The Witch War Cycle

Chapter eight

Chapter eight

The four smithsEmder, sober-faced, lifted the statue. Emder, sober-minded, meticulous, supremely efficient, is the friend who looks after me when I happen to be in a palace or a civilized place, as Deft-Fingered Minch, my crusty old kampeon comrade, is the friend who looks after me in camp. Now Emder shook his head.

“It is a great pity. The piece has merit.”

“Aye,” Seg said with some emphasis, and gave Emder no chance of holding onto the statue by tweaking it out of his grasp.

“What the empress will say...” started Emder. Then he halted. “No. I am being foolish. The empress would command instantly that her girls remove what is necessary from her own boudoir and anywhere else.”

“You are right, Emder,” I said, and reached out for a candlestick, one of a pair, and Seg, hurling the statue into the sack, went over and fetched the other candlestick. Both went clink into the sack.

“Although,” said Nath na Kochwold, “if you asked the citizens of Vondium to contribute, they would do so willingly and to the best of their ability.”

“They’ve suffered enough, what with all the wars and destruction. If the palace here cannot find enough then I’ll loot some other damned place I’m supposed to own.”

On this Earth a couple of thousand years or so ago Pliny described electrum as consisting of one part of silver to four of gold. Native gold dug up with something approaching a half admixture of silver, not less than a fifth, was also reasonably common on Kregen; but we did not have time to go prospecting. To find the quantities of electrum we needed we simply grabbed all the statues and pretty little objects fabricated from dudinter and used them.

Garfon the Staff came in, belted his golden-banded balass staff down and said in what was for him a very soft whisper: “The four smiths are here, majister!”

“Right. I’ll see ’em now. Get all this stuff down to the forges right away.” Briskly, I strode off and as I went I tweaked a neat little dudinter trinket from a side table. This was a miniature of those enormous statues that come from Balintol, of an eight-armed person, a Talu, dancing with fingers outstretched like an abandoned cartwheel.

The attractive pale yellow color of electrum, named for amber in the old Greek, glimmered in my hand as I went off to the reception room. The four smiths stood a trifle uneasily, summoned by the emperor to the palace. I hoped not a one of them was uneasily running through his mind the list of his latest crimes!

Well, the job was simple enough.

“We have to rid ourselves of this ganchark, my friends. And to do that we have to stick him with a weapon forged from dudinter. Arrow piles — and the broad fleshcutters particularly. Swords and spears. You’ll have to get an edge the best way you can.”

“We will forge an edge, majister,” said Naghan the Bellows, the armorer.

Ortyg Ortyghan, the goldsmith, nodded eagerly. Logan Loptyg chipped in to say that he would work night and day. He was the silversmith.

The foxy Khibil face of Param Ortygno expressed confidence, and also caution.

“I am the dudinter smith you have summoned, majister. Maybe the chief place should be given to me, for, after all, we are to work in my specialty and I am a Khibil.” At that he brushed up his arrogant whiskers, a true-blue haughty fox-faced Khibil to the life.

I did not laugh.

“I am grateful to you for your willing offer of help, Koter Ortygno. The fate of Vondium is at stake in more ways than perhaps you may imagine. I think it best if you four work in harmony, as a team, like a quadriga. There should be no need for any professional secrets to be revealed. Those parts of the work may be conducted as each one of you sees fit.” I fixed them with an eye that has often, most unkindly, been described as a damned baleful Dray Prescot eye. “Am I understood?”

“Understood, majister!” they sang out in a chorus.

“Queyd arn tung!”[3]

They each gave a respectful little nod of the head and turned to leave. If sometimes I overreact to all this bowing and scraping and condemn it too harshly, I hope the reason is not some deep psychological flaw in me that demands and rejects an attention I cannot bring into the open lights of day. Those four little nods of the head I reasoned showed proper respect not for me as a man but for my position. It was to the emperor the respect was due, who represented Vallia. These men had been among those clamorous crowds who had called me and elected me emperor to sort out their troubles. If a fellow or a girl cannot feel respect for their own country, then the world may not roll around.

Of course, that brings up the knotty problem of what happens when your country falls below the standards you consider to be proper and decent in the world...

I became aware of the little dudinter statue in my hand. I called after the four smiths.

“Wait, my friends.”

They turned at once and I threw the Talu toward them. Interestingly enough, it was not the haughty Khibil, Param Ortygno, who caught the thing. He might be the dudinter smith; but it was Naghan the Bellows who took the eight-armed idol out of the air and without a scratch.

“Remberee,” I said.

“Remberee, majister.”

Delia’s note merely said she’d been called away to the bedside of a dying friend. She did not name the friend.

I thought I knew.

The sorority to which Delia belonged, the Sisters of the Rose, was in any terms a powerful Order. Much of their work was carried on in the open; a very great deal remained secret. Through the surprising favor of the Star Lords, I had been afforded the privilege of vicariously sharing in some of Delia’s adventures, discovering thereby many secrets Delia would never reveal to a man, and, also thereby, feeling honor-bound to keep them totally concealed. In fact, I never thought about them if I could manage that trick.

