Aquamancer (mancer series Book 2) (6 page)

“Sure. But the way is pretty swampy for a dry-land person like you. It’s easy to get lost among the bayous, lagoons, and creeks and such, if you don’t swim too well. There’s a dry pathway, however, now that I think of it,” the Sea Otter said, sitting up.

“Where can I find it?”

“Be easier to show you.”

“I don’t want to take you away from home.”

“Nonsense! Home is anywhere there’s water...and food. And where there is water there is almost always food.”

Marbleheart evidently had made up his mind to be Douglas’s guide so the young man accepted his assistance, despite his misgivings about strangers in this strange land. When he rose to resume his journey, Marbleheart asked him politely to carry his marble disk—he didn’t want to leave it behind, he said, and it slowed him down to walk on only three legs—then fell into step beside the Wizard, showing the way.

The Otter walked with a curious
gallumping
stride, arching his long back high and then running out from under it on his short, web-footed legs. The effect was more than a little comic and Douglas could be forgiven for laughing at the sight. Marbleheart didn’t seem to mind.

Whenever their way lay beside water, the Otter chose to swim instead of walking, and that was at least half of the time. In the water he reminded Douglas of the Porpoises of Warm Seas, swift, streamlined, and graceful.

As they went they chatted in a friendly manner. Douglas told the Sea Otter of Flarman and their adventures defeating the evil Ice King. Then he explained his interest in the Witches’ Coven in the west.

By the time they passed through a dense screen of ten-foot reeds with feathery tops and found themselves on the bank of a broad, slow river, he had learned the Otter’s history, also.

“I was born in a cozy burrow on the south shore of the Briney,” Marbleheart told him. “It was a hard life, but a good one. The Briney is full of tasty cod and scrumptious sole. Mama and Papa taught us to swim fast and fish well and have a marvelous time, in the water and out. By the time I was old enough to strike out on my own, I was larger and stronger than any of the other kits of my litter. I was the first to leave home.”

“How large a litter?” asked Douglas, thinking of Pert and Party, the cats of Wizards’ High, who regularly bore four or five kittens to Black Flame.

“Only seven in all. We were a pawful. Mama always said! I made my way south over the sand spit to the Broad, wanting to see World on my own. Since then I’ve wandered almost everywhere there is to be, along the coast of Dukedom, even to the top of your Farango Waters. Delightful place, if a bit too noisy with shipbuilding and dangerous with net fishing. The fishermen were rather unfriendly. They were jealous that I caught the biggest and best Sea Trout that swam the Waters.”

The fishermen had chased him away from their nets, throwing stones and sometimes shooting arrows, but Marbleheart considered it all a great lark.

“Oh, I knew they were trying to kill me at times, but I understood. Life isn’t all games, even for a Sea Otter. Fishermen have a living to make, too.”

Douglas found himself warming to the animal. Marbleheart was jolly, self-confident, and a bit of a clown at times.

“I swam all the way across the Broad on a wager,” the Otter boasted, “with a disreputable old cormorant I met. More or less settled down here. It’s much quieter, no shipyards or fish nets. Loads of loud, muddy-footed birds, however. They always think I’m after their eggs or chicks. I’d have to be nearly starved to eat a loon’s egg, let alone a chick. Ugh! All feathers and bones!”

They came in late afternoon to a shallow harbor in a graceful river bend. Breasting a last dune, they stopped to look down on a strange sight.

As far as eye could see, the flat sandy land was covered with the ruins of a vast city. Walls, columns, pavements, broken towers, and weed-grown plazas reached to the horizon, all laid out in straight lines and graceful curves, colonnaded squares and ornamental oval patches that once had been gardens, Douglas decided.

Most of the walls were broken down, stones and brick lay scattered everywhere, columns lay where they had fallen ages before, and the paving was cracked or tilted or buried in drifting sand.

Few of the buildings had upper stories or even roofs, and only a huddled handful had doors or windows covered with sun-bleached cloth. And yet, faint threads of smoke from supper tires showed that someone lived, still, in Summer Palace.

A half dozen long, narrow boats, once gaily painted but now chipped and weathered to bare, gray wood, were tied to the downstream side of a crumbling stone pier jutting out from the riverbank. Nets had been stretched to dry across rows of broken-off columns.

