Witch Doctor - Wiz in Rhyme-3 (50 page)

Still, it did seem kind of odd to me that the queen should let us make it back to the mainland with no worse trouble than that. I mentioned this to Friar Ignatius right after we had hauled the boat past the high-tide mark and started hiking inland. "It may be that she has little time to spare for us," he told me, "even though we may be the greatest challenge yet to her throne."

"Aye," Gilbert agreed. "If the Spider King and t e Grem in ave done as they promised, she will be far too busy to spare us much attention.

"Good point." I turned to the nearest large spider-we were hiking through a marshy meadow, and the arachnids seemed to be everywhere; the stiff grass was ideal for mooring webs. "Tell the Spider King we're back, will you?" I said. "And we'd like to know what's going on." My buddies glanced sidelong at me as if they were wondering about my sanity again, but they'd met the Spider King, too, all except for Gruesome and Friar Ignatius, so they kept their peace. Which was very wise-the spider was busy mending the rim of her web, but she turned and scampered straightaway back to the center-and disappeared. Friar Ignatius stared at it for a few seconds. Then he whipped his

gaze up to me, stared for a few seconds longer, then glanced back at the web.

Gilbert squared his shoulders and cleared his throat. "There is small time to debate, " he said. " 'Tis long and far to Allustria, and we have only our legs."

He took the lead, and we filed off after him.

About half an hour later, we were coming up to a stand of trees. just to the right of our path, a really splendid web was strung between two saplings, four feet in diameter, with a spider whose body was the size of an old-fashioned dollar. We glanced at it in admiration, then looked again.

Woven into the web were runes. They spelled out, "Gaze."

"Gaze?" I frowned, staring. "Gaze at what?"

"Thus." Friar Ignatius beckoned, and we turned aside from the path, heading for the sound of a brook that had been paralleling our path for the last few minutes. The monk scouted along its edge until he found a small pool that had formed between some rocks. "Here, poet," he said. "Craft a verse that would tune a pool to the king's mind.

"uh, I think I pulled out the sheaf and riffled through, then yanked a slip. "Here, Frisson!"

The poet pursed his lips, absorbing his own verse again, then spouted it out, with improvements:

"Water, water, most contrary, Help this televisionary. Let no image now be sinking, But show us what the king is thinking.

I did a double take, but he was right-"television" was Latin for

//seeing at a distance," though not quite in the way my culture meant it. I looked down at the pool, almost daring it to show me something. it clouded and darkened, then cleared, but stayed dark, a deep indigo-and in its depths, images formed. My gaze locked onto them; I couldn't have forced myself to look away if I'd wanted to. And, of course, I didn't want to; to say the least they were compelling.

We saw a mob of peasants beating up a squad of soldiers in a village square. It was unbelievable, until the pool showed us just one villager swinging a cudgel down at a soldier. The men-at-arms stabbed at him with a pike-but the peasant's cudgel whacked right on the haft behind the head, and the shaft broke.

"The Gremlin!" I breathed. After all, our perverse friend specialized in making things break down at the crucial moment. Admittedly, he was better with high-tech devices-the more complicated they are, the more things can go wrong-but he was managing pretty well with what he had.

The battle disappeared, and another army swam into view-but in this one, the soldiers were fighting among themselves. A knight rode about the fray, trying to knock combatants apart with a mace, but his horse tripped, and he disappeared into a melee of flailing arms. The images grew larger and larger, floating out past the edges of the pool, till I could see an overturned kettle next to the ashes of a campfire. The kettle was empty. Then the fighting soldiers swam back in, growing smaller and smaller until I was looking at an overhead view of the churning mass of soldiers. Suddenly they streaked past me, and the images expanded again, until I found myself looking down into a trio of farm wagons. They were filled with hay. Apparently, the quartermaster had bollixed up the order, sending horse food instead of people food, and the soldiers were starving.

"The Gremlin!" Gilbert breathed.

"Maybe," I said, "but I think he's getting expert advice." The fight dimmed and faded, and another picture grew in its place. A peasant, wearing a green tunic with yellow hose and a tall cap, was going from door to door, looking very confused as he scooped gold pieces out of a bag and handed them to the peasants. The recipients stared, unbelieving, then broke into huge smiles and heaped thanks on the donor-but he was already turning away toward the next cottage, looking very frazzled.

