“You will have a struggle there, I think.”
“I think so too. The Pontifex is not famous for his patience. He feels that his reign as Coronal was stained by the scheming of his enemies, and he believes, probably rightly, that this man Mandralisca has been behind most or perhaps all of the trouble. Now that trouble has burst out again, he wants to be rid of Mandralisca, once and for all. Well, who doesn’t? But war, to me, is a last resort. And I’d be the one who would have to command the troops, after all, not Prestimion.”
“That would not matter to him. You are the Coronal. The Pontifex decrees policy, and the Coronal carries out the decrees. It has always been thus.”
Dekkeret shrugged. “Nevertheless, if I can avoid this war, I will, Dinitak. I’ll go into Zimroel, yes. And I’ll see to it that Mandralisca’s days of troublemaking are brought to an end, just as Prestimion wants. It’s what happens after Mandralisca’s out of the picture that I want to discuss with you now.”
The bedroom door opened and Fulkari emerged, dressed in a handsome green morning robe. She gave Dinitak an amiable smile, as if to say that she saw nothing wrong with Dekkeret’s holding a policy conference at this hour of the night. Dekkeret threw her a grateful wink. Quietly she took a seat by the window. The first faint purplish streaks of dawn were visible in the east.
“Peacefully or otherwise,” Dekkeret said, “the Mandralisca problem has been solved, let us assume. The uprising of the five Sambailids has been curbed, and they’ve been made to see that they had better not get such ideas again. Without Mandralisca to do their thinking for them, they probably won’t. All right. The question that will remain, Dinitak, is this: what can we do to prevent future Mandraliscas from arising? He and his master Dantirya Sambail have given the world an entire generation of trouble. We can’t let anything like that happen again. And so—an idea, a very strange idea, in the middle of the night—”
13
“You are a duke?” the Shapeshifter asked, as Thastain led him from Mandralisca’s office. “Truly, a duke? You are so young to be a duke.”
Thastain grinned. “It amuses him to call me that. Or count, sometimes: he calls me that too. I’m not a duke or a count of anything, though. My father was a farmer in a place called Sennec, west of here. He died and we couldn’t pay the debts and we lost the farm, and I went into the service of the Five Lords.”
“But he calls you a duke,” said Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp. “You are a farmer’s son, and he calls you a duke. It is only a joke, you say. A strange joke, is what I think. It seems almost to be a kind of mockery. I do not understand human jokes. But, then, why should I? Am I in any way human?”
“Only in your appearance right now,” Thastain replied. “But of course that can change.—Come this way, sir. Down these steps, if you will.”
I am having a polite conversation with a Metamorph, he thought, astounded. I just called him ‘sir’. Life held no end of amazements, it seemed.
As his meeting with Mandralisca ended, the ambassador from the Danipiur—for that was what he was, Thastain realized, the ambassador from the Shapeshifter queen—had reverted to his assumed human form for the journey back to his lodgings. So now he was a peculiar-looking long-legged man once again, who walked as though he had learned how to walk only last week and spoke with a thick buzzing accent that was a struggle for Thastain to penetrate. It seemed to him that Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavistheyp was almost as strange in pseudo-human guise as when he was wearing his own form.
Like any farm boy of northern Zimroel, Thastain had been raised to fear and loathe the Shapeshifters. They were the dread alien beings of the Piurifayne jungles to the southeast, who seethed with hatred over the loss of their world to human invaders thirteen thousand years before, and would never rest until they had somehow recaptured control of it. Though Lord Stiamot had confined them to their rain-forest reservation, everyone knew that their form-changing abilities made it possible for them to slip out of Piurifayne at will and go secretly among humans, working every manner of mischief: poisoning wells, stealing mounts and blaves, kidnapping babies to be raised as slaves in their jungle villages. Or so Thastain had grown up believing.
He had never spoken to a Metamorph before, not knowingly. He had never so much as seen one at close range. And now—Come this way, sir. Down these steps, if you will. Wonder of wonders. Come this way, sir.
They emerged from the procuratorial palace into the clear, bright light of another perfect Ni-moyan day. The hostelry where Mandralisca kept his out-of-town visitors was a ten-minute walk away from the river—up the hill past the Movement headquarters and the apartment building where Thastain himself lived, turn left, enter an underground passageway that quickly turned into a broad stone staircase going up to the next level inland. And there was the hostelry, a great white tower, as most of the buildings of this sector of Ni-moya were, standing in a row of similar towers that formed a solid phalanx along the street known as Nissimorn Boulevard. Four of the Five Lords had mansions farther down Nissimorn Boulevard, where the apartment towers gave way to the private dwellings of the very wealthy. Everyone knew Nissimorn Boulevard. It was such a famous street that when he first saw it Thastain wondered if his feet would begin tingling as they came in contact with its pavement.
“The Count Mandralisca makes jokes of you,” the Metamorph went on as they ascended the stone staircase, “but even so you are one of his most important people. Is that not so, that you are a close aide?”
“One of the closest. You saw the other two just now. Jacomin Halefice, Khaymak Barjazid, and I: we are his inner circle, the people he most trusts.” It was the truth, more or less, Thastain thought. The Count was more at ease with Halefice and Barjazid and him than with anyone else. He had told them things that he had kept secret from everyone all his life, about his childhood, his father, his service with Dantirya Sambail. That had to signify a certain closeness.
But Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp said, startling Thastain with the accuracy of his perception, “You are the people he most trusts, yes, but how much does he trust you? Or anyone? And how much do you trust him?”
“I can’t speak to any of that, sir.”
“He is a difficult man, I think, your Count Mandralisca. Proud, suspicious, dangerous. He offers us an alliance. He makes us promises.”
Thastain saw what was going on now. He maintained an uneasy silence.
The Shapeshifter said, “We have not done well by the promises of your people in the past. There were Pontifexes and Coronals who swore to make our lives better, to grant us this privilege and that one that had been taken from us by Lord Stiamot, to permit us to come forth freely from our lands. You see how we live now.”
“Count Mandralisca is neither a Pontifex nor a Coronal. The thing that he seeks is to free the people of this continent from the rule of such kings as those. He means all the people of this continent, your people included.”
“Perhaps so,” the Shapeshifter said. “And he is an honorable man, would you say, your Count Mandralisca?”
Honorable?
That word was not, thought Thastain, the first one that would come to mind in describing Mandralisca. Cold-hearted, yes. Cruel, maybe. Frightening. Fierce. Determined. Ruthless. But honorable? Honorable? Thastain had known a few unquestionably honorable men in his Sennec days, good, strong, uncomplicated men, whose word was their bond. Liaprand Strume, for one, the storekeeper, who would always allow more credit to someone in trouble. Safiar Syamilak, his father’s bailiff, the devoted guardian of their lands. And the big red-bearded man with the farm just upriver from theirs, the one who had cracked his back lifting the wagon that had fallen on that little boy—Gheivir Maglisk, that was his name. Three honorable men, no doubt of that. It was hard to see what Count Mandralisca had in common with those three.