Everything seemed to have lost color to the sun, turned white as old bones. There was an air of desolation and depression about the whole huge, ruined place.

“Summer Palace,” murmured Marbleheart. He pointed to a low rise on the distant horizon where there stood a gaunt pile, glinting in the leveling sunlight, a tangle of tumbled but once-ornate stonework. “They tell me that was once a magnificent burrow with golden roofs and a hundred crystal gables and tall arched doorways. You can still see some of the arches, I think.”

“You’ve been in the city?” asked Douglas, studying the ruins.

“Oh, yes, any number of times. The people are pretty pathetic, for my taste. No sense of play at all. They’ll watch you steal their fish stew right off their tables and then sit around and argue about it for hours instead of giving proper chase. Not much fun! I found my breaking stone here, however, and thus my name, so I’m sort of fond of the place.”

He led the Journeyman down into the dilapidated city, through streets littered with blocks of stone fallen from buildings and dried sea-grape leaves and faded flowers blown from weed-choked gardens.

The broad avenues had originally been carefully paved with pink and gray granite cobbles set in swirling patterns, Douglas noted. The sides of the streets were choked with blown sand and debris, overgrown with thorny wild rose bushes and drooping bunches of roughly serrated yellow dune grass. The only sound he could hear was of the grass rustling mournfully in the evening breeze.

The Otter took Douglas to a side street just a bit less cluttered than the others, where the houses were, at least, roofed with musty reed thatching. Gray smoke made smudges in the air as it escaped through chinks and cracks where once there had been elaborate decorations and fenestrations. Coughing and low, monotonous murmuring came from behind each door, draped with weathered, ancient tapestries, but no one was abroad at this twilight hour.

“Here’s the house of the one they call Majordomo,” announced Marbleheart. “I’ll leave you here. I find Majordomo a fool leading fools, quite hard to suffer—and besides, I want to catch the ebbtide. Good-bye!”

He scampered off without another word, not waiting for Douglas to say thank you for his guidance.

Douglas knocked politely on the rickety doorframe of the Majordomo’s house. It was opened after a long pause by a tall, dry-looking individual in a ratty, once-white periwig and a rusty red long-tailed coat over stained white breeches so patched and mended that it was hard to tell what was repair and what original cloth.

“Ah, sir!” the man said in a polite but haughtily affected drawl. “How may I serve you?”

“You must be the Majordomo,” said Douglas. “I’m Douglas Brightglade, Journeyman Fire Wizard, pupil of Flarman Flowerstalk, also called Firemaster...”

“Welcome to Summer Palace, Master Journeyman Wizard!” interrupted the man. “Please to come in out of the night’s airs.”

He held the door curtain wide and allowed Douglas to precede him into a lofty, dim, and dusty entryway. Through arched doorways on either hand were two outsized, bare rooms that took up most of the ground level of the building. A winding stair led up to a boarded-up second-story landing.

“I am familiar with the rank, reputation, and accomplishments of the Great Wizard Flarman,” said the Majordomo when Douglas turned from his inspection of the interior. “As his colleague, you are most welcome at Summer Palace. Unfortunately,” he added with exaggerated sadness, “His Majesty King Grummist is not in residence just now. But you are undoubtedly most weary from your travels. May I suggest dinner, at once, while I have a suitable room prepared for your rest?”

He led the way through the left-hand archway to a scarred, most ancient table almost as long and wide as the kitchen table at Wizards’ High. A small, smoking fire of damp driftwood in a vastly ornate fireplace provided some warmth. Douglas was puzzled by the servant’s extreme and cold formality but he let it go unnoticed as the functionary seated him at the top of the table and clapped his hands imperiously for dinner to be served. He had something much more important to worry about.

King Gnimmist, who had been the lord of Summer Palace, had perished over two hundred years earlier in the terrible carnage of Last Battle of Kingdom!

Chapter Five

The Waiters

Douglas found that evening most strange, to say the least.

The Majordomo was scrupulously polite, but overly subservient. The dinner, served on fine old porcelain with gold service, was adequate but extremely bland, without salt or spices at all. Douglas asked for salt to go with the roast fish put before him by a timid and entirely silent serving maid who obeyed Majordomo’s summons. It was produced at once—without comment or apology.