"He is a tax collector." Gilbert frowned. "Wherefore does he give money, rather than take it?"

It almost seemed as if the pool had heard him; it clouded up, then cleared again, showing us a view of a big room. We were looking at it from high up on the wall, and we saw a mob of men in rich-looking robes milling about half a dozen tables with checkerboard tops. There was a lot of gesturing, and I could imagine the noise. It looked like one of those television news shots of the New York Stock Exchange just before closing time on a bad day.

" 'Tis the exchequer," Friar Ignatius murmured. Oh. So that was where the word "checker" came from. Now that he mentioned it, I could see colored disks on some of the checkerboards, like beads on an abacus, and serving the same purpose. This was a counting room, and these men were clerks. "What are they arguing about?"

I shouldn't really have asked; I knew the answer as soon as I'd thought of the question. They were blaming one another, of course, trying to pass the buck before one of them got caught with it. The pool seemed to have heard me, though-as if in answer, it magnified the big desk in the center of the room, the one without a checkerboard, where a man with a gold chain around his neck was scribbling furiously on slips of parchment and handing them to the nearest of a group of boys, who twisted their way between furiously arguing clerks to hand the slips to men who were still sitting at their counting tables, moving stones about frantically, trying to look busy. As one boy carried his parchment, it swelled till it filled the pool, and we could all read, "Take two pennies from each peasant." But even as we watched, the words "Take" and "from" were blurring, the pen strokes writhing into new forms that made the message say, "Pay two pennies to each peasant."

"What spell is this?" Frisson stared, amazed.

"The Gremlin again," I said, "though I think he might be getting some advice from the Rat Raiser."

The scene rippled and disappeared, and another one steadied in it, place. This one looked a lot like the first, except that the tables didn't have checkerboards inlaid into them, and the men milling about wore richer and more colorful clothing-mostly doublet and hose; I only saw one or two real robes. Most of them were also wearing mail shirts that gleamed at the necks of their tunics and showed between belt and hose.

'Tis the command post of an army!" Gilbert exclaimed, staring.

"And judging from the quality of the clothing, this is the high command," I agreed. "it looks a lot like the other room."

'Tis in the queen's castle," Brother Ignatius breathed. Gilbert frowned. "How is this? Knights and lords, scribbling on

parchments?

"It's called centralized command," I said. "They put their orders in writing, and couriers run them to the generals in the field."

"They fear the field will come to them," Gilbert said, "and shortly, or they would not be wearing mail."

I hoped he was right.

A general finished dictating to a clerk, who was scribbling on a parchment. He poured sand on it, dumped the sand, made sure the sheet was dry, and handed it to a courier who headed for the door, slipping it into a pouch as he went-but not quite quickly enough to keep the pool from magnifying it, and we watched it change from "Conscript five male peasants from each village" to "Discharge five male peasants to each village." Then the parchment slipped into the dispatch case and was gone from sight-but even as it did, the scene rippled and changed to a view from up high, showing a long stretch of dirt road with twenty or thirty soldiers ambling along with their pikes over their shoulders, laughing and slapping one another on the

back.

"Men released from arms?" Gilbert cried. "in the midst of a war?"

"Seems Queen Suettay made a mistake by turning her commanders into bureaucrats," I said. "She made them vulnerable to the Gremlin-and the Rat Raiser, of course."

"The Rat Raiser! Can this soft-handed clerk best even knights in

the field?"

"Not in the field," I corrected him. "Only before they get there."

The scene rippled again and changed to a paneled room with a richly dressed man sitting behind an elevated table on top of a dais. Before him stood a bruised man in rags and chains, flanked by two well-fed men in green and brown.

"Foresters," Gilbert breathed, "and a county magistrate."

"A courtroom?" I asked.

"A knight's court, mayhap," he said, "though a simple knight can carcely be termed to hold court."

"Well, it certainly is serving the purpose." I couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor peasant in front of the bench. "What did this guy do, to deserve being arrested?"

