Carus grinned, reverting to the cheerful expression he most often wore. “But I know, lad, cutting throats isn’t your way; and maybe if my sword hadn’t made so many martyrs, things would’ve turned out better in my own day.”
Carus had been the greatest as well as the last ruler of the Old Kingdom. When he and the royal fleet sank in a wizard’s cataclysm, the Isles had shattered into chaos and despair. A thousand years hadn’t been enough to return the kingdom to the peace and stability it had known in the age before the Collapse, and forces gathering now threatened to crush what remained into dust and blood.
Not if I can help it! thought Garric.
“Not if we can help it!” echoed the ghost.
“I’m not afraid of their bravos!” Hordred snapped. In the angry response, Garric caught a glimpse of the man he must usually have been: tough and self-reliant, able to handle himself in a fight and well aware of the fact.
Relaxing with a conscious effort, Hordred continued, “I wrote down the strength of the forces gathering on Tisamur and the names of as many leaders as I could find. That’s in the books I gave you.”
He cocked an eyebrow at Liane; she nodded back. Hordred continued, “There’s contingents from Haft and Cordin, but the real danger’s in the mercenaries the leaders’ve been hiring from all over the Isles.”
Garric’s face went hard. His formal title now was Prince Garric of Haft, Adopted Son and Heir Presumptive to Valence III, King of the Isles. What he really was…one of the things he really was…was Garric, the nineteen-year-old son of Reise the innkeeper in Barca’s Hamlet on the east coast of Haft. The only contact Barca’s Hamlet and the borough around it had with the outside world was the Sheep Fair every fall and in summer the Tithe Procession, when priests from Carcosa on the west coast rolled images of the Lady and the Shepherd through the countryside and collected what was due the temple.
Garric was a peasant from Haft—and he was also the real ruler of the Isles, though the authority of the central government didn’t really stretch far from the capital here in Valles on Ornifal. If he didn’t put down this Confederacy of the West promptly, he wouldn’t rule his birthplace even in name.
“The notes are in Serian shipping code,” Hordred added. “Can you read that?”
“Yes, of course,” Liane said, touching the travelling desk in which she’d placed Hordred’s notebooks. They looked like ordinary accounts, thin sheets of birchwood bound in fours with hinges of coarse twine. The inner faces were covered in a crabbed script written in oak-gall ink.
“I should’ve stopped there,” the spy muttered, sounding both angry and frightened. He clasped his hands again unconsciously. “I thought, ‘Let’s see what the cult’s part in it is. Let’s learn about Moon Wisdom.’”
He swallowed. “I got into one of the ceremonies,” he went on, his voice dropping back to a whisper. “There were over a hundred people in the temple, some of them from as far away as Ornifal. They each had a symbol stamped on their forehead in cinnabar, a spider. I made a stamp for myself and nobody noticed anything wrong. But…”
Hordred fell silent again. Garric moistened his lips with his tongue, and prompted, “What went on at the ceremony, Master Hordred?”
The spy shook his head, trying to make sense of his memories. “We chanted a prayer to the Mistress of the Moon,” he said. “I didn’t know the words, but I could follow well enough.”
“Chanted words of power?” Liane asked, her face and voice sharper than they had been a moment before. She understood that wizardry was neither good nor bad in itself; like a sword, the power depended on the purpose—and the skill—of the wizard using it. But Liane would never forget the night that her wizard father had prepared to sacrifice her for purposes he had thought good.
“No, no,” said Hordred to his writhing hands. “Just ordinary speech, a hymn like you might hear at any Tennight ceremony if you’re the sort who wastes his time in temples. Only something happened, I don’t know what. I could feel something. And I thought I saw something in the air in the middle of the room, but there wasn’t anything there except gray. Nothing!”
He clenched his right fist as though to bang the table, but his arm trembled and he lowered his hand instead. “There wasn’t anything there, but it’s been with me ever since. Whenever I go to sleep.”
Garric stood. The discussion made him uncomfortable. He was as religious as any other youth in Barca’s Hamlet. He dedicated a crumb and a sip of beer to the Lady and her consort at most meals, and once a year he’d offered a flat cheese of ewe’s milk to Duzi, the roughly carved stone on the hill overlooking the meadows south of the hamlet. Duzi watched over sheep and the poor men who watched them; and if he did not, if Duzi was only the scars of time on rock, well…a cheese wasn’t much to spend on a hope of help in trouble.
But this business of temples and the powers called down by them—this was wizardry or worse, and no place for ordinary mortals. Becoming king hadn’t made Garric any less mortal, but he knew that this was a matter for kings regardless.
He grinned. There was a time that Garric or-Reise had imagined that nothing could be more unpleasant and frustrating than herding sheep caught in a sudden thunderstorm. Prince Garric knew his slightly younger self had been wrong.
“Master Hordred,” he said, “I’ve called a meeting of my council to discuss the conspiracy. You needn’t be present—”
Not every member of the council loved Garric, but each councillor knew his own survival and the best chance for the Isles to survive depended on Garric’s success. Even so, Liane had insisted that as few people as possible know the face of this spy or the other agents she had hired.
Garric accepted her judgment, as he did on most matters where Liane felt strongly and he did not. A boy from Barca’s Hamlet didn’t have the special skills needed to gather intelligence from across the kingdom’s scattered islands.
“—but I’d like you to remain here for the time being in case we have further questions for you afterward. There are cushions if you want to sleep—”
He nodded to the built-in benches. The walls were wainscotted to the height of a seated man’s shoulders and frescoed above with scenes from pine forests like those of Northern Ornifal.
“—and I can have food and drink brought in if you choose. You’ll be well guarded, of course.”
“Sleep!” Hordred said. “I could sleep on broken lava, I’m so tired. If I dared!”
“You’re in Valles now,” Garric said. “You’re as safe as I am myself. Or Lady Liane.”
Hordred looked up at him, then toward Liane as she rose also. “Am I?” the spy said. He laughed bitterly. “I suppose I am at that. Well, it doesn’t matter, I’ve got to sleep.”
Liane had been taking notes of Hordred’s information with a small brush in a vellum chapbook. Even though she was merely going with Garric to a larger bungalow ten paces distant, she placed her notes in the uppermost tray of the desk and locked it with a four-ward key.
“Yes, well…” Garric said. “We’ll see you soon, Master Hordred. On my honor, the kingdom won’t forget the risk you ran for its safety.”
As Garric opened the door for Liane, who carried the desk, he heard Hordred mutter, “I should’ve known better than to go into the temple. I thought it was just priests with a new trick to put money in their purses, but it’s wizards’ work or worse!”
“There’s no safety for anyone in the kingdom,” said the wizard-slain king in Garric’s mind, “while there’s wizards above the ground!”
Carus was wrong in his blanket condemnation: without the aid of the wizard Tenoctris, Garric and the Isles would have been doomed long since. But Garric remembered the desperation in Hordred’s eyes, and he knew that there was more than just prejudice to support King Carus’ opinion.