"Ah..."

Saltimbanco began sweating. The wolves were closing in. He had to distract them...

Turran asked, "Valt, who could've gotten to your papers?"

"Anybody. Anytime. I don't lock my door. Never thought there was any need to. Anybody who had the time could've made a duplicate list."

"Well, d.a.m.n it, start locking your door."

"Famous case of locking barn door after horse is fled," Saltimbanco observed. "Great Lords, Lady, how many people in castle read.and write?" He had found his diversion. He would set them to chasing shadows. "Start interviewing them huh? But we don't mention treachery. Maybe if not scared, traitor makes mistake. Maybe we plant new list. Not knowing everybody watching for him, he maybe does treasonous task again. Pounce! We get him! Hai! Big hanging party! Everybody turns out, much wine, much song, this humble one is hero for thinking of plan, has very good time..."

"Good idea," said Turran. "But no hanging. I'll want to question the man. Brock, tomorrow I want you to ask for men who can read and write. Say we've got some clerical work to do. Offer bonuses so they'll all turn out. We can watch whoever responds. Now, for the bad half of Ridyeh's message."

"You mean there's more, and worse?" Valther asked.

"Yes. Iwa Skolovda and Dvar have formed an alliance. They're raising a mercenary army to attack Ravenkrak. They raised standard two weeks ago, and already they've gathered five thousand men.

Remarkable, don't you think? Especially considering that most of these mercenaries are southerners, up from Libiannin, h.e.l.lin Daimiel, and the Lesser Kingdoms. And their officers are Guildsmen."

"Sounds like High Crag knew something ahead of time," said Valther. "They'd actually march against Ravenkrak? How'1I they find us?"

"Our friend Haroun again. He'll have command. Ridyeh says he visited the Kings when he was in IwaSkolovda and Dvar."

"But they can't hope to take Ravenkrak..."

"They don't know that. And we're terribly undermanned. But that doesn't worry me much. What does is why all that fuss is being made. Consider. Haroun bin Yousif is a man with a mission and a lot of talent.

Between politicking, hara.s.sing El Murid, and advising the Itaskian General Staff, he's been living twenty-five-hour days. Though in luxury, to be sure."

"Why," Valther mused, "would a man give up doing exactly what he wants in order to organize hill tribesmen?"

"That's what I'm trying to get at. More, why, after he'd chased Nepanthe out of Iwa Skolovda, did he prematurely scatter them?" Fewer than fifty tribesmen had fallen into the trap Turran had set for bin Yousif.

"He'd finished his job."

"Check. Somebody wanted us out of Iwa Skolovda. Enough to meet the outrageous price bin Yousif would have demanded for the job. And it wasn't the Iwa Skolovdan Royalists. Remember, he was at work in the hills before we took over."

"Foreknowledge," Brock grumbled. "Necromancy." He looked like he had just bitten into a crabapple.

"The Star Rider getting even?"

"Possibly. But to the main curiosity. His killing spies while his army fore-recruited gathers. Why?"

"Something big is going on," Valther averred.

"Brilliant. And it's something we didn't antic.i.p.ate when we went to the flatlands. Something that started earlier and we didn't notice. What?"

Turran spoke in a manner suggesting that his discourse was rhetorical till that final, plaintive "What?" Then it was clear that he was mystified too.

"We'd better sit back and wait till we find out," Valther said. "We can hold out here as long as we have the Horn." Murmuring, he added, "It must be him. Trying to get it back."

"That's the plan. We're undermanned, but I doubt that they can get to us. If we can hold them off till winter, we'll whip them. They'll be trapped by the weather, at the end of precarious supply lines. I imagine they'll pull out with the first snow and fall apart as soon as they hit the flatlands. Neither Iwa Skolovda nor Dvar can afford to keep them together. They don't have the credit."

"And next summer can see us down in their territory again, against weaker opposition," Valther mused.

"Sounds good, anyway," Brock grumbled. "But I wish we had a better idea of what's going on."

"You," Turran told him, "I'm making siegemaster. Make this stonepile impregnable. Now, let's tell the others. Be cheerful, make it a joke. Laugh because somebody is fool enough to come after us."

Turran and his brothers went to the Great Hall, where they announced the forthcoming siege.Saltimbanco and Nepanthe wandered through chilly hallways till they reached her quarters in the Bell Tower. Nepanthe settled onto a stool before a large frame and resumed work on her embroideries.

Saltimbanco dumped his bulk into the comfort of a large, goosedown-stuffed chair facing the fireplace.

Nepanthe's serving girl brought mulled wine, then disappeared.

Nepanthe's sitting room, perhaps the most comfortable in all Ravenkrak, was filled with womanly things.

An abandoned summer frock hung in a corner, forgotten; a hastily discarded lace rebosa lay across one end of a vanity cluttered with cosmetics she seldom used. The rugs on the floors, the tapestries on the walls, the very scents in the air, all bespoke occupation by a woman.

It was a room of sleepy comfort, so peaceful and quiet that Saltimbanco couldn't remain awake. A scant five minutes after arriving, he lapsed into gentle snoring.

