“By Krun, Jak! That beastie nearly had me — and you!”
“You were busy saving Tyfar, for which my thanks again.”
“You are his father?”
“No, no. He is a good comrade.”
“Then you have my thanks, for what they are worth, for my life-”
“Do not, I beg you, say, for what that is worth.”
“Sometimes my life has meant a great deal to me, and sometimes nothing at all.”
Tyfar panted up then, and started in at once thanking the girl. Then he said, “And I do not know to whom I owe my life.”
“You may call me Jaezila.”
We started off along the path again, and I felt it prudent to hang back. I did this to guard against pursuit and, also, as I realized with a sly amusement, so that they might have it out between them.
“Jaezila,” said Tyfar, rolling the syllables around his mouth as though they were best Jholaix. “And is that all — my lady?”
“No. It will do for you — Jikai.”
She cut him with that great word, used as she used it, in mockery of his warrior prowess.
“Jaezila,” persisted Tyfar, and I own I was impressed by his refusal to become warm. After all, he was a prince. “And no more — you are Hamalese?” He sounded doubtful.
I thought I detected a wary note in Jaezila’s voice.
“Hamalese — does it matter? I seek to aid you, who are Hamalese. Is not that good enough?”
“I accept that.” Tyfar passed on, following her beyond the end of a screen of curly-fronded ferns where the dragonflies, as big as chickens, flitted and flurried on diamond wings. “And what brought you to Khorunlad?”
“Your breeding left much to be desired, dom.”
Tyfar bridled up like a spurred zorca. To be accused of poor breeding, and a Prince of Hamal! And to be addressed so familiarly as dom, the common greeting! I watched it all, enthralled. Then I jumped forward.
My Val! We had been growing very chummy with these people, with stubborn Kaldu and this enigmatic woman styling herself Jaezila. But we did not know them. I didn’t want Tyfar labeling himself a prince -
particularly a Prince of Hamal — until we knew them a great deal better.
“You may be surprised to know-” Tyfar was saying with his voice as frosty as the caverns of the Ice Floes of Sicce. He was going to put Jaezila properly in her place by telling her that she had the honor of addressing a prince, I didn’t doubt that. I burst in, quite rudely.
“Come on, come! Don’t stand chaffering. I think there were sounds of pursuit along the path.”
Tyfar immediately swung about and lifted his sword.
Jaezila simply looked at me. “You think there is pursuit?”
She missed nothing, this girl, nothing…
“And if there is not, that is still no reason to stand lollygagging about. By Krun! Let us get out of this bog and onto firmer ground.”
“Fifty paces will bring us to the bank. If you can call it a bank. I scouted this area-”
I said, “You are not from Khorunlad, Jaezila. Hamalese? Maybe. But I do not inquire why you help us from Hamal.”
“Do you think that the Empress Thyllis will conquer all the Dawn Lands, Jak?”
That was a confounded question!
It suited my purposes to be thought a Hamalese. Yet it went against the grain to have to say that, yes, mad Empress Thyllis would overrun all the Dawn Lands, one after the other.
“She might,” I said. “If her throat is not cut first.”
She drew her breath in. The others showed up ahead waiting under a grove of drooping missals. Beyond them the river glimmered blue as the summer sky.
“You spoke of revolution,” said Jaezila. “Now, I see-”
I interrupted, swiftly but courteously: “My lady Jaezila, do not misunderstand me.” Zair knew, I’d taken long enough getting myself accepted as a Hamalese, and this girl quite clearly was more than she appeared. She could go running back to Hamal with a tale that would destroy my plans. I had to dissimulate. “I spoke figuratively. We all serve the empress, do we not? Hamal is set on the road of conquest, is not this so?”
“By Jehamnet! Hamal is set on the road to conquest!”
Her voice contained emotions I couldn’t fathom. She swore by Jehamnet, a spirit of harvest time associated with crop failures and similar disasters, and who is known as Jevalnet in Vallia, and Jegrodnet and Jezarnet in the Eye of the World. But she had said Jehamnet, which is Hamalian. He is known as Jehavnet in most of Havilfar. I fancied she was Hamalese and therefore, down here, out doing skullduggery for Thyllis. I held my tongue.
We gathered by the boat, a little skiff that would just about take us all and give us a hand’s-breadth freeboard. The river rippled gently in a small breeze. On the opposite bank the walls and roofs of the jumbled Aracloins offered shelter. We pushed off and Kaldu and I pulled the oars, taking it gently. There were a sizeable number of other boats on the river. A low pontoon bridge spanned the river lower down, and this impediment assisted in the formation and continuance of the boggy area upstream. So, moving cautiously but with purpose, we successfully reached the safety of Horter Rathon’s questionable establishment.
Chapter nine
“By Havil! I don’t intend to sit here mewed up like a blind bird!”
“I agree. And I’ll tell you something else, Tyfar. If we’re not back at the camp before very soon, the Pachaks will come in after us. Or even, Krun forfend, Hunch might-”
“What!” And Tyfar lay back on the pallet and roared.
Horter Nath Rathon joined in the laughter, although he wasn’t at all sure what the jest might be. He was like that. He was a jolly, fat, smiling, hand-washing little man, clad in a long green and red gown with a silver chain around his neck and depending from it a bunch of keys reposing on the proud jut of his belly. He had sent one of his servants out to spy the land.
This fellow, Ornol — a massive Gon whose shaven head gleamed brilliantly from the application of unguents, a fashion some of the Gons have — came back to report not the hair or hide of a Havil-forsaken mercenary to be seen.
Nath Rathon burbled and jingled his keys.
“Excellent, Ornol. Now go and keep watch.”
Ornol went off, his pate glistening, and I looked carefully at Tyfar. Young Prince Tyfar was high of color, and a trifle breathless, and given to wider gestures than usual. He was not drunk. The nearness of his escape from death in the little swamp was beginning to work on him, and he was going through the shakes like a true horter. Also, I fancy the idea that he had been saved and his life preserved to him by the quick and skillful actions of a girl came as a novel surprise.
“You will assuredly have to wait until the suns set,” cautioned Nath Rathon.
“That is a pesky long way off,” grumbled Tyfar.
“I think,” I said, “our friends will wait until nightfall.” I did not add that I felt it highly unlikely they would venture into Khorunlad before Quienyin had sussed the city in lupu for us. There might well be a period of fraught explanation if his apparition appeared, ghostlike, to scare the others half to death.
But, then, I had come to the conclusion that it would take a lot more than that, a very great deal more than that, to scare this mysterious young lady Jaezila witless.
She had tended to Barkindrar’s wound, and the Bullet had declared stoutly that he was fit to walk out with us. The situation was complicated — some situations are and some are not and most times they are resolved by death but not always — and we understood that while the official policy of Khorundur toward Hamal was neutrality, factions inevitably arose. The common folk labored under the delusion that if the Empress Thylliss took over their
