Lone stood and crossed the common room, his walk like that of a swaggering cat, his jet ponytail swinging in counterpoint.
Near dawn, Hâlott filled the minuscule fang with a minute amount of the ricinus elixir, and then he sealed the flat end with a insignificant amount of wax. Just as he took up the ruby ring, he heard a shout: “Mathter, Mathter, I bring you thomeone to open the boxth.”
Lone looked about the chamber and shook his head. Not only had he seen that the square-based tower was a ruin—with vine-covered rubble about its foundation, the top two levels but shells, with partial walls here and there and stairs leading up to dead ends or gaps—but now that he was inside, the ground-level floor seemed nearly a ruin itself, even though it was intact: barely livable, it was all but dead of neglect. Rogi set the lantern on a dust-laden table then went about lighting candles, while still calling out “Mathter, Mathter, thomeone to open the thecret boxth.”
Lone’s gaze went to the rune-marked, gilded box sitting on the table. There seemed no latch, no lock, no lid. He smiled in anticipation.
And then Hâlott walked into the room, and Lone turned, and for the first time the youth saw Hâlott up close and personal. Oh, he had seen Hâlott in the ’Unicorn now and again, yet always at night, and always from across the room. But now he stood no more than a stride away from what seemed to be the desiccated remains of a living corpse, and Lone wondered, What the frog has my mentor foisted upon me now?
At dusk, once again came a light tapping on the door. When Rogi answered it, he saw the young woman who had called him an ugly little creature and had fled.
Even as she recoiled once more, Rogi smiled and looked up at her, the irises of his eyes such a pale, pale blue that the whole of them looked dead white … white with black dots where his pupils were. Rogi began fumbling at the rope at his waist. “You would like to thsee my dragon, yeth?”
She huffed and said, “I would see your master.”
Rogi’s shoulders slumped. He turned and called out, “Mathter, thome woman to thsee you.”
A hollow whisper came from the adjacent room, and Rogi responded.
In moments, Rogi exchanged the ruby ring for a small but fairly weighty pouch, and the young woman fled once more.
Rogi sighed, and closed the door, then untied the pouch strings and fished out from among the coins two rather large and squarish silver ones—shaboozh—and one small gold piece—a royal—and pocketed them for himself. After all, he had worked hard for his wages: Not only had he found the “boxth,” he had wandered around in the shadowy woods in the moonlight with a bag of “beanth,” and he had searched all over town to find Chance and Lone and had been jeered at by fishermen and had nearly been thrown out of the Golden Gourd and …
From nearby and for perhaps the hundredth time came Lone’s frustrated shout: “Frog! Froggin’ chest!”
Dressed in white and wearing her ruby jewels, Nadalya, smiling, sauntered among the crowd of personages gathered in the courtyard to celebrate the visit of per-Arizak, known as Ariz to some and, because of his fiery temper, as the Dragon to others. Big and brawny and brown-haired, as were most of the Irrune, he was a man who clearly had gotten his height not only from his father, but also from his mother, Verrezza, Arizak’s first wife. In the courtyard to greet his eldest son was Arizak, who sat in a chair with his damaged left leg propped on a pillowed footstool. Tall, gray-haired Verrezza was there, too, for certainly she would not miss an event where the “one true” heir to the throne was present at court. Naimun, first son of Nadalya and Arizak, stood off to one side surrounded by his coterie of plotters, many of the young men laughing over something that their own pretender to the throne had said, or at some gaffe by Ariz, an uncouth but dangerous boor in their eyes, living in the hills with the bulk of the savage Irrune people as he did. Red-haired Raith was elsewhere among the crowd, the second son of Nadalya and Arizak. At seventeen, Raith was lithe and of a middling height, taller than his petite mother, shorter than Naimun, and certainly shorter than Aziz. Raith was the brightest of the lot, or so his mother deemed, and would make a better ruler than either of the two other contenders.
Additionally, there were merchants and their wives from Land’s End, powerful in their own right, as well as ladies of the court and daughters of various guests, all hanging on the words of so-called men of power or of their sons, especially those of Aziz, Naimun, and Raith. The smarter ones, though, sought out Verrezza or Nadalya, for that’s where the true machinations of the court as well as the progression resided.
Nadalya wove her way among the crowd, pausing here to jest with a youth, stopping there to speak of the tide and times with a merchant, lingering at another gathering to compliment the gems or hair or dress of some lady. Across the courtyard, she espied Andriko and caught his eye, and he nodded toward a cloth-draped table on which sat casks of wine used by the servants to replenish pitchers they bore through the gathering to refill goblets and glasses held by the guests.
Slowly, working her way outward, Nadalya eventually came to the table and casually and without notice found the box beneath, a cord tied to the hasp of the latch.
She tapped on the wine casks, as if measuring their fill, and at the same time, she repeatedly kicked the box below, the sound of one covering for the other. Then she took up the hasp-string and pulled the lid open, then stepped away toward Naimun and his circle of friends.
In moments, screams signaled that the enraged hornets had found their way out from under the cloth-covered table and were attacking anyone or anything that moved.
As men batted at the angry insects, women screamed and ran for the doors of the palace. Verrezza and Ariz got Arizak to his feet, and, with him hobbling, they headed for the palace as well.
Nadalya turned the ring ’round her finger until the gemstone was toward her palm, and she twisted aside the ruby and stepped to Nidakis and cried, “Oh, Nikki, there’s one on you,” and she slapped him on the back of his neck, then grabbed Naimun’s arm and headed for the palace, and was most pleased to see that Raith was before them and moving with the crowd.
The next day, Nidakis developed a cough, which by the following day turned into an endless hacking along with nonstop diarrhea. On the third day, a fever came upon him, and he could not keep any food on his stomach—vomiting until he was empty, and then retching nought but greenish bile thereafter. Even water would not stay down, nor juices of any kind. By that evening he had fallen into a coma, swiftly followed by death. The healers were puzzled, including Velinmet, the best of the lot … until postmortem they examined his body, and embedded under the skin in the back of his neck they found …
After four days of repeated and frustrating attempts, Lone, who had stubbornly determined that nothing could or would defeat him, at last opened the gilded box. It took twenty-seven separate moves of sliding panels in just the right sequence to unlatch the thing, and inside he and Hâlott found a carefully wrapped bronze bust of a woman. Beautiful she was, with a long, elegant neck and high cheekbones and graceful lips and a narrow chin and a long, straight nose. She had a high forehead and shell-like ears, and she wore what seemed to be a crown of sorts, or perhaps a strange, tall hat. The hat itself was marked with an ankh, like the one Hâlott himself wore. But strangest of all was that her eyes were outlined in a similar manner to Hâlott’s own painted-on eyes of kohl.
Lone was disappointed, for this was no treasure he wanted—no gems, no gold, no silver, no coinage or jewelry of any sort—and he had expected riches worthy of the puzzle of the box. But Hâlott was devastated, and he howled at the sight of the bust and sank to his knees and buried his withered face into his bony hands and sobbed inconsolably, though no tears whatsoever ran down his desiccated cheeks.