One fact, however, I did know. The mistress of the Order, who had once been known as Elomi the Shining, from Valka, was dying. Delia had been chosen to be the next mistress, and had refused. The Sisters of the Rose were in every sense important; for Delia being Empress of Vallia was also important in an entirely different fashion, a fashion in which the idea of obligation and service figured in just as dramatic a way as it did in the Sisters of the Rose.

So, I knew Delia had gone to Lancival. The location of this place, so secret and unknown, remained a secret as far as I was concerned, even although I could laugh with glee along with the SOR at the impudence of the place’s disguise in Vallia. There Delia would confer with her peers, politic with some, cajole others, argue, plead, seldom order — although that she could do supremely well, by Vox! — and eventually they would elect the new mistress.

If by some mischance some feminine chicanery landed Delia with the job, I fancied she’d make a different kind of mistress of the SOR from any hitherto in the Order’s long history.

All our daughters had been educated and trained by the SOR, as our sons by the Krozairs of Zy. I devoutly believe there is no better education or training anywhere in two worlds.

Because something of that kind had been flowing through my mind when the outlying islands of Vallia had been attacked by the reiving fish-headed Shanks from over the curve of the world, we’d formed an Order, originally in Vallia, based on the Krozairs of Zy. The mystical and superhuman woman we knew as Zena Iztar had been instrumental in aiding us to get the new Order, the Kroveres of Iztar, formed and aware of the fact that it was in the process of creating a tradition for the future.

Seg Segutorio was the Grand Master of the KRVI.

Where there was injustice, where tyranny, where we were attacked by the Shanks, there — in theory — the brothers of the KRVI would be found assisting the oppressed and resisting the Shanks.

A new and what was, I suppose, a daring idea had recently been giving me some interesting prospects for future action.

Why not, I’d said to myself, why shouldn’t both men and women join the same order and fight injustice, succor the weak and helpless, fight the damned fish-headed Shanks?

Well, it was a thought...

At this point it is proper for me to mention that I knew very little of the other female Orders of Paz. The Sisters of the Sword, the Sisters of Samphron, the Grand Ladies, the Little Sisters of Opaz, and many others were secret still.

I did know that a new Order, the Sisters of the Whip, had collapsed.

So when Seg joined me the first thing I said was: “It seems to me that this damned werewolf is a suitable job for the kroveres.”

“By the Veiled Froyvil, my old dom! You are right!”

“We have lost touch a little lately, of course.”

“Well, we’ve been off in Pandahem. But — let me see—” and although Seg’s fey blue eyes did not actually cross in thought, his face took on a most menacing expression as he mentally began sorting out the brothers available to undertake this mission.

In this my narrative of my life on Kregen there are many people who appear illuminated, as it were, in the forefront of the action, only to subside into the background as fresh events overtake us. But these folk were not forgotten. They formed the living breathing fabric of life and friendship. Many of them met and talked with me almost every day. Others I saw at banquets, dinners, rowdy parties or within the harsher environs of business, the church, the law and the army.

Unmok the Nets, for instance was — still — undecided what business to undertake next. The Pachak twins still cared for Deb-Lu-Quienyin. Our Khibil wrestlers had found ready employment, going eventually with Turko. Tilly and Oby were a permanent part of life. And — Naghan the Gnat. As I said to Seg: “We didn’t hoick our friends out of the Arena in Huringa for nothing. Naghan can start fashioning dudinter weapons right away.”

Seg said: “Do wha—? Oh, yes, surely. I can put my finger on a score of brothers within a day. And, as for Naghan the Gnat, I am more than happy to wield any weapon made by him.”

“Good.”

“Although it is a pity Vomanus is still poorly.”

“He is taking more time to recover than I like. But he will. He has, like us, bathed in the Sacred Pool of Aphrasöe.”

“Don’t remind me. I am still totally confused by all the implications—”

“You are not alone!”

“That’s as may be. His daughter, Valona, turned up pretty sharpish, so I heard, after Delia sorted out the trouble up in Vindelka.”

“Sister of the Rose, business conducted by these formidable women to our confusion. There was a time when I sincerely believed that Valona was my daughter Lela—”

“If I made some humorous remark about that’s what you get for chasing off to the ends of Kregen, then I’d be a dolt. Now I know about your comical little Earth with only a yellow sun and only one moon and no diffs, I can understand a lot more that you’ve never spoken of.”

“You can? Maybe, Seg my Bowman comrade, it is time for us to try a few falls on the mat.”

“You can take on Korero the Shield. I’m off to find Balass the Hawk and start this werewolf thing moving.”

“Korero?”

“Drak has sent the First Regiment of the Emperor’s Sword Watch back to Vondium. Well—” and here Seg laughed in his rip-roaring raffish way “—he couldn’t hold on to them for a single heartbeat when they learned you were back in Vondium!”

“No,” I said. “No, that rascally bunch will insist on putting their bodies between me and danger.”

Although I spoke flippantly, I felt the leap of spirits at this news. 1ESW might be a rascally bunch, the regiment was also a smashingly powerful fighting instrument, devoted, very much a law unto itself in matters of regimental honor and pride, and still a unit of the army, standing shoulder to shoulder with their comrades in the defense of Vallia.

Seg moved off and called back: “They’ll want to go with us up to Turko, Dray.”

“Yes. I shudder to think what 2ESW will say...”