“Well then, you were mostly successful. Did your story really happen?”
“Yes. It really happened,” DeWar said, then sat back and laughed, shaking his head. “No, I’m jesting with you. How could it happen? Search the latest globes, scour the newest maps, sail to the ends of the world. You will not find Lavishia, I swear.”
“Oh,” Perrund said, disappointed. “So you are not from Lavishia?”
“How can one be from a place that does not exist?”
“But you are from… Mottelocci, wasn’t it?”
“Mottelocci indeed.” DeWar frowned. “I don’t recall ever telling you that.”
“There are mountains there, aren’t there? It is one of the… what are they called, now? The Half-Hiddens. Yes. The Half-Hidden Kingdoms. Unreachable half the year. But a small paradise, they say.”
“Half a paradise. In spring and summer and autumn it is beautiful. In winter it is terrible.”
“Three seasons from four would be sufficient to please most people.”
“Not when the fourth season lasts longer than the other three put together.”
“Did something like your story happen there?”
“Perhaps.”
“Were you one of the people?”
“Maybe.”
“Sometimes,” Perrund said, sitting back with a look of exasperation on her face, “I can quite understand why rulers employ torturers.”
“Oh, I can always understand,” DeWar said softly. “Just not…” He seemed to catch himself, then sat upright, pulling his tunic tighter down. He looked up at the vague shadows cast on the softly glowing bowl of the light dome overhead. “Perhaps we have time for a game of something. What do you say?”
Perrund remained looking at him for a moment, then sighed and also drew herself upright. “I say we had better play ‘Monarch’s Dispute’. It is the one game you might be suited for. Though there are also,” she said, waving to a servant at a distant door, “‘Liar’s Dice’ and ‘Secret Keep’.”
DeWar sat back on the couch, watching Perrund as she watched the servant approach. “And ‘Subterfuge’,” she added, “and ‘Blaggard’s Boast’ and ‘Whiff of Truth’ and ‘Travesty’ and ‘The Gentleman Misinformant’ and…”
7. THE DOCTOR
“My master has a plan for your mistress. A little surprise.”
“I’ll bet!”
“More like a big one! Eh?”
“So would mine.”
There were various other comments and whistles from round the table, though nothing, in retrospect, that seemed much like wit.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Feulecharo, apprentice to Duke Walen, just winked. He was a stocky fellow, with wild brown hair that resisted all attempts to control it save those employing shears. He was polishing a pair of boots while the rest of us tucked into our evening meal, in a tent on the Prospect Plain, one day into the 455th Circuition. On this first rest stop it was traditional for the senior pages and apprentices to dine together. Feulecharo had been allowed to join us by his master, but he was being punished for one of his regular misdemeanours with extra work, hence the boots, and a set of rustily ancient ceremonial armour he was supposed to polish before we set off the next day.
“What sort of plan?” I insisted. “What can the Duke want with the Doctor?”
“Let’s just say he’s suspicious,” Feulecharo said, tapping his nose with a polishing brush.
“Of what?”
“My master is suspicious, too,” Unoure said, breaking a piece of bread in half and smearing some gravy round his plate.
“How very true,” drawled Epline, page to Guard Commander Adlain.
“Well, he is,” Unoure insisted sullenly.
“Still testing out his new ideas on you, is he, Unoure?” one of the other pages called. He turned to the others. “We saw Unoure in the baths once—”
“Aye, it would be the once!”
“What year was that?”
“We did,” continued the page, “and you should see the lad’s scars! I tell you, Nolieti is a perfect beast to him!”
“He teaches me everything!” Unoure said, standing up, his eyes bright with tears.
“Shut up, Unoure,” Jollisce said. “Don’t let this rabble bait you so.” Slight but elegantly fair, and older than most of us, Jollisce was page to Duke Ormin, who was the Doctor’s employer after the Mifeli trading family and before the King commandeered her services. Unoure sat down again, muttering under his breath. “What plans, Feulecharo?” Jollisce asked.
“Never mind,” Feulecharo said. He started whistling and began to pay uncharacteristically close attention to the boots he was polishing, and soon started to talk to them, as though trying to persuade them to clean themselves.
“That boy is intolerable,” Jollisce said, and took up a pitcher of the watered wine which was the strongest drink we were allowed.
A little after supper, Jollisce and I wandered along one edge of the camp. Hills stretched ahead of us and on both sides. Behind us, past the lip of the Prospect Plain, Xamis was still slowly setting in a fiery riot of colour, somewhere far beyond the near-circle of Crater Lake, falling over the round edge of sea.
Clouds, caught half in Xamis’s dying light and half in the late morning glare of Seigen, were lit with gold on one side, and red, ochre, vermilion, orange, scarlet… a wide wilderness of colours. We walked amongst the settling animals as each was quieted. Some — the hauls, mostly — had a bag over their heads. The better mounts had elegant eye-muffs while the best had their own travelling stables and lesser beasts merely warranted a blindfold made of whatever rag came to hand. One by one they folded themselves to the ground and prepared to sleep. Jollisce and I walked among them, Jollisce smoking a long pipe. He was my oldest and best friend, from the time when I had briefly been in the service of the Duke before being sent to Haspide.
“Probably it’s nothing,” he said. “Feulecharo likes to listen to himself talk, and he likes to pretend he knows something everybody else doesn’t. I wouldn’t worry about it, but if you think you ought to report it to your mistress, then of course you must do so.”
“Hmm,” I said. I recall (looking back on that earlier self from this more mature vantage point) that I was not sure what to do. Duke Walen was a powerful man, and a schemer. He was not the sort of man somebody like the Doctor could afford to have as an enemy, and yet I had to think of my own, real Master, as well as my Mistress. Should I tell neither of them? Or one — if so, which? Or both?
“Listen,” Jollisce said, stopping and turning to me (and it seemed to me he’d waited until there was nobody else around before he divulged this last piece of intelligence). “If it’s any help, I have heard that Walen might have sent somebody to Equatorial Cuskery.”
“Cuskery?”
“Yes, do you know of it?”
“Sort of. It’s a port, isn’t it?”
“Port, city-state, Sea Company sanctuary, lair of sea monsters if you believe some people… but the point is, it’s about the furthest north people come in any numbers from the Southern lands, and they supposedly have quite a number of embassies and legations there.”
“Yes?”
“Well, apparently one of Duke Walen’s men has been sent to Cuskery to look for somebody from Drezen.”
“From Drezen!” I said, then lowered my voice as Jollisce frowned and looked about us, over the sleeping bodies of the great animals. “But… why?”
“I can’t imagine,” Jollisce said.
“How long does it take to get to Cuskery?”