The Shining Ones (29 page)

‘Lady Sephrenia seemed very tired, your Majesty,’ Alean responded. ‘She bathed and went directly to bed. I couldn’t even interest her in any supper.’

‘It’s probably best to just let her sleep,’ Ehlana said. ‘I’ll look in on her later.’

Emperor Sarabian had obviously taken advantage of the brief interruption to frame his thoughts in a somewhat studied archaism. ‘Verily,’ he said to Xanetia, ‘thy mode of speech doth fall prettily upon mine ear, Lady. In truth, however, thou hast been unkind to absent thyself from us, for thou art fair, and thine elegant mode of address would have added luster to our court. Moreover, thine eyes and thy gentle demeanor do shine forth from thee and would have provided instruction by ensample for they who are about me.’

‘Thy words are artfully honeyed, Majesty,’ Xanetia said, politely inclining her head, ‘and I do perceive that thou are a consummate flatterer.’

‘Say not so,’ he protested. ‘I do assure thee that I speak truly from mine heart.’ He was obviously enjoying himself.

She sighed. ‘Thine opinion, I do fear me, will change when thou dost behold me in my true state. I have altered mine appearance as necessary subterfuge to avoid affrighting thy subjects. For, though it doth cause me grave distress to confess it, should thy people see me in mine accustomed state, they would flee, shrieking in terror.’

‘Canst thou truly inspire such fear, gentle maiden?’ he smiled. ‘I cannot give credence to thy words. In truth, methinks, shouldst thou appear on the streets of fire-domed Matherion, my subjects would indeed run – but
not
away from thee.’

‘That thou must judge for thyself, Majesty.’

‘Ah – before we proceed, might I inquire as to the state of your Majesty’s health?’ Itagne asked prudently.

‘I’m well, Itagne.’

‘No shortness of breath? No heaviness or twinges in your Majesty’s chest?’

‘I said that I’m healthy, Itagne,’ Sarabian snapped.

‘I certainly
hope
so, your Majesty. May I be permitted to present the Lady Xanetia, the Anarae of the Delphae?’

‘I think your brother’s right, Itagne. I think you’ve taken leave of – Good God!’ Sarabian was staring in open horror at Xanetia. Like the dye running out of a bolt of cheap cloth, the color was draining from her skin and hair, and the incandescent glow that had marked her before she had disguised it began to shine forth again. She rose to her feet, and Kalten stood up beside her.

‘Now is the stuff of thy nightmares made flesh, Sarabian of Tamuli,’ Xanetia said sadly. This is who I am and what I am. Thy servant Itagne hath told thee well and truly what transpired in fabled Delphaeus. I would greet thee in manner suitable to thy station, but like all the Delphae, I am outcast, and therefore not subject to thee. I am here to perform those services which devolve upon my people by reason of our pact with Anakha, whom thou has called Sparhawk of Elenia. Fear me not, Sarabian, for I am here to serve, not to destroy.’

Mirtai, her face deathly pale, had risen to her feet. Purposefully, she stepped in front of her mistress and drew her sword. ‘Run, Ehlana,’ she said grimly. ‘I’ll hold her back.’

‘That is not needful, Mirtai of Atan,’ Xanetia told her. ‘As I said, I mean no harm to any in this company. Sheathe thy sword.’

‘I will, accursed one – in your vile heart!’ Mirtai raised her sword. Then, as if struck by some great blow, she reeled back and fell to the floor, tumbling over and over.

Kring and Engessa reacted immediately, rushing forward and clawing at their sword-hilts.

‘I would not hurt them, Anakha,’ Xanetia warned Sparhawk, ‘but I must protect myself that I may keep faith with the pact between thee and my people.’

‘Put up your swords!’ Vanion barked. ‘The lady is a friend!’

‘But…’ Kring protested.

‘I said to put up your swords!’
Vanion’s roar was shattering, and Kring and Engessa stopped in their tracks.

Sparhawk, however, saw another danger. Danae, her eyes bleak and her face set, was advancing on the Delphaeic woman. ‘Ah, there you are, Danae,’ he said, moving rather more quickly than his casual tone might have suggested. He intercepted the vengeful little princess. ‘Aren’t you going to give your poor old father a
kiss?’ He swept her up into his arms and smothered her indignant outburst by mashing his lips to hers.

‘Put me down, Sparhawk!’ she said, speaking directly down his throat.

‘Not until you get a grip on your temper,’ he muttered, his mouth still clamped to hers.

‘She hurt Mirtai!’