Leaving her embroidery to brush her hair, Nepanthe gave her guest a look which would have surprised her had she known she wore it, and wondered about him. He seemed to have sprung into existence fully grown, sometime shortly before having entered Iwa Skolovda.

Past? Did Saltimbanco have one? Indeed, though few men would have taken pride in it, had it been theirs.

His earliest memories were of a picaresque youth spent in company with a blind, alcoholic sadhu (source of much of the misinformation integral to his present act-that holy man had been a thorough fraud) wandering between Argon, Necremnos, and Throyes, with occasional forays into Matayanga. That sadhu early inspired in him a powerful loathing for honest work, and, from the blind man and others into whose company their travels had led them, he had obtained an intimate knowledge of pickpocketry, sleight-of-hand, ventriloquism, and all the mummery he now used to lend credence to his claims to magical powers.

After evening old scores with the sadhu, in finest picaro style (the old man had treated him cruelly, almost as a slave), and having stolen and gambled his way into the enmity of half the middle east, he had fled to the west. In Altea he had joined a carnival following a gypsy life through the occidental kingdoms.

Sometimes he claimed his name, Mocker, came from that of a character he had portrayed in pa.s.sion plays, though that wasn't true. When not on stage, or in his booth as "Magelin the Magician," he had mixed with the crowds, lifting purses. He had been quite proficient.

But once he had slashed the wrong pursestrings and found his wrists seized in a painful grasp. He had found himself looking at a dusky, aquiline face, into rapacious eyes... He had jerked free, jabbed in a fashion learned in the east. They had scuffled, to no conclusion.

Later Haroun had come to talk, and Mocker had soon found himself in bin Yousif's employ, as an agent to be insinuated into the camp of El Murid, leader of the horde of religious fanatics then besieging h.e.l.lin Daimiel.

Acting on inspiration, he had pulled off the coup of the El Murid Wars, successfully kidnapping The Disciple's daughter Yasmid. The confusion in El Murid's camp had allowed Haroun and his partisans the month or so necessary to break the siege of h.e.l.lin Daimiel and create a bloated bin Yousif reputation.

In later years he, Haroun, and their mutual "friend," Bragi Ragnarson, had spent several years getting into and out of hare-brained adventures. Then Haroun's conscience had nagged him into resuming his role of King Without A Throne, commander of the Royalists El Murid had driven from Hammad al Nakir whentaking over. Then Ragnarson, the fool, had gotten married, and the fat brown man, in his later twenties, had found himself drifting around alone again, tagging along the carnival circuit or undertaking an occasional minor espionage mission. The relationship between the three had faded from others'

memories...

Then Haroun had materialized, accompanied by an old man filled with promises of vast wealth.

Mocker, a compulsive gambler, needed money desperately.

It had been a long road into the present, sometimes painful, usually dangerous, seldom happy. Here, in Ravenkrak, he was as at home and as near contentment as ever he had been. He liked these Storm Kings-yet the day would come when he would have to betray them...

SEVEN: Even the Sparrow Finds a Home

Fallen, fallen was Ilkazar, like ruin, like death. What more was there when that end had been accomplished?

Varthlokkur wandered away, depressed and lonely. His great work was complete. His goals had been fulfilled.

Already victory tasted of bile. Two decades he had paid for it, and now it seemed without point, possibly even an error. In destroying something he found vile he had also destroyed much that was good. For all its wickedness of heart, the corpus of the Empire had given common folk much for which to be thankful: peace throughout most of the west, a common law and language, relative social and physical security...

Like maggots, Varthlokkur foresaw, a thousand petty lords would appear to devour the Imperial cadaver. The west would collapse into chaos.

His responsibility troubled him deeply.

Should he terminate his tale now? Be done with his past, with having to observe and endure the consequences of what he had done?

No, he thought not. There might be something he could do to justify his existence, to redeem the evil he had done, to ease the coming pain.

He looked up. His feet were headed north. As good a direction as any when you have nowhere specific to go. He retreated to his thoughts, harrying something he'd heard from Royal.

There was a time for everything, Royal had told him. A time for birth and death, for love and hatred, for planting and reaping, for mourning and laughter, for war and peace, for construction and destruction. And a time for the love of a woman. Only a man himself could judge when his times had come. As Ilkazar fell farther behind, he realized that, in his country way, Royal had been as wise as the priests and wizards who had taught him later. Loneliness inundated him. He missed Royal and the old woman. Hatred and purpose gone, he had receded to his point of origin, alone in a lonely world.

Loneliness had never been this absolute. Solitude he had known well during his years in Shinsan, but always the intolerable existence of Ilkazar had ameliorated that.

"Fallen, fallen is Ilkazar, that was mighty among the nations..."The loss of his mother had left him desolate, yet that had been softened by the kindness of the executioner, and of Royal. Now Ilkazar's streets were the dwelling places of jackals. Nothing and no one needed him. His name was already legend, gothic with darkness and dread. It would grow with time and retelling. While he remained Varthlokkur, he would move in a vacuum created by fear that he would again use the Power he had revealed at Ilkazar.

