King of Swords (The Starfolk) (9 page)

Desperate to make conversation, Rigel asked about maps. The starfolk looked blank. Geography, he explained. Blanker. Eventually he got his meaning across, and they all burst out laughing. Geography was an earthling idea. They had no geography and didn’t need it.
Where
depended on
who
, they said, and that was that.

He considered asking how many halflings there were and decided not to risk it. Did he even want to be granted status, assuming that it was some sort of residency or work permit? Would he be happier going back to Earth to face at least three murder charges? Was that even an alternative? The starfolk might be quite happy to banish him back to the real world,
but he suspected they would not want to lose their legendary Saiph.

The thought of Earth reminded him of Mira. What was happening to her?

He was being asked a question, something about minotaurs…

“No, starborn, never,” he said.

“Great sport!” Muphrid proclaimed. “We’ll find you a good young one.”

“He’ll be able to show us Saiph in action!” That was Nashira, of course. When she wasn’t too busy caressing his thigh, she never missed a chance to snipe at him.

Playing toreador with a minotaur? Would he have to wave a red cape?

For years Rigel’s highest ambition had been to find his parents. It still mattered to him, and now he was making progress. Now he knew that one had been human, the other starborn. Maybe Gert had been his mother after all, and her story of the King of the Elves close to true except that her supernatural visitor had probably not been royalty. She wouldn’t have cared who he was or how strangely his ears were shaped so long as he paid well. “You’re growing tall like your dad,” she had told him when he was young. After the baby was born, his elfin father must have given him Saiph to defend him in his youth.

Or had the amulet served another purpose? Could the use of magic be detected by some sort of elfin direction-and-ranging system? The first time Rigel had needed it… no, the third time. And that made sense. Fomalhaut had turned up much too promptly for it to have been a coincidence. Rigel punching out a mugger’s teeth in Vancouver might have alerted elfin watchers that the amulet had been activated, killing a bear would narrow down his location, and then slaughtering three
men in Walmart would lead them right to him. Which sort of suggested that his father’s name was Fomalhaut, a conclusion even less appetizing than the toasted ivy salad.

The first dozen courses were followed by an intermission, during which a flock of eight imps, including Izar, came in to entertain the grown-ups with an act they’d been rehearsing. They varied in height from about one meter to more than two, and only the tallest had any trace of color in their hair and eyes—the rest had the same white pigmentation as Rigel. The imps brought two sorts of harp, three lutes, two woodwinds, and a zither, setting up the large harp at one end of the line and the zither at the other. They then began to play, dance, and sing, all at the same time. As they wove in and out, they tossed instruments back and forth, so that a child might strum a few bars on a lute and then toss it to another in return for a woodwind. The older ones added back flips and other acrobatics. They never missed a beat and they all sang like angels when they weren’t blowing into oboes. See it and weep, Cirque du Soleil!

Rigel had always believed that he was musically gifted, but now he realized that he had inherited only a small part of true elfin talent. At the end of the performance, he wanted to leap to his feet and cheer, yet the audience’s applause was no more than polite.

After the banquet ended, the adults collected around a grand piano farther along the hall; they all sang and some of them played. Fortunately the halfling was not asked to join in.

E
ventually, as the sky outside darkened, the starfolk began slinking off in couples, but few seemed to go with the partners they had been fondling throughout the dinner. Rigel watched wistfully as Alniyat was hustled away by the giant Gacrux. As soon as Rigel rose from his chair, Senator appeared at his side, accompanied by a young human in the historical livery.

“May I be so bold as to inquire what sort of room the halfling would prefer?”

Rigel, intoxicated by dinner at Versailles, went for broke. “A beach cabin with good swimming.”

“Salt water or fresh?”

“Salt.”

“Azmidiske Cove,” Senator told the youngster, who in turn bowed and asked if the halfling would be so kind as to follow him.

He led Rigel to another set of imposing double doors. The moment they were opened, Rigel smelled the sea and heard a distant boom of surf. He walked through and then turned to his guide.

