Black Day, and in that day will the Great Chyyan reward all his loyal followers! Thus spake Ob-Eye Enil, swearing by Beng Drangil, the patron saint of hawkers. This was no fantasy. This was stark reality. As I jogged along toward Seg’s kovnate capital city of Falanriel, a place which, despite its architecture, I always looked forward to visiting, I realized more and more the hold the Chyyanists had on these people.
On a day when the suns broke through scattered clouds and the joy of living should have burst all worries — and, sadly, did not — we trotted through a ferny dell. With horrid shrieks designed to chill us, the drikingers leaped from the ferns, waving their clanxers and rapiers and spears, roaring at us to surrender or be chopped.
With a curse I ripped out the clanxer scabbarded to Twitchnose. A smith may carry samples of his wares. If it came to it I’d use the longsword on them.
Then I checked. The bandits closed up around us, fierce, hairy men with thickly bearded faces and bright merry eyes, darting the points of their weapons at us. But Ob-Eye pulled out a leather wallet from his loose tunic, opened it, waved a scrap of black feather in the air.
“Peace, brothers!” he squeaked. He was only a little frightened, I saw, and marveled. “We are all Chyyanists together, you and I. Listen to what Makfaril has said through his priests, listen and rejoice, for the day is coming.”
And then these fearsome bandits set up a yelling and a hullabaloo and crowded around, laughing, slapping their thighs and bellowing greetings, and every other sentence had to do with the Black Feathers. In no time a fire had been lit and we were sitting around listening and smelling roasting vosk haunch. The wine went around. It was good too, plunder from a vintner’s caravan. Good humor prevailed, although the leader, a ferocious villain with a spade beard he had threaded with gold wire and with golden earrings that caught the lights of the fire and of the suns, did bellow out, “By Varkwa the Open-Handed! If many more travelers are Chyyanists the pickings will be small!”
“But soon all Vallia will be ours for the looting!” bellowed his lieutenant, and the gang set up a racket of laughter and promises of what they would do on the Black Day. Chief among these was the heartfelt desire to go into Falanriel and sack the place and take all. And what they would do to the kovneva, the high and mighty, stuck- up, prideful and ignorant Kovneva Thelda, would have set the Ice Floes of Sicce alight.
I chewed on succulent vosk and kept my face down. Listening would help more than a stupid sword-swinging affray. Was this another piece of the puzzle? Was poor Thelda, who always meant well, overdoing her part as a kovneva? She loved the title and took immense pride in her status. Yet once in the long ago she had been forced to spy and scheme for the racters. Now my good comrade Seg had her in his keeping. I made a little vow that not only would I speak to Thelda as a friend, I’d stick a length of steel blade into any of these drikinger cramphs who tried to harm a hair of her head. But, all the same, she could be a terribly tiresome woman, and goodheartedly never be aware of it. There could now be no doubt that the Chyyanist creed had caught on like a prairie fire here in Falinur. An attempt had been made to spread the word in Veliadrin. Delphond had been under attack — I was sure Delia was right and there was the black feather to prove it — even though we did not know how far the Chyyanists had reached there. I fancied that Inch in the Black Mountains and Korf Aighos in the Blue Mountains would be facing the same challenge.
If I allowed myself to be swayed by the megalomania I have been accused of, I could see a clear pattern. But Natyzha Famphreon and the other racters knew of the Black Feathers, and their provinces had been infiltrated also. Makfaril, whoever he was, surely intended to sound the call for the Black Day at the same time all over Vallia. With a little knowledge I have of human nature, with a little knowledge of running affairs of state, and with the knowledge borne in on me by the demeanor of bandits around the campfire, I knew with a dark foreboding that Makfaril might not be able to hold his followers to his timetable. The explosion might erupt at any moment, triggered by any silly stupid event. The day of the Black Feathers could strike tomorrow. .