‘No, she didn’t. Mirtai knows how to fall without getting hurt. Don’t do anything foolish here. You knew this was going to happen. Everything’s under control, so don’t get excited – and
don’t,
for God’s sake, let your mother find out who you really are.’

‘It doesn’t really talk!’ Ehlana interrupted Sparhawk’s account of what had taken place in Delphaeus.

‘Not by itself, no,’ Sparhawk replied. ‘It spoke through Kalten – well, it did the first time, anyway.’

‘Kalten?’

‘I have no idea why. Maybe it just seizes on whoever’s handy. The language it uses is archaic and profoundly formal – thee’s and thou’s and that sort of thing. Its speech is much like Xanetia’s, and it wants me to respond in kind. Evidently, the mode of speech is important.’ He rubbed one hand across his freshly shaved cheek. ‘It’s very strange, but as soon as I began to speak – and think – in twelfth-century Elenic, something seemed to open in my mind. For the first time, I knew that I was Anakha, and I knew that Bhelliom and I are linked together in some profoundly personal way.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It seems that you’re married to two different people, love. I hope you’ll like Anakha. He seems a decent enough sort – once you get used to the way he talks.’

‘Perhaps I should just go mad,’ she said. ‘That might be easier than trying to understand what’s going on.
How many other strangers do you plan to bring to my bed tonight?’

Sparhawk looked at Vanion. ‘Should I tell them about Sephrenia?’

‘You might as well,’ Vanion sighed. ‘They’ll find out about it soon enough anyway.’

Sparhawk took his wife’s hands in his and looked into her gray eyes. ‘You’re going to have to be a little careful when you talk with Sephrenia, dear,’ he told her. ‘There’s an ancient enmity between the Delphae and the Styrics, and Sephrenia grows irrational whenever she’s around them. Xanetia has problems with the Styrics as well, but she manages to keep it under control better than Sephrenia does.’

‘Doth it seem so to thee, Anakha?’ Xanetia asked. She had resumed her disguise, more for the sake of the comfort of the others than out of any real need, Sparhawk guessed. Mirtai sat not far from her with watchful eyes and with her hand resting on her sword-hilt.

‘I’m not trying to be personally offensive, Anarae,’ he apologized. ‘I’m just trying to explain the situation so that they’ll understand when you and Sephrenia try to claw each other’s eyes out.’

‘I’m sure you’ve noticed my husband’s blinding charm, Anarae,’ Ehlana smiled. ‘Sometimes he absolutely overwhelms us with it.’

Xanetia actually laughed. Then she looked at Itagne. ‘These Elenes are a complex people, are they not? I do detect great agility of thought behind this bluff manner of theirs, and subtleties I would not have expected from a people who tailor steel into garments.’

Sparhawk leaned back in his chair. ‘I haven’t really covered everything that happened, but that’s enough to let you know in a general sort of way what we encountered. We can fill in more detail tomorrow. What’s been going on here?’

‘Politics, of course.’ Ehlana shrugged.

‘Don’t you ever get tired of politics?’

‘Don’t be silly, Sparhawk. Milord Stragen, why don’t you tell him? It shocks him when I start going into all the sordid details.’

Stragen was once again dressed in his favorite white satin doublet. The blond thief was sunk deep in a chair with his feet up on a table. ‘That attempted coup – or whatever it was – was a serious blunder on the other side,’ he began. ‘It alerted us to the fact that there were more mundane elements involved in this business than hob-goblins and resurrected antiquities. We knew that Krager was involved – and Interior Minister Kolata – and that turned it into ordinary, garden-variety politics. We didn’t know where Krager was, so we decided to find out just how deeply Interior was infected. Since all policemen everywhere are compulsive about paperwork, we were fairly sure that somewhere in that rabbit warren of a building there was a set of files that would identify the people we wanted to talk with. The problem was that we couldn’t just walk into the ministry and demand to see their files without giving away the fact that we knew what they were up to, which in turn would have let them know that Kolata was our prisoner instead of a willing guest. Baroness Melidere came up with the idea of a new filing system, and that gave us access to all the files of all the ministries.’

‘It was dreadful,’ Oscagne shuddered. ‘We had to disrupt the entire government in order to conceal the fact that we were really only interested in the files at Interior. Milord Stragen and the Baroness put their heads together and concocted a system. It’s totally irrational and wildly inconsistent, but for some reason it works amazingly well. I can lay my hands on any given piece of paper in less than an hour.’

