Ionina didn’t pay much attention to the band of desert. She pointed at a group of tiny figures perhaps a mile away, just where the foothills of Thedherom finally leveled off into the plain.
“Pilgrims,” said Pelio. “They’re walking here along the Dgeredgerai Road.”
“They are witlings, then.”
“No. Probably they are soldier- or servant-trainees.” Most normal Azhiri spent a good many ninedays of their lives in pilgrimage, for—unless you were a Guildsman—it was simply impossible to teleport to a destination more than a few yards away, unless you had actually traveled to that destination previously. Back when his father could still hope Pelio had a usable measure of Talent, the prince had himself walked the north-south length of the palace, a full sixteen hundred miles. He had learned the palace’s true immensity, but little else. Oh, afterward he could occasionally seng the pools along the line of march—which would have been impossible without the pilgrimage—but he still could not teleport to them. It was humiliating, though Pelio had plenty of servants who could teleport him wherever he wanted to go—and really, most people depended on professional rengers for long-distance jumps, anyway.
They spent an hour exploring the Gallery’s fountains and garden rooms before they finally returned to the transit pool and jumped eight hundred miles northward—all the way to the triple-canopy rain forest that covered the equatorial portion of the Summerkingdom. Here he showed Ionina rooms built in the branches of the hardwood trees that rose from the steamy depths. They walked a wide avenue planed from the surface of one of those branches and listened to the buzzing and screaming of life below them in the greenish dark. Unidentified smells, both enticing and faintly repulsive, floated up past the gray-green pillars.
Pelio let his mouth babble on, but all the time another part of him was watching the girl’s reaction, and admiring her dark slenderness. She listened closely to everything he said, and when she asked a question it was always intelligent—though often naive. Every so often he noticed her quietly appraising look, and wondered what judgment she was forming of him. She didn’t gawk at what he showed her, as he had often seen minor nobles from the outer baronies do, the first time they saw the palace. Somewhere, he guessed, she had seen things more impressive. But where? Samadhom at his heels and the guards further behind were completely forgotten.
For midday meal, they stopped at the hunting lodge overlooking the Dhendgaru plains. The dining hall was virtually empty: with the nobility attending the ambassadorial reception in the Keep, he and Ionina had an unprecedented opportunity to roam unremarked through the palace. Pelio did not like to think of the dark side of this: the fact that his father had not required him to attend the reception was just another indication of how far Pelio was removed from the centers of power. When someday he did succeed to the crown, he would be the first figurehead monarch in centuries.
Ordinarily the thought would have turned him silent, but today it didn’t really seem to matter. Their sauced bvepa was delicious, though the girl didn’t finish her serving. She seemed more interested in the silvery sweep of the grain fields far below. Pelio found himself telling her how all those thousands of square miles were harvested and the grain teleported to the forests where it fed the animals that ultimately provided the food they were eating. From her questions Pelio gathered that where she came from, the farmers kept their livestock in artificial containments and fed them from closed fields. It all fitted his theory: only mental cripples would have to concentrate their food production so.
Seven
The afternoon was spent renging about the palace. No room was more than one league from any other, so that even though the palace stretched eight hundred miles north and south of the equator and thirty miles east and west of the royal meridian, they could visit any place within it in two or three jumps. The hours passed and the shadows lengthened. Through the long windows of the game room, Pelio could already see the colors of sunset in the west.
He looked across the gaming table. Ionina sat hunched forward, concentrating on the silver balls Pelio had just set rolling on the table. She seemed to sense his attention and looked up. “Is there anything more you’d like to see after we finish this match, Ionina?”
The girl sat up abruptly, all thought of the game forgotten. Her lips parted but she remained silent for several seconds, thinking. On the terrace below them, several other games were making noisy progress. Finally: “Yes. When Ajao and I were … got by the soldiers, they took many things that were there with us. Could I see these things? They are just poor things without use, but I feel happy to see them.”
You’re lying, thought Pelio. He remembered those fragments the troopers recovered. They were strange, like weird jewelry. If he had been superstitious he would have called them talismans. He looked back into her mysterious eyes—but I’d like to play along with you. This could be an especially good chance to find out more about Ionina’s background. And even if there were some kind of magic attached to those objects, it shouldn’t hurt for her to see them. The only problem was that he had secreted them in his personal cache in the palace Keep. Pelio looked over the railing at the nobles on the terrace below. The crowd had been growing during the last hour. Judging from the shadows outside, and the formal clothes those people wore, the reception was over, its participants dispersed: it should be possible to enter the Keep without having to talk to too many people.
“I think we can do as you ask, Ionina—if you describe to me the function of these things you had with you.”
The girl bowed her head a fraction of an inch, didn’t look him quite in the eye. “As far as may be, I will.”
They had to make several intermediate jumps to accommodate themselves to the thinning air, before they finally emerged into the gray chill of the Highroom. The room was ten thousand feet above sea level—and the most secure place in the palace, outside of the Keep itself. Down beyond the vertical slit windows a sheer cliff fell away for thousands of feet. Only a Guildsman could teleport himself to the room without first climbing here as a pilgrim. Five centuries before, when Pelio’s ancestors had ruled only the Inner Kingdom, and when that kingdom had been scarcely bigger than a modern duchy, the Guild had been hired to provide the rulers with some retreat reasonably safe from attack. The Guild had senged this niche in the cliff face, and had teleported workers here to carve out the room and the yard-wide stone stairs that led three thousand feet down the cliff. Anyone climbing those stairs was helpless against attack from above, so the early kings had had no trouble excluding unwanted pilgrims. It had taken the kingdom more than a century to pay off the debt the Guild’s service put upon them, but the price was worth it, for the Inner Kingdom then had the most secure redoubt on the continent. Without that redoubt, the dynasty that had culminated in Pelio and that now ruled most of one continent and part of another, would never have survived. In the end, of course, such hidden rooms became a common feature of even minor states, and the means of besieging and seizing them became widely known. That was why in modern times, the Highroom was used merely as the entrance to a much more secure volume—the palace Keep of the Summerkingdom.