That ride up through the heart of Valka was all a great foolishness. Bits of it recur to me now. I had hoped the long ride would soothe me and calm me down, but the more I saw and heard the more fraught and tense I became. And the burden of my fear, a true and deeply abiding fear, must be shown by the first words I spoke to Seg after the joyful Lahals.
“And the news from Delia, Seg? Where is her letter?”
He shook his head. “No letter from Delia has arrived here, Dray. There are packages for you forwarded on, flown in from Vondium and Valka, and coming from — well, you know the names.”
I did. There would be estate information from Strombor and chunkrah counts from Hap Loder and the Clansmen. There would be news from Kytun and Ortyg in Djanduin. But I hungered to hear from Delia, for now I knew she struggled against some unknown evil that threatened our daughter Dayra. I asked after Thelda, and Seg spread his hands and said she had been visiting in Vondium and was momentarily expected.
The impression Seg gave was that he wanted to take up his great longbow and go ask the emperor to repeat the words that had banished me. I fancied the emperor would find life exceedingly uncomfortable thereafter if he did repeat them.
“Well, by Vox! how long does he think to keep you banished, the old onker?”
“Only from Vondium. And the Black Feathers have not sprouted there as yet.”
“Come and wet that dusty throat of yours and let us see what we may contrive.”
We went down from the battlemented gateway and so across the outer yard and through the inner walls and up through narrow winding stairways of stone into Seg’s private chambers in the Fletcher’s Tower. Once it had been the Jade Tower, but Seg had changed all that. This castle fortress of his, frowning down over the city of Falanriel, had been built to withstand a protracted siege. Seg kept the place amply stocked. He had a small guard of Bowmen of Loh, backed up by a regiment of Pachaks with a few other diffs in their different specialities. He was no fool, was Seg Segutorio, over these matters, with the wild fey ways and shrewd practicality of his mountain people.
All the same, as we sat and drank in the quiet ease of his rooms, I had to say, “It does look as though we are the high and mighty of the land now, and grind down the poor.”
“To the Ice Floes with that, my old dom!” Seg looked annoyed. “I was a miserable starveling, a mercenary, a slave. I know. If a man works in my province of Falinur he is assured of a living and of comfort.”
“Slaves?”
Seg made a face and drank his wine. “These devils are sly and secret and run slaves no matter what I do to stop ’em.”
“Vinnur’s Garden-”
He did not let me go on. “My nobility here, all owing their fine estates to me, all prate on and on about marching into Vinnur’s Garden and taking it for Falinur. But Vomanus-”
“He is seldom at home. He is almost as much of an absentee landlord as I am.”
“Well, I have put in my stint here. And it looks as though I’d have done better to have stayed in Vondium, or visited Erthyrdrin again, for all the good I have done here.”
When I told him, during the course of our long talk through the evening and most of the night, about Natyzha Famphreon and the chavonths, he grimaced and said, “I’d rather not hear what she did to her slaves. They’d all be punished to make sure the guilty got it in the neck, to the devil with the innocent”
“Aye.”
“And they actually expected you to fight your father-in-law?”
“Not exactly fight him. But certainly not assist him.”
“Remember the Dragon’s Bones?”
“Now there was a bonny little fracas.”
“Bonny little fracas! Dray, Dray! That was High Jikai!”
“I wouldn’t have said so, but it was squeaky, all the same.”
“Those days when you and Delia and Thelda and I marched across the hostile territories! Ah, but they’ll never come again.”
I was not at all sure of that. Kregen is a world of ups and downs. So we talked on through the night, amicably drinking, and our thoughts were as often of the stirring past adventures as of the terrors of the future and the problems we faced.
Two days later Thelda arrived back in Falanriel, flushed, bright-eyed, bouncing, filled with glowing stories of her time in Vondium. She had been desolated that her great friend Delia had not been there. Of all her sprightly babble we took the due meed of attention. “And the dear queen! Queen Lushfymi! What a charming woman she is, and so regal. I own she has quite won me over. And yet the ignorant fools call her Queen Lush. It really is a
