Walking to the ramshackle stairs, Limbeck was startled to feel a wet tongue lick across his knuckles. It was Haplo’s dog, looking up at him, wagging its tail.
“I understand,” the animal seemed to say, its unspoken words startlingly clear in Limbeck’s mind. “I’m sorry.”
“Dog!” Haplo spoke to it sharply, calling it back.
“No, that’s all right,” said Limbeck, reaching down to give the animal’s sleek head a gingerly pat. “I don’t mind.”
“Dog! Come!” Haplo’s voice had an almost angry edge to it. The dog hurried back to its master’s side, and Limbeck retired up the stairs.
“He’s so very idealistic!” said Jarre, gazing after Limbeck in admiration mixed with exasperation. “And not at all practical. I just don’t know what to do.”
“Keep him around,” suggested Haplo. He stroked the dog’s long nose to indicate that all was forgiven and forgotten. The animal lay down, rolled over on its side, and closed its eyes. “He gives your revolution a high moral tone. You’ll need that, when blood starts to flow.”
Jarre looked worried. “You think it will come to that?”
“Inevitable,” he said, shrugging. “You said as much yourself, to Limbeck.”
“I know. It seems, as you say, that it is inevitable, that this is the natural end of what we began long ago. Yet it has seemed to me lately”—she turned her eyes to Haplo—“that we never seriously turned our thoughts to violence until you came. Sometimes I wonder if you aren’t really a god.”
“Why is that?” Haplo smiled.
“Your words have a strange power over us. I hear them and I keep hearing them, not in my head, but in my heart.” She placed her hand on her breast, pressing it as if it pained her. “And because they’re in my heart, I can’t seem to think about them rationally. I just want to react, to go out and do ... something! Make somebody pay for what we’ve suffered, what we’ve endured.” Haplo rose from the chair and came over to Jarre, kneeling down so that he put himself at eye level with the short, stocky Geg. “And why shouldn’t you?” he said softly, so softly that she couldn’t hear over the whumping, whooshing of the Kicksey-Winsey. Yet she knew what he said, and the pain in her heart increased. “Why shouldn’t you make them pay? How many of your people have lived and died down here, and all for what? To serve a machine that eats up your land, that destroys your homes, that takes your lives and gives nothing to you in return! You’ve been used, betrayed! It’s your right, your duty to strike back!”
“I will!” Jarre was caught, mesmerized by the man’s crystal blue eyes. Slowly the hand over her heart clenched into a fist.
Haplo, smiling his quiet smile, rose and stretched. “I think I’ll join our friend in a nap. It’s liable to be a long night.”
“Haplo,” called Jarre, “you said you come from below us, from a realm that we . . . that no one knows is down there.”
He did not reply, merely looked at her.
“You were slaves. You told us that. But what you haven’t told us is how you came to crash on our isle. You weren’t”—she paused and licked her lips, as if to make the words come more easily—“running away?” One corner of the man’s mouth twitched. “No, I wasn’t running. You see, Jarre, we won our fight. We are slaves no longer. I’ve been sent to free others.” The dog raised its head, turning to stare sleepily at Haplo. Seeing him leaving, the dog yawned and got up, hind end first, stretching out its front legs luxuriously. Yawning again, it rocked forward, stretching the back legs, then lazily accompanied its master up the stairs.
Jarre watched, then shook her head, and was sitting down to finish Limbeck’s speech when a thumping against the curtain recalled her to her duties. There were people to meet, pamphlets to be delivered, the hall to be inspected, parades to be organized.
The revolution just wasn’t much fun anymore.
Haplo mounted the stairs carefully, keeping to the inside against the wall. The knobwood boards were cracked and rotting. Large snaggletoothed gaps waited to snare the unwary and send them crashing down to the floor below. Once inside his room, he lay down on the bed, but not to sleep. The dog jumped up on the bed next to him and rested its head on the man’s chest, bright eyes fixed on his face.
“The woman is good, but she won’t serve our purpose. She thinks too much, as my lord would say, and that makes her dangerous. What we need in this realm to foment chaos is a fanatic. Limbeck would be ideal, but he must have that idealistic bubble of his burst. And I’ve got to leave this place, to carry on with my mission—investigate the upper realms and do what I can to prepare the way for the coming of my lord. My ship is destroyed. I have to find another. But how...how?”
Musing, he fondled the dog’s soft ears. The animal, sensing the man’s tension, remained awake, lending its small support, and slowly Haplo relaxed. Opportunity would come. He knew it. He had only to watch for it and take advantage of it. The dog closed its eyes with a contented sigh and slept, and after a few moments, so did Haplo.
31
“Alfred.”
“Sir?”
“Do you understand what they’re saying?”
Hugh motioned to Bane, chatting with the Geg, the two of them scrambling across the coralite. Storm clouds gathered at their backs and the wind was rising and keened eerily among the bits and pieces of lightning-blasted coralite. Ahead of them was the city Bane had seen. Or rather, not a city but a machine. Or perhaps a machine that was a city.
“No, sir,” said Alfred, looking directly at Bane’s back and speaking more loudly than was usual for him. “I do not speak the language of these people. I do not believe that there are many of our race, or the elves either, for that matter, who do.”
“A few of the elves speak it—those who captain the waterships. But if you don’t speak it, and I assume that Stephen didn’t, then where did His Highness learn it?”
“How can you ask, sir?” said Alfred, glancing significantly toward the heavens.
He wasn’t referring to the storm clouds. Up there, far above the Maelstrom, was the High Realm, where dwelt the mysteriarchs in their self-imposed exile, living in a world said by legend to be wealthy beyond the dreams of the greediest man and beautiful beyond the imagining of the most fanciful.
“Understanding the language of a different race or culture is one of the simpler of the magical spells. I wouldn’t be surprised if that amulet he wears—Oh!”
Alfred’s feet decided to take a side trip down a hole and took the rest of Alfred with them. The Geg stopped and looked around in alarm at the man’s cry. Bane said something, laughing, and he and the Geg continued on their way. Hugh extricated Alfred and, keeping his hand on his arm, guided him rapidly over the rough ground. The first raindrops were falling out of the sky, hitting the coralite with loud splatters.
Alfred cast an uneasy sidelong glance at Hugh, and the Hand read the unspoken appeal to keep his mouth shut. In that appeal, Hugh had his answer, and it wasn’t the one Alfred had given for Bane’s benefit. Of course Alfred spoke the Gegs’ language. No one listened intently to a conversation he couldn’t understand. And Alfred had been listening intently to Bane and the Geg. What was more interesting—to Hugh’s mind—was that Alfred was keeping his knowledge secret from the prince.
Hugh thoroughly approved spying on His Highness, but that opened the other nagging question. Where—and why—had a chamberlain learned to speak Geg? Who—or what—was Alfred Montbank?
The storm broke in all its deadly fury and the humans and the Gegs made for the city of Wombe at a dead run. Rain fell in a gray wall in front of them, partially obscuring their vision. But the noise made by the machine was, fortunately, so loud that they could hear it over the storm, feel its vibrations underfoot, and knew they were headed in the right direction. A crowd of Gegs were waiting by an open doorway for them and hustled them all inside the machine. The sounds of the storm ceased, but the sounds of the machine were louder, clanking and banging above, around, below, and beyond. Several Gegs, who appeared to be armed guards of some sort, plus a Geg dressed up to look like an elflord’s footman, were waiting—somewhat nervously—to greet them.