Bellcrank tugged on Sturm's sleeve. "Metal," he whis pered. "Lots of it."
"I see it," Sturm said calmly.
"This way. This way," Rapaldo said, gesturing.
The very center of the keep was the audience hall, a square room ten yards wide. When Rapaldo entered, a half dozen tree-men snapped glass spears to their nonexistent shoulders in salute. They hooted in unison three times, and dropped their spears to a ported position.
"My palace guard," Rapaldo said with pride.
"Are they intelligent?" asked Wingover.
"Not like you and I are. They learn things I teach them, remember orders, and such like, but they weren't civilized when I first came here."
At the far end of the room, a crude throne was set up, a high-backed chair mounted on a thick rectangle of ruby glass. The chair had obviously been cobbled together from ship's timbers; the peg holes from the trenails were still visi ble.
Rapaldo hopped upon the glass pedestal and picked up his scepter from the seat of the chair. He turned around and sat down with a sigh, laying the emblem of his office in the crook of his arm. It was a broadhead axe.
"Hear ye, hear ye. The royal court of Lunitari may begin,"
Rapaldo recited in a high-pitched voice. He coughed once, and his skinny chest convulsed. "I, King Rapaldo the First, am present and speaking.
"In honor of the unexpected guests who have arrived today, I, King Rapaldo, will relate the marvelous tale of my coming to this place." Roperig and Fitter, sensing that a long story was beginning, sat down.
Rapaldo leaped to his feet. "You will stand in the presence of the king!" he shouted, punctuating the command with a sweep of his scepter-axe. The two gnomes stood with alacri ty. Rapaldo shivered with fury. "Those who do not show respect will be removed by the Royal Guard!"
Sturm flashed Kitiara a knowing look. She bowed and said, "Forgive us, Your Majesty. We've not been in the pres ence of a king for quite some time."
Her intervention had an almost magical effect. Rapaldo relaxed and sat on his wooden throne again. There was a distinct clink as he did so. Sturm spied a glint of chain around his waist.
"Better, better. What's a king without subjects who pay him respect? A captain without a ship, a ship without a rud der? Ta-ra!" Rapaldo gripped the arms of his throne tightly for a moment. "It's been t-ten years since last I spoke to another human being," he said. "If I rattle and prattle, lay it to that fact."
He drew a deep breath. "I was born the son and grandson of sailors, on the island of Enstar, in the Sirrian Sea. My father was slain by Kernaffi pirates when I was but a lad, and the day the word came home, I ran away to sea. I learned to use the axe and adze."
Cutwood heard this and squirmed to comment. Sighter and Wingover both put hands over his mouth.
"The trade of the shipwright built a man out of a boy, heh, heh, and as the summers passed, I stopped going to sea and stayed ashore on Enstar, making craft that plied the wide green ocean." The royal axe slid down to Rapaldo's lap.
"Had I stayed a land-bound shipwright, though, I would not now be the royal person you see before you." A frayed sleeve slipped off his bony shoulder. Absently, Rapaldo replaced it. "I would not now be on this moon," he mut tered. "A prosperous ship owner named Melvalyn hired me to sail with him to southern Ergoth. Melvalyn planned to buy timber to build a new fleet of merchant ships, and he wanted an expert along to grade the available wood. We were to depart from Enstar for Daltigoth on the third day of autumn, an ill-starred day. The soothsayer, Dirazo, the one
I always consulted for times of good luck and bad, parleyed with the dark spirits and pronounced the sailing date as damned by the rise of Nuitari, the black moon. I tried to beg off, but Melvalyn insisted the voyage begin as planned.
Heh, heh, old Melvalyn learned what it means to disregard the omens! Yes, he learned!
"Cold, contrary winds from the southeast blew us west of
Ergoth. We tacked and tacked, but made little headway against the Kharolis Blow. Then, four days out to sea, the wind died. We were becalmed.