“These doors are incredible. Will they take you anywhere?”

The lad seemed surprised at his ignorance. “The portals? To any other portal within the master’s domain.”

“How do you work them?”

Surprise became worry. The boy developed a stutter. “You j-j-just think of wh-where you want to b-b-be.”

“Remember it, you mean?”

He nodded vigorously. “Will these quarters s-satisfy, h-halfling?”

The room was no bigger than a tennis court, but not much smaller either, and furnished with exquisite taste in a writhing, curlicue style that Rigel had never seen in any book or magazine. A deck outside faced a white sand beach under a quarter moon. Dark palm tree fronds gestured gracefully against a starry sky. Wow! Life on Earth had never been this good.

He said it would suffice.

Reassured, the footman said, “If the halfling has any special preference for breakfast, I can have the kitchen prepare it.”

“Thanks,” Rigel said. “I’ll decide in the morning.” The royal treatment was making him so lightheaded that he was tempted to say, “Rigel will decide.” He didn’t. “What’s your name?”

The footman cringed. “My name?”

“You do have a name?”

“It is Sextus, if it p-p-pleases the halfling.” His face crumpled. “I have displeased my lord? I mean, the halfling? He wishes to lodge a complaint?”

“Not at all. You have been most helpful. Where were you born?”

“Here, halfling. Not here at Azmidiske Cove, I mean, but within the master’s domain.”

“And your parents also?”

Sextus seemed thoroughly confused by this personal interest. “My mother was, halfling. The master borrowed my father from another domain.”

Rigel felt his scalp crawl. Earthlings were only tools, Alniyat had told him. “Is Starborn Muphrid a good master to work for?”

Sextus brightened. “Oh, yes. Very fair. We get two whole days off a month, and this is my nine hundred and seventy-first day without punishment!”

Puke!
“That’s good. You must be proud of such a record.”

“The halfling is most kind to say so.” He beamed. “That is why I was so worried when I was afraid I had failed to give satisfaction. When I achieve two thousand days, I shall be permitted to co-habit!”

Rigel wanted to ask if young Sextus would have any say in choosing his roommate, but the conversation was making his gorge rise. He dismissed the man.

Then he ran down the sand and hurled himself into the water. It was wonderfully cool and clean.

Elves were not.

He swam all the way across the lagoon to the reef where the surf thundered. By the time he had swum back and was trudging up the beach, the quarter moon was setting, in paradoxical ignorance of the full moon he had seen earlier in the Moon Garden. The constellations looked familiar but twisted, as if either the season or the latitude had changed dramatically. That was certainly Orion’s belt and his name star, Rigel, but he had never seen the Hunter standing on his head before. The Starlands must be in the Southern Hemisphere, or on another
world entirely, but if this was another world, how could it have the same moon and stars?

There were lights on in his cabin, and when he reached the door, he heard movement inside. He raised his hand.

“Saiph!”

This time he was ready for the weight of the gauntlet and sword. He hurled the door open with his left hand. The woman in the process of removing her bonnet and shawl jumped.

“Oh! You idiot! Put that damned thing away.”

He obeyed. “Good evening, Mira.”

Even Saiph could not better the dangerous glint in her eye. “You expect the services of your concubine for the night?”

“Certainly.” The bed was large, but there was only one of it.

“Dream on.” Mira flopped into a chair. She wore a floor-length homespun dress, rather obviously padded out by many layers of petticoat. Her feet were encased in high button boots and she was not in a good mood. “I hope you enjoyed your banquet? I spent all day scraping lichen off rocks to make some sort of salad.”

“Oh, is that what that mess was? Nasty! But I may be confusing it with the aphid puree.” Rigel sat down. He was desperately tired, but clearly they must exchange notes, and he hoped that Mira’s background as a detective had helped her learn more than he had. “Have you the foggiest idea where we are?”

“Not a clue.”

