…
Scalza, with Ekaterina’s assistance, had gotten a scryer locked onto the Star Rider’s horse. “I started out trying to fix it on him… Ouch! Eka!” “That’s for taking credit for something you didn’t do, Worm.” “Yeah? All right. Eka did the brain work. And she’s the first one I’m gonna boil in lead after I take over the world.”
Which jest ignited an uncomfortable silence. One did not joke about such things amongst the mightiest faces of the Dread Empire. That reeked too much of possible wickedness.
Eka said, “He’d trip over his own mutant feet and fall in the cauldron himself if I wasn’t there to look out for him.”
That helped, but only a little.
Red-faced, Scalza focused on his task. “Well, anyway, we couldn’t lock it on him. He has some kind of protection that keeps that from happening. So we tried to lock onto the Horn thing because he’s always got that with him. Same thing, so we tried his horse and that worked.” Varthlokkur said, “It’s an insoluble problem with no satisfactory answer. Knowing where the horse is doesn’t tell us why the rider went there and it doesn’t tell us what he’s doing.”
Mist asked, “Can the Unborn keep an eye on him?”
“It could. But he would notice. That would cost me my best tool.” “Is he really that powerful?”
“We don’t know, do we? And that’s the point. There’s no telling what powers and resources he has. We do have someone who can tell us, though. Don’t we?”
Among the mob jammed in there were Mist’s mind specialists. The senior of the two stuck to the Old Man, talking softly, studying every move he made on the shogi board. His associate focused on Ethrian and Nepanthe, often involving the boy in a puzzle that required him to manipulate wooden blocks in different shapes and colors. After hassling her brother some more Ekaterina went to watch Ethrian fiddle with those. She had trouble not helping but Ethrian was getting lazy, counting on her to make things easier for him.
The specialist let her do nothing but offer encouragement. She had it bad for someone just getting into the high drama phase of a girl’s life. Were Ethrian normal her imagination would not have pushed her into such strong fantasies. His obsession with Sahmaman would have sucked the life out of that.
Ekaterina was brighter than the quietly smart, shy child she pretended.
She was more introspective than most girls her age. Further, her little brother was the only child she knew. She owned an unusually adult outlook. That included an appreciation of her own emotional landscape. It headed off nothing before it happened but did make it possible for her to analyze and understand after the fact. She was scared that the real, secret Ekaterina could become one truly frightening adult.
Meantime, she had her crush on her cousin and it was all she could do to keep that hidden and manageable. Manageable she managed, but, hidden, not so much. Everyone with eyes and a brain sniffed that out. The puppy love amused everyone. Folks were kind enough not to torment her, Scalza being the exception. Little brothers have obligations. The specialist who focused on the Old Man said, “We can now touch the level we needed to reach to get the information you want, Illustrious. If I put him into a deep trance he’ll do the rest.” He had been preparing the Old Man for hypnosis since he had arrived. The Old Man’s memory problems were not the result of physical damage. The emotional scarring, though, was serious.
Mist said, “I’m counting on you, Academician Sue.”
“I understand. We need to talk about the desert people, too.”
“Desert people?”
“The ones the wizard brought. Neither Lum nor I speak their language. The only available translators are bin Yousif and the sorcerer. The former is marginally capable because he spent time in one of our prisons-unfortunately Lioantung. Those people have an accent so thick they practically speak their own dialect, which he then butchers with an accent of his own.”
“I see.”
“And I’m not confident of the wizard’s translations. He’s your ally, Illustrious. You know him best. Is his agenda at variance with ours?”
“I ask myself frequently. And I can’t give you a definitive answer. My guess is, he’ll be reliable so long as the greater threat exists. He’s put himself square on target for that one, possibly deliberately.”
She looked round, did not see Varthlokkur. He had said nothing about leaving so must be somewhere in the castle. He should not be gone long. He hated leaving outsiders unsupervised in his space. Mist wished he would stay where she could keep an eye on him. “Do the best you can. I’ll find an interpreter you can trust.”
She looked around again. Scalza was focused on the Star Rider, Nepanthe on events in Kavelin. Ekaterina was beside Ethrian, who had abandoned his puzzle in favor of watching the shogi wars from behind Lord Kuo. When did Wen-chin do any work? She seldom caught him in the act but he was always caught up.
The game ended. Victorious, Lord Kuo abandoned his seat. Ethrian and Ekaterina crowded in opposite the Old Man. Eka began resetting the board.
Old man and boy shared a conspiratorial grin.
Scalza called, “Mother, I need you here.”
…
A man with a donkey herd and saddle horses to wrangle ought not to be able to manage much in the way of stealth. Donkeys did not present the nasty challenges offered by camels and mules but they did harken to a unique drummer, in a dimwitted sort of way. They needed close care and inspired supervision. So how could the killer of a king stay out of sight for so long?
Old Meddler was baffled.
Eventually, he decided that someone must be masking the killer from afar. After operating on that premise a while, though, he changed his mind. Even disguised, all those animals would leave a big scat trail and a route stripped of greenery.
The old devil decided that he could not find his man because his man was not out there to be found. He was no longer on the move.
Old Meddler had existed in this world for millennia, and in another for ages before that. His mind was a clutter of ten thousand times the memories of the oldest mortals around. Outside the moment and task at hand that could be a sink of confusion, a cat’s cradle of memories mixed and tangled, fragmented and partially lost. He sometimes enjoyed crystalline recollections of events two thousand years gone but modern memories eluded him even when he knew they were there. Till he actually saw it, and considered it from up close, he did not remember the Imperial watchtower.
There were donkeys and horses at a pool in the shade of the tower. They had stripped every plant. The killer was nowhere to be seen.
A faint, almost echoing call came on the breeze, drifting down from the battlements. He looked up, expecting to glimpse a pale white child’s face. That left him frowning. Why did he think that?
He probed the spell suite that had drawn the killer to the tower. He had done good work back then… He remembered the place now.
His mood collapsed.
He had not shut everything down once he finished manipulating the boy who would become the King Without a Throne.
Troubling, that. An inexcusable lapse. He should review all his recent work, though the blunder was harmless enough-except to the rare traveler who wandered into range of the haunting call.
He tried to get to the tower from above, as in the old days, but his mount shied off. It refused two further attempts. Could it sense something that he did not? Though unlikely, the chance should not be ignored. Silly to force something dangerous.
Could someone have converted the tower into a deathtrap? Improbable, but improbable death had stalked him a thousand times. Death had her eye on him now, and was sharpening her claws, he was sure.
It was the season to indulge in a psychotic level of caution.
He brought the winged horse to earth near the pool. The donkeys still carried their travel packs, the horses their saddles. The killer had become too entranced to take care.