The Journeyman dined alone in the huge, dim room. The Majordomo hovered behind his chair, filling his glass with a watery, too-sweet wine when it was only a third empty and silently removing the empty dishes as each new course was brought from a kitchen somewhere outside the house.

No one came to see the visitor. The street outside remained empty, although occasionally Douglas could hear distant voices, a door closing, or slow footsteps echoing in a bare passage somewhere.

He ate dessert, a particularly tasteless egg custard, and was offered coffee and brandy; he accepted the first, refused the second. Hardly more than four sentences had been spoken during the entire meal.

“You will wish to retire,” said the man, drawing back Douglas’s chair smoothly and at precisely the proper time. “If you will be pleased to have a seat in the drawing room across the hall, I will see that your quarters are properly prepared. It will take just a moment or two, Sir Wizard. May I recommend a book from our extensive library? His Majesty has eclectic tastes in literature or you may find the technical books of greatest interest.”

“Do you have an atlas of Kingdom?” Douglas asked, and a thick, musty old volume was brought to him by the silent maid in the cold drawing room. He spent the next quarter hour studying the shape, names, and extent of ancient Kingdom, alone and in complete silence except for the dry rustle of turning pages.

At least I can find out something about where I’m headed,
he thought, and soon located Pfantas, mentioned by Captain Mallet back in Westongue. The town lay two hundred miles upstream of Summer Palace on what the atlas identified as the Ferngreen River. Douglas remembered it had been renamed Bloody Brook because of the infamous Last Battle, fought on its banks. The book must have been compiled long before the Fall of Kingdom.

He calculated distances and estimated the length of the journey ahead.

At best, if I can average, say, twenty miles a day, that’s a hundred and twenty miles in a week, saving one day for rest and washing clothes and such things. I expect it’ll take almost a fortnight to reach Pfantas, and find this man Cribblon.

The Majordomo appeared silently at his elbow. Douglas put his finger on the spot marked Pfantas and looked up at him.

“I intend to go here, Majordomo. Can you tell me how long it will take me to get there?”

The other seemed taken aback.

“I am not at all sure, Sir Wizard. I have never traveled to Pfantas myself. I recall someone saying that on horseback it takes five days, with relays every fifty miles along the River Road. That was some years ago.”

“Yes, something like two hundred years ago,” said Douglas dryly. “You have no idea how things have changed over the intervening years?”

“No, I am afraid not, Sir Wizard. We are very isolated here on this coast. We don’t get many visitors or much news.”

“When was the last time you heard from the ... His Majesty, the King?” Douglas was almost afraid to ask.

“I cannot tell you exactly,” said the servant, uneasy at the question, “but it has been quite some time...”

“Well, then, I’ll just have to start out tomorrow and find out for myself, Majordomo. By the way, do you have a name?”

“Er, yes, Sir Wizard. I am called Delond.”

“Delond, my name is Douglas Brightglade and as I am neither ennobled nor even knighted, I prefer to be called that name, especially by a gentleman who is undoubtedly three centuries older than am I.”

The words made Majordomo even less comfortable and he changed the subject, avoiding the use of either Douglas’s title or his name.

“Your bedchamber is prepared, sir. May I show you the way?”

“Oh, good,” sighed Douglas, unenthusiastically. “I might as well get a good night’s sleep.”

But sleep was difficult to come by.

The storm and the shipwreck had exhausted him physically, but not mentally. The apartment to which Delond showed him was spacious, fairly clean, but rather damp and musty, with windows open to Sea breezes, now rather warmer than the night before. The young Wizard paced restlessly for some time before sliding between patched sheets.

“What’s wrong here, I wonder,” Douglas asked himself as he hovered just short of the edge of sleep. “I smell enchantment; that’s it! These people don’t know or want to know what World has done outside of Summer Palace for two centuries. I wonder...?”

He fell asleep and dreamed of Flarman, Bronze Owl, and Myrn Manstar. His friends, in the dream, talked of Douglas as if he were nearby and would soon arrive at Wizards’ High when they should have known he was two hundred leagues away to the west.