You are well met. Here, my Prince.” And she hauled a letter from the small script at her waist.
The letter was written on yellow paper and carried a faint and fragrant perfume to my nostrils. The writing, firm and rounded and yet girlish, in that beautiful running Kregish script, is very dear to me. My comrades stood back. The girl touched the rose embroidered upon her breast. “I have a letter for the Princess Katri. But yours, my Prince, I was instructed to deliver first.” She laughed, a clear tinkling sound. “And the letter for the emperor the last of the three.”
So I, being intoxicated on emotion, laughed too. “I cannot wait, for no reply is expected.” She turned to leave, her legs in the tights very long and lovely. “But there is one lie I shall no longer believe.”
With the letter burning my hands I said, “Will you not stop to take refreshment? And what is this lie?”
She halted at the door and smiled back. “I thank you, my Prince, but I must hurry. As to the lie, all women say the Prince Majister of Vallia never laughs.”
And she went out, swinging, jaunty, laughing, the rapier and dagger swinging at her sides. She was a woman, like my Delia, all woman.
I banished her from my mind and opened the letter. I know the words by heart, but many of them are private so I will simply say that Delia said all was well, she was in good health, Melow sent her love, the task was proving more difficult than she’d expected and she was like to be away longer than she had hoped. There was more, but that is for Delia and me. She finished by saying that the letter to Aunt Katri requested the emperor’s sister to go to Valka to see after Didi, and that the letters were being entrusted to Jikmer Sosie ti Drakanium.
The word jikmer had been crossed through, but Delia had been in a hurry and so I could read it beneath the quickly scrawled scribble. Jikmer. That would be the Sisters of the Rose equivalent to Jiktar. Hmm. These girls had their chukmers, their jikmers, their hikmers and their delmers too, without doubt. The notion charmed me. It all added up, without the shadow of a doubt, to a powerful and secret organization of women who, from my knowledge of Delia, were dedicated to philanthropic and chivalrous ends. What the mysticism might be I, of course, could not know.
I think it was the delivery of this letter with its evidence of an efficient organization of women devoted to purposes with which, from the little I knew of them, I could sympathize, that made me finally put into practice a scheme I had been harboring for some long time. As the scheme developed — and I worked on it with some intensity — I will tell you as it impinges on my story. For now, I would have to wait for the first fruits until Seg and Inch were available.
Also, I must make it clear that I am concentrating here very much on the Chyyanists. A great deal happened in Vondium during this time. Instead of being an idle layabout, I found myself hard at work. As the Prince Majister in the capital with the emperor absent I had many official functions to perform. I performed them. Most were very little of a laugh. I sat in the courts for a time and handed down judgments. I canceled work on a new slave bagnio, letting the slave masters see my scathing contempt, and set the laborers and masons into constructing a building to plans I laid out for them. They couldn’t really understand what the building was for. A visit to anywhere in Kregen where men and women flew saddle-birds through the air would have told them. It was accommodation for a thousand flyers. One day, and alarmingly soon, I fancied, Vallia would have need of them. So life was not all dressing up inconspicuously and sliding off as Nath the Gnat. Often one or another of my boon companions would accompany me, but we made a compact that we kept apart. Turko, as usual, grumbled. But he saw the sense of it. My cover, if it was to be kept, would not be served by my suddenly appearing with friends. In a tavern, Turko could sit drinking quietly and keep an eye on me. We all chuckled over the episode of Rafik rescuing me.
That was a strange time. Here I was in Vondium, the capital of the puissant Empire of Vallia, and my Delia not with me. By Zair! I had fought and struggled to reach this place, and had been dragged here in chains, and never had I thought I’d live here without Delia. It was unnerving. I had all preparations made for the society I formed. There are many secret societies on Kregen. This seems to be a part and parcel of the makeup of all cultures. In the most simple terms, I wanted to instill some of the superb qualities in the teachings of the Krozairs of Zy into Valka and Vallia. But I had no intention of limiting the new order to the island of Vallia. If I could bring Pandahem in and Zenicce and the Hoboling Islands, perhaps even Seg’s Erthyrdrin, that would be even better. I would find men I could trust, men of good heart, of good character yet lusty rogues withal, men who could see evil and stare back at it unflinchingly and do what they might to root out evil and plant the good. Of course, these terms are all relative. Good to one man is a mere matter of decency to another; evil to one man is normal human behavior