"There's not a more helpless feeling than being at sea with no wind. Melvalyn tried all the tricks, wetting the sails, kedging with the anchors, and such like, but we didn't move enough to measure. The sky sort of closed in on us, fish-eye gray, and then the father of all storms broke on us."
Rapaldo, caught up in his own monologue, stood abrupt ly. He made swift, jerky gestures to illustrate his story.
"The sea, it was running like this, and the wind, it was blowing like this -" His hands swung in from opposite directions and clashed in front of his face. "Rain was screeching over the deck flat sideways. The Tarvolina, that was our ship, lost her topmast and yards straight away. And then, and then, it came down and grabbed us." Rapaldo stepped upon his throne and crouched, his head ducked to protect himself from the memory.
"What was it?" Rainspot burst out unwittingly. Rapaldo, waiting for this cue, didn't get angry this time.
"A waterspout," he said, shivering. "A mighty, twisting column of water a hundred feet wide at the bottom! It sucked up the Tarvolina like a dry leaf, and we went right through the hollow middle of it, up and up and up! Some of the sailors got scared and jumped overboard. Those that jumped down the middle fell all the way back to the sea, miles and miles, but those that hit the wall of twisting water
…" Rapaldo stamped his foot on the chair. All the gnomes jumped in fright. "They were ripped to pieces. Might as well have jumped into an ocean of knife blades." The metaphor seemed to please him, for he smiled. For all his scruffiness, the king of Lunitari had a fine set of straight white teeth.
"The waterspout carried us so high that the blue went out of the sky. Only six men out of the full crew of twenty lived to the funnel's end. The waterspout turned inside out, and dropped the Tarvolina upside down, here on Lunitari."
King Rapaldo hopped down to the glass throne base. His shaggy eyebrows closed in over his dark brown eyes.
"Three men survived the shipwreck: Melvalyn, Darnino, the navigator, and Rapaldo the First. Melvalyn had a bro ken leg, and died not long after. Darnino and I almost starved, until we learned to eat the plants that grow by day and drink the dew that collects in the red turf at night."
That's something we didn't know, Sturm thought.
"Darnino and I stayed together until we met the Oud ouhai, the tree-people. The tree-folk had never seen men before, and they took us for their dread enemies -" Here
Rapaldo paused. He peered at each member of the group in turn. "Anyway, there was a fight, and Darnino was killed.
The Lunitarians were about to kill me, too, when I raised my axe." He suited the action to the words. "And they were so awestruck that they proclaimed me oem-owa-oya, supreme ruler of them all and wielder of the holy iron."
Rapaldo finished his story with a giggle. Unmindful of the guards standing nearby, he added, "The worthless savages had never seen metal before! They figured it must have come from the gods, and that I was a holy messenger sent to look after them."
"Have the Lunitarians no metal of their own?" asked Bell crank.
"There's no metal on the whole bloody moon, as near as I can tell," said Rapaldo. He flopped into his throne and adjusted his ragged clothes with extreme care and dignity.
"Now I would hear of your own coming," he said loftily.
Wingover started to speak, but the king rapped the side of his axe on the throne. "Let the lady tell it."
Kitiara unhooked her sword belt and stood the weapon, in its sheath, before her. She leaned on the sword and told the tale of how she and Sturm had met the gnomes in the rainstorm, the flight to the red moon, their expedition, and the theft of the Cloudmaster.
"Heh, heh, heh," Rapaldo laughed. "You can't leave things lying about unguarded, not even on Lunitari. The Micones have taken your craft."
"Micones?"
"The enemies I spoke of. The Oud-ouhai have no preda tors to fear, as there are no animals on Lunitari, only plants.
But the Micones, when directed, are a plague indeed."
"But what are they?" asked Kitiara.
"Ants."
"Ants?" said Sighter.
"Giant ants," said Rapaldo. "Six feet of solid rock crystal.
The magic in this moon gives them the power to move and work, but they haven't got a single brain among them."
"Who – or what – directs these Micones?" asked Sturm.