"The two men to either side of him are forest keepers," Frisson said. "I warrant the peasant was caught a-poaching." He sounded as if he spoke from experience.

I caught my breath. I'd always thought the medieval forest laws were unfair, even though I had to admit the game laws of my own day and age made no sense. Still, making sure deer and pheasants aren't hunted to extinction was a far cry from making sure they were reserved only for the aristocracy's tables and amusement.

This time, however, justice seemed to be adhering to the spirit rather than the letter; the knight was gesturing, and the foresters stared, aghast. The knight pounded on the table, getting red in the face, and the foresters reluctantly turned to strike off the peasant's irons. He stood, dumbstruck, staring at his reddened but naked wrists; then a forester gave him a shove toward the door. He stumbled, but turned the stumble into a run and got out of there before the knight could change his mind.

The knight, for his part, was still red-faced, only now he was glowering at a parchment that lay beside him on his high table.

"The Rat Raiser again!" I grinned. "He told the Gremlin how to louse up the judicial system-from Suettay's standpoint, anyway."

"Aye." Frisson smiled. "Merely dispense actual justice." The scene rippled again, and we found ourselves looking down from overhead at two long battle lines stretched out across a meadow, facing each other. At the head of each rode a man in armor, with a whole squadron of silver lobsters behind him on heavy-duty Percherons.

" 'Tis the duke of Degmaburg!" Gilbert cried. "I know his arms!"

"Only a duke?" I frowned. "Not a minister of some sort?"

"Nay. He was too strong to depose, though not to corrupt. He is one of the few of the old nobility who has held his station under the sorcerers' reigns."

"And now he sees his chance to reestablish the old line," I breathed, "meaning himself."

Even as I said it, the duke's horse began to canter forward. His

squad of heavy armor heaved into a trot right behind him, and the peasantry leveled their pikes and began to move forward. But Gilbert was frowning. "How is this? The queen's knights are far behind the line of men -at-arms! What can they do there"' He was about to find out-for just before the duke and his knights struck, the peasant line opened up like a gate, and the horsemen hurtled through. Suettay's armored division snapped their lances down and tried to work up to a quick trot-apparently they hadn't planned on having to fight. But the duke and his men were going too fast to stop; they slammed into the royal knights, unhorsing a few, then dropping their lances and grabbing for maces and broadswords. It turned into a melee after that, with the knights chopping one another to filings.

Meanwhile, back on the front lines, one of the noncoms lowered his pike and held out a wineskin. The advance wavered; then the duke's troopers dropped their pikes, reached for the wineskins, and pulled out some hardtack. In a few minutes, they were laughing and chatting with their opposite numbers, having a regular party while they watched the lobsters open one another's shells.

"How can they think they will not be punished?" Gilbert wondered.

"Nice question." I pointed to the silver melee. "Here come their masters."

The knights were riding back full-tilt, and those broadswords rose and flailed down at their own men. They hit ...

And broke.

Snapped clean across, just as if each sword had been a brittle antique. The knights stared at the remnants of blade attached to their hilts, then roared and pulled out their maces.

The heads flew off on the first swing.

The tankers' arms shot up, presumably with a cheer; then their pikes raised and stabbed, some finding chinks in armor, some jabbing between saddle and tin pants, levers to tip knights out of saddleswhich they did. Then each knight disappeared in a cluster of soldiers, and pikes rose and fell.

Gilbert was pale-faced. "Soldiers striking down their own knights!" It was the ultimate threat to him.

"Suettay's harvest," I told him, knowing it would be reassuring.

"She's trained her army to get everything they can for themselves and prey upon the weaker, killing off anybody who gets in their way. She forgot that she might not always be the stronger." But the queen's side hadn't dispensed with all its strong-arms yet; a sorcerer in a midnight robe banded with gray stood up, waving his arms.

"A man of the second rank." Frisson frowned. "This may be their undoing, poor devils," "Maybe not," I said. "Don't underestimate the Gremlin's capacity for making things go wrong," Suddenly, a rain fell-a very localized rain; it seemed to envelop only the sorcerer. He clutched his hat and ran, but the storm followed him.