that, emperor and emperor…
The slave looked up and spoke.
“Lahal, my old dom,” he said. “I might have known you’d get here — given time.”
He coughed, then, and a spittle of blood trickled down his chin.
It was extraordinarily difficult for me to speak.
The babble of voices at my back, with their continual interlarded majisters and emperors… I straightened my shoulders. I found my voice.
“Lahal, Seg,” I said.
Chapter Twelve
We flew back to Vondium. The odd little thought occurred to me that had I known it was Seg Segutorio struggling all naked with his chains, I would have unlimbered the Krozair longsword and gone in raging like a maniac.
And that was a demeaning thought, to be sure; but it adequately expresses my own confessed confusion in personal relationships.
“By the Veiled Froyvil, my old dom, but that is good,” said Seg as he took the goblet from his lips. His mouth shone with fine Gremivoh, and I instantly refilled the goblet for him. We sat in my study, with the books and the maps, and Seg looked more like my old friend than a sodden wrung-out chained-up slave. The doctors had seen to him and patched him up, declaring he needed rest. His first words after that typical greeting had been: “And Thelda?” Whereat I had shaken my head. “There has been no news of her, none at all.”
“I went up to Evir,” said Seg, now, as we brought each other up to date with our doings since we had parted on the way to the Sacred Pool of Baptism in Aphrasoe. “I went into that damned pool with Delia and the emperor and the others, and then I was back home in Erthyrdrin.” He drank again, and shook his head. “Mightily discomposing, I can tell you.”
“I know.”
He looked up. “Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”
“So you made your way back to Vallia and went to Evir?”
“Yes. If I’d been sorcerously transported home, then Thelda would, too — or so I thought.”
“You were right.” I told him a little of the power of Vanti, the Guardian of the Pool, enough to allow him to understand that we had been caught up in a wizardly manifestation. He seemed satisfied with my explanation.
“She’d been there. They told me. An uncouth bunch, all right, those Evirese.”
“And?”
He moved his left hand emptily.
“I went to Falinur, then. After all, I am supposed to be their damned kov. But, for me, they can keep their kovnate and their mangy ways. I was taken up by flutsmen, and escaped, and then, being a trifle down, was easy prey for the aragorn. We’d been marching for days on end. I think — I’m not sure — I escaped a couple of times. But the lot I was with when you came up were the last.”
“You are home now, Seg.”
He gripped that empty hand into a fist. A Bowman of Loh, Seg Segutorio, for my money the best bowman on Kregen, and a kov, the Kov of Falinur. Yet he was the truest friend a man can have, and be thankful to all the Gods of Kregen he may call a friend. Now he looked down, shrunken, fearful of the terrors the future must bring.
“Home — yes, Dray, I made Vallia my home. And, now — my wife, my children, where are they?”
“You have returned. They will, too.”
“I believe that. I have to believe that. But the whole business has been a nightmare.”
He had heard the news, how the emperor’s life had been saved by his immersion in the Sacred Pool, of how all those who had taken him there had been sorcerously dispatched to their homes, of how the emperor had at last been slain in the final moments of the Fall of Vondium. He had listened stony-faced as the story of Kov Layco Jhansi’s treachery was told, and of how Zankov, the mysterious agitator, had killed the emperor. He heard about Queen Lushfymi of Lome, and expressed no great desire to meet her, despite that she worked hard and devotedly for Vallia. I knew that Seg loved his Thelda very deeply. For all her faults she was a good comrade and I often castigated myself for my treatment of her, for the supposedly funny remarks I made about her. She tried desperately hard to be a good friend to Delia, and Delia loved her, too, in her own way.
And now she was missing and might be anywhere, not only in Vallia, either. Anywhere at all on Kregen…
Seg fetched up a sigh. “Well, Thelda always means well,” he said, at which I shot him a hard look. “I just pray Erthyr the Bow has her in his keeping.”
“Amen to that, Seg, and Opaz and Zair, too.”
The doctors having told me that the Kov of Falinur needed a proper convalescence, which was not at all surprising, I made Seg see sense. In addition to seeking Thelda he wanted to know what had happened to his children, Dray and the twins. From my own bitter experiences of the past, and more recently in attempting to trace Dayra, I knew the wait might well be a long and agonizing one before any news was received. And, all this time, the work of preparing Vondium and the provinces loyal to us to resist the coming attack had to go on.
I said to Seg: “I am particularly pleased that the Grand Archbold of the Kroveres of Iztar is now with us.”
Seg showed a flicker of interest.
“The Order has admitted a number of new brothers lately. The work goes on. It seems to me, as a mere member, seemly for the Grand Archbold to welcome the new brothers.”
“Yes, my old dom,” said Seg, but he spoke heavily. “You are right. I value your words in this. You made me the Grand Archbold — for my sins, I suspect, as you so often say. But I will perform my duty.”
He brightened. “Anyway, it seems to me a perfectly proper function of the KRVI to search out and rescue ladies in distress.”
“Ah!” I said.
If I thought then that this work with the KRVI might help Seg, I feel the thought to be just and proper. If, as I suspect may have been the case, I also thought it would get him out of my hair, the thought was not only unjust and improper — it was despicable. Still, as they say, only Zair knows the cleanliness of a human heart.
Seg did say, with a flash of his old spirit, that, as for the new army, they were a fine, frilled, lavendered bunch of popinjays with their laces and decorations and brilliance of ornamentation. “I mind the days when you and I, Dray, marched out with a couple of rags to clothe us. Provided our weapons were fit for inspection by Erthanfydd the Meticulous, we didn’t care what we looked like.”
“Ah, but, my old dom,” I said, somewhat wickedly, to be sure: “That was before you met Thelda.”
Which was, to my damnation, a confounded stupid thing to say.
Seg took himself off to meet the brothers of the Order and discuss plans and, no doubt, take a stoup or two, and I went back to the paperwork. Blue was a color not in favor in Vallia save in the northeast, where it had been adopted in provincial badges and insignia as a kind of silent insult to the south, and in certain seacoast provinces where the ocean gave ample reason for its inclusion. These color-coded badges and banded sleeves and insignia of Vallia can be lumped together under the general name of schturvals, and by the schturval a man wore you could tell his allegiances. Nath Orcantor, known as Nath the Frolus, came to see me, highly indignant, determined that the fine spanking regiment of totrixmen he was raising should wear blue tunics over their armor, and red breeches. Enevon Ob-Eye and Nath were in the room with me at the time, going over sumptuary lists, and they looked on, more than a little astonished.
“Blue?” said Nath. “In the Vallian Army?”
“And why not, Kapt Nath?” said Nath Orcantor the Frolus. “I am from Ovvend, as you very well know, and our colors were granted in the long ago by the emperor then.”
“Oh,” said Enevon, and he smiled. “You mean sky-blue.”
