Which left only Akbalik, really. To lose Akbalik to the stupid bite of a vicious little Stoienzar crab, then, would be a terrible blow to all of Prestimion’s plans. Especially in a challenging time like this, when troubles seemed to sprout like mushrooms on every side.
We will be in Sisivondal before long, Varaile thought. That was an important city: her father had owned warehouses there, she remembered, and a bank, and a meat packaging company. Surely there would be competent doctors in a city like that. Would it be possible to persuade Akbalik to go to one of them for treatment? It would have to be handled very delicately. “Akbalik was so wonderfully sensible that we all used to go to him for advice about our problems,” Prestimion had told her. “But the wound has changed him. He’s turned touchy and strange. You have to be very careful not to offend him, now.” But certainly she had legitimate reasons of her own now for wanting to stop in Sisivondal for a medical checkup; and would it greatly upset him, she wondered, if she were to suggest in a mild sort of way that he might just as well get that leg of his looked at too, while they were there?
She would try it. She had to.
Sisivondal, though, was still many hundreds of miles away. It was too soon to bring the subject up.
They sat side by side in silence, watching for hour after hour as the flat monotonous landscape of west central Alhanroel’s dusty drylands flowed past their windows.
“Can you tell me if any battles were fought here in the civil war?” Varaile asked him, finally, purely for the sake of having some sort of conversation at all.
Akbalik looked at her strangely. “How would I know, milady?”
“I thought—well—”
“That I fought in it? I suppose I did, milady. Many of us did. But no memory of it remains to me. You understand why that is, do you not?”
Fresh perspiration had broken out on his brow and cheeks. His deep-set gray eyes, nearly always bloodshot now, took on a haunted look. Varaile regretted having said anything at all.
“I know what the mages did at Thegomar Edge, yes,” she said. “But—listen, Akbalik, if talking about the war is something painful for you—”
He seemed scarcely to have heard her. “As I understand it, there were no engagements close by here,” he said, looking not at her but at the scene outside, a parched brown landscape punctuated by occasional sparse clumps of gray-green trees that grew in strange spiral coils. “There was a battle northwest of here, at the reservoir on the Iyann. And something by the Jhelum, off to the south, and one in Arkilon plain, I think Prestimion said. And of course the one at Thegomar Edge, which is far off to the southeast. But the war bypassed this region, so I do believe.” Akbalik turned suddenly in his seat to stare at her with wild-eyed intensity.
“You know, do you not, milady, that I fought against Lord Prestimion in the war? ”
Varaile would not have been more startled if he had revealed himself just then to be a Shapeshifter. “No,” she said, with as much control as she could muster. “No, I had no idea! You were on Korsibar’s side? But how can that be, Akbalik? Prestimion thinks the world of you, you know!”
“And I of him, milady. But even so, I believe I was on the other side during the rebellion.”
“You only believe that you were? You aren’t sure?”
Something that could have been a spasm of pain passed across his face. He tried to turn it into a wry smile. “I told you, no memory of the war remains to me, or to any of us, except for Prestimion and Septach Melayn and Gialaurys. But I was at the Castle when the war broke out, that much I know. Even though the manner of Korsibar’s coming to the throne would have to have been unusual and irregular, I still would have regarded him, I think, as the true Coronal, simply because he had been anointed and crowned. So if I had been asked to fight on his behalf—and certainly Korsibar would have asked me—I would have done so. Korsibar was at the Castle, and Prestimion was off in the provinces, raising armies from the local people. Most of the Castle princes would necessarily have served as officers in what would have been regarded as the legitimate royal army. I know that Navigorn did. And I, being Prince Serithorn’s nephew, would surely not have defied my powerful uncle by going off to join Prestimion.”
Varaile’s head was swimming. “Serithorn was on Korsibar’s side too?”
“You ask me about things I no longer remember, lady. But yes, I think he was, at least some of the time. It was a very complicated period. It was not easy to know who was on which side, much of the time.”
He half-rose, suddenly, wincing.
“Akbalik, are you all right?”
“It’s nothing, milady. Nothing. The healing process—a little painful, sometimes—” Akbalik managed another unconvincing smile. “Let us finish with the war, shall we?—Do you see, now, why Lord Prestimion wiped it all from our minds? It was the wisest thing. I would rather be his friend unto death than his former enemy; and now I have no recollection of ever having been his enemy, if indeed I ever was. Nor has Navigorn. Septach Melayn has told me that Navigorn was Korsibar’s most important general; but all that is forgotten, and Prestimion trusts him implicitly in all things. The war is gone from us. Therefore the war can never be a factor in our dealings with one another. And therefore—”
Another groan came from him now, one that he was altogether unable to conceal. Akbalik’s eyes rolled wildly in his head, and sweat seemed to burst from his every pore, coating his face with a bright sheen. He started to rise, spun about, fell back against the cushion of his seat, shivering convulsively.
“Akbalik—Akbalik!”
“Milady,” he murmured. But he seemed lost in delirium, suddenly. “The leg—I don’t know—it—it—”
She seized a pitcher of water, poured some for him, forced the glass between his lips. He gulped it and nodded faintly for more. Then he closed his eyes. For a moment Varaile thought he had died; but no, no, he still was breathing. A very sick man, though. Very sick. She dipped a cloth in the water and mopped his burning forehead with it.
Then, hastening to the fore cabin, she rapped on the frame of the door to get the driver’s attention. The driver, a brown-furred Skandar named Varthan Gutarz, who wore amulets of some Skandar cult around the meaty biceps of three of his four arms, was hunched over the floater’s controls, but he looked up quickly.
“Milady?”
“How long before we’re in Sisivondal?”
The Skandar glanced at the instruments. “Six hours, maybe, milady.”
“Get us there in four. And when you do, head straight for the biggest hospital in town. Prince Akbalik is seriously ill.”
Sisivondal appeared to be a thousand miles of outskirts. The flat dry central plain went on and on, practically treeless, now, the emptiness broken only by little clusters of tin-roofed shacks, then more emptiness, then another small group of shacks, perhaps twice as many as before, and then emptiness, emptiness, emptiness, with some scattered warehouses and repair shops after that. And gradually the outskirts coalesced into suburbs, and then into a city, a city of great size.
And great ugliness. Varaile had seen few ugly places in her recent travels about the world, but Sisivondal was somber indeed, a commercial city with no beauty of any sort. Many major roads met here. Much of the merchandise being shipped from Alaisor port to Castle Mount or to the cities of northern Alhanroel had to pass through Sisivondal. It was a starkly functional city, mile after mile of gigantic warehouses fronting broad plain boulevards. Even the plants of Sisivondal were dull and utilitarian: stubby purple-leaved camaganda palms that could stand up easily to the interminable months of Sisivondal’s long rainless season, which lasted most of the year, and massive lumma-lummas, which could be mistaken for big gray rocks by the casual eye, and the tough prickly rosettes of garavedas, which took a whole century to produce the tall black spike that bore their flowers.