“Or why the shoppers went crazy and attacked us in Walmart?”

“No.”

“You want to go home, I assume? To Earth.”

She nodded. “Can you get these damned boots off me? I forgot to get a buttonhook. Of course I want to go home. Even Micah would be bearable after a day in Muphrid’s kitchens.”

“I don’t know what I want to do.” He knelt down to help her. “I need more information, lots more. But what we want may not count for zip.”

“There must be police and TV cameras all over that Walmart store,” Mira conceded. “And I might be a tad conspicuous if I were dumped back there in this Pilgrim costume. They took my own clothes and burned them!”

No doubt they’d done the same with his. “If I can get them to send you home—to somewhere outside of Walmart, that is—I will. I promise.”

“That’s a deal, but if either of us sees a chance of escape we grab it, right?”

He chuckled, suddenly realizing how happy he was, in spite of his fatigue. “All for one, but not necessarily one for all? Let’s pool what we know. Start with politics.”

“You’ll have to deal with the politics. You’re upstairs, I’m downstairs.”

“I’m not much on politics.” He summed up what he had learned: “The queen is likely to abdicate and there are three contenders to succeed. I think she chooses the winner, but I’m not sure of that. They might have to fight it out for all I know. We know that Muphrid takes orders from Fomalhaut, and he’s a Prince Vildiar supporter, so it sounds sort of feudal. I’ve read books about the Middle Ages.”

“Good for you. It also sounds like gangs—the Mafia and so on.”

“That’s as far as I got.”

“It is?” She seemed unimpressed. “You didn’t hear that this world is in danger of falling apart?”

He thought for a moment. “There was some mention of some high muck-a-muck who had lost half his lands somehow.”

“And you didn’t think that was important?” Mira said acidly. “He isn’t the only one. It’s happening all over. The servants are quite worried.”

“What do they know about it? Why should they care? They’re slaves!”

“They know more than you’d expect,” Mira said. “The guests bring servants of their own, so there’s an exchange of information, a sort of underground telegraph.” She glanced uneasily around the room. “I suppose if Muphrid wants to eavesdrop on us, he has ways I can’t imagine.” She pulled a face in disgust. “They’re worse than slaves. They’re livestock, Rigel, cattle. They’ve been bred for docility, like sheep and cows, so don’t dream of raising a slaves’ revolt, because they wouldn’t help you. They wouldn’t even
want
to help. And they have no magic. Only the elves have magic.”

“Did you find out how magic works?” If Saiph would obey his commands, other amulets should, too.

“No. I was kept busy the whole time. Did you?”

“All I learned was that a starborn female mustn’t have love affairs with humans or halflings.”

Mira wrinkled her nose in disgust. “But the old double standard applies. Remember how shocked they pretended to be when you called me your concubine? That was pure hypocrisy. Tonight I was brought here ‘to serve my master,’ and at least one other girl was sent off to entertain a male guest. Just like slavery in the Old South.”

“Or like the fur traders who opened up the Canadian west. The voyageurs took native wives, but they would have been appalled if a white woman had married an Indian.”

Maybe Gert hadn’t been his birth mother after all; from what Mira was saying, he might very well be a changeling conceived in a Starlands slave barn.

Mira said, “I did get the impression that half br… that halflings are rare. There are some here, but they don’t mix with the kitchen riffraff, so I didn’t meet any. The footmen coming back from the banquet hall were commenting that you were quite ‘starry-looking’ apart from your ears. Your lack of a navel seems to matter a lot. You could be allowed to stay. That’s what status means, I gather. You get some sort of second-class citizenship.”

“Better than nothing,” he said. “Halflings are higher than slaves, because they have free will. I was also told that starborn can’t kill one another without dying themselves—it’s a guilt thing. They can’t get around that effect by using human assassins because humans are just tools, like daggers or swords. But halflings are immune to this. We have free will and our barbarian heritage makes us dangerous. Saiph makes me
extremely
dangerous, like a nuclear submarine.”