‘Anyway,’ Stragen continued, ‘we browsed around
through the files at Interior for a week or so, but the people over there kept slipping back into the building at night to move things around so that we’d have to start all over again every morning. That’s when we decided to just move our operations out onto the lawns. We stripped all the paper out of all the buildings and spread it out on the grass. That inconvenienced the rest of the government enormously, but Interior was still holding out on us. They were still hiding the critical files. Caalador and I reverted to type and tried burglary – along with Mirtai. The queen sent her along to remind us that we were looking for paper rather than miscellaneous valuables, I guess. It took a few nights, but we finally found the hidden room where the files we wanted were concealed.’

‘Didn’t they miss them the next morning?’ Bevier asked him.

‘We didn’t take them, Sir Knight,’ Caalador told him. ‘The queen called in a young Pandion who used a Styric spell to bring the information back to the castle without physically removing the documents.’ He grinned. ‘We got us all that there real incriminatin’ stuff, an’ they don’t know we got it. We stole it, an’ they don’t even miss it.’

‘We’ve got the name of every spy, every informer, every secret policeman and every conspirator of whatever rank Interior has in all of Tamuli,’ Sarabian smirked. ‘We’ve been waiting for all of you to come home so that we can take steps. I’m going to dissolve the Ministry of the Interior, round up all those people, and declare martial law. Betuana and I have been in close contact, and we’ve laid our plans very carefully. As soon as I give the word, the Atans are going to take charge of the entire Empire. Then I’ll
really
be the Emperor instead of just a stuffed toy.’

‘You’ve all been very busy,’ Vanion observed.

‘It makes the time go faster, my Lord.’ Caalador shrugged. ‘We went a little farther, though. Krager obviously knew that we were using the criminals of Matherion as spies, but we weren’t sure if he knew about the hidden government. If he thinks our organization’s localized, that’s not much of a problem; but if he knows that I can give the order here in Matherion, and somebody dies in Chyrellos, that’s a whole ‘nother thang.’

‘I’ve missed that dialect,’ Talen said. He considered it. ‘Not really very much, though,’ he added.

‘Critic,’ Caalador accused.

‘How much were you able to find out?’ Ulath asked him.

Caalador spread one hand and rocked it back and forth doubtfully. ‘It’s sorta hord t’ say,’ he admitted. ‘They’s some places whur it iz ez them folks o’ ourn kin move around free ez frogs in a muddy pond. Other places, they can’t.’ He made a sour face. ‘It probably all boils down to natural talent. Some are gifted; some aren’t. We’ve made a little headway in putting names to some of the rabid nationalists in various parts of Tamuli – at least we
think
it’s headway. If Krager really knows what we’re doing, he could be feeding us false information. We wanted to wait until you came back before we tested the information we’ve got.’

‘How do you test something like that?’ Bevier asked.

‘We’ll send out the order to have somebody’s throat cut, and see if they try to protect him,’ Stragen replied. ‘Some chief of police somewhere, or maybe one of those nationalist leaders – Elron, maybe. Isn’t that astonishing, Sparhawk? That’s one of the things we found out. It turns out that Elron is the mysterious Sabre.’

‘What an amazing thing,’ Sparhawk replied with feigned astonishment.

‘Caalador wants to kill the man named Scarpa,’
Stragen went on, ‘but I favor Elron – although my preference in the matter could be viewed as a form of literary criticism. Elron deserves killing more for his abominable verse than his political opinions.’

‘The world can stand a little more bad poetry, Stragen,’ Caalador told his friend. ‘Scarpa’s the really dangerous one. I just wish we could put a name to Rebal, but so far he’s eluded us.’

‘His real name’s Amador,’ Talen told him. ‘He’s a ribbon clerk in Jorsan on the west coast of Edom.’

‘How did you find
that
out?’ Caalador seemed astonished.

‘Pure luck, to be honest about it. We saw Rebal making a speech to some peasants out in the woods. Then, later on, when we were in Jorsan, a gust of wind blew me into his shop. He isn’t really very much to worry about. He’s a charlatan. He uses carnival tricks to make the peasants think that he’s raising the ghost of Incetes. Sephrenia seems to think that means that our enemies are spread thin. They don’t have enough real magicians to arrange all these visitations, so they have to resort to trickery.’

‘What were you doing in Edom, Sparhawk?’ Ehlana asked.

‘We went through there on our way to pick up Bhelliom.’

‘How did you get there and back so fast?’

‘Aphrael helped us. She’s very helpful – most of the time.’ Sparhawk avoided looking at his daughter. He rose to his feet. ‘We’re all a little tired tonight,’ he suggested, ‘and I rather expect that filling in all of the details is going to take us quite a while. Why don’t we break off here and get some sleep? Then we’ll be able to attack it again in the morning when we’re all fresh.’