And what of womankind? he asked himself. His ignorance of the other s.e.x was as vast as his knowledge of the Power. Too many years, formative, learning years, had been squandered to purchase vengeance.

Could any woman accept the Empire-Destroyer? He was sure he'd be ages finding one such. She'd have to be as alienated as he, and as unhappy, as unwise. Where could he find a female mirror of himself?

He took another name. Eldred the Wanderer became a face familiar along the roads connecting the western city-states. He became renowned as a man pursuing a dream, though no one knew its nature-least of all the Wanderer himself. He thought he had found a worthy project when he rediscovered the wretchedness of the poor. His sorcery could alleviate their misery. He raised a poor man to power in h.e.l.lin Daimiel, to aid his fellows, but the man proved more cruel and corrupt than any hereditary monarch. In Libiannin, a man raised less high tried torturing him to compel him to give more. Eldred became a man as despised as Varthlokkur had been feared, briefly wresting the t.i.tle "Old Meddler" from the less obtrusive Star Rider.

Depressed, he fled east, to the steppes behind the Mountain of M'Hand. He found his thoughts trending darkly. Had he any real reason to live? He rehea.r.s.ed all the old arguments. Then one night, in a gloomy ravine beside a small creek, with the steppe wind moaning through scrawny trees overhead, he took strange instruments from his saddlebags, drew pentagrams, burned incense, sang spells, and performed a powerful divination. Demons added their voices to the mourning of the wind. Familiars of devils came and went, smoke things half-seen. Before dawn, he had had a shadowy look down the river of time.

There were two women waiting somewhere, if he could but endure. It would be a wait of centuries, and the divination had been extraordinarily cloudy. One he would use, one he would love. His love waited in a time of flux, when extraordinary powers would be malignly dipping envenomed fingers into the affairs of men. The necromancy couldn't be clarified. Forces Varthlokkur thought of as the Fates and Norns would be squabbling amongst themselves.

Yet he elected to live, to pursue this love-destiny. The Fates, he felt, had commanded him.

Somehow, somewhere (perhaps from the Tervola or Princes Thaumaturge of the Dread Empire), he had acquired an unshakable conviction that the Fates controlled his destiny. A collateral portion of his divination troubled him deeply. Mourning llkazar, he had sworn never again to use the Power for destruction. The divination said that he would, during the coming age of confusion. That saddened him.

Varthlokkur stared into his fire, lost in contemplation. He had gained command of all sorceries while in Shinsan. Spells had been put upon him. At what cost? He couldn't remember. His selective amnesia disturbed and frightened him.) He had become ageless, though not immortal. He would die someday, when the Fates willed, but he need never age. He could reverse his aging when he wanted, to the lower limit of the age he had been when the spells were cast.

He let himself grow old. The old were revered and well treated. Alone as few men had ever been alone, he cherished even such inconsequential kindnesses as he garnered this way.

He found the proverbs: "No man is an island," and "Man lives not by bread alone," uncomfortably true.

Alone. So alone. Could he not find just one friend?For a time he played shaman to a nomad tribe on the steppe. It was a comedown, but a position for which he was grateful. He couldn't renounce the Power completely. Because he needed to be needed, he deluded himself with the belief that the tribesmen loved him. He still didn't understand human nature. The tribe went to war. Its chieftains became righteously indignant when he refused to use the Power on their behalf. Nor did he employ more than the minimum necessary to insure his survival when they turned upon him.

He wandered again, through the basin of the Roe, amongst the oldest cities of Man. He saw nothing to elevate his opinion of his own species. He wished the time-river would roll faster. She waited somewhere downstream.

There was an old road running east from Iwa Skolovda, one that seemed to lead nowhere. Periodically, the Kings of Iwa Skolovda sent colonists along it into East Heatherland and Shara, where they were supposed to supplant the savages through stubbornness and numbers, winning new territories for the Crown. Such movements were invariably devoured by the barbarians.

The road was wide and well-paved near the city, but after a dozen leagues, once it no longer served to bring produce from the countryside, it soon degenerated into a path. One spring day, two hundred years after the fall of Ilkazar, Varthlokkur followed that road, a sad old man who hadn't yet found a thing to make living worthwhile. But recently he'd encountered an interesting legend. It concerned a remote castle of unknown origins, and an immortal of equally nebulous background. Both waited at the end of this road, in that knot of tremendous mountains called the Dragon's Teeth. Both, Varthlokkur had divined, could become an inextricable part of his fate.

He had found a sc.r.a.p of the legend in one city, a fragment of myth in another, and a piece of speculation in a third. Together, they had hinted of a castle called Fangdred, or the Castle of Wind, as old as The Place of A Thousand Iron Statues, and as feared, and as mysterious as that alleged stronghold of the Star Rider. In Fangdred dwelt an immortal known only as the Old Man of the Mountain, who supposedly had retreated there to escape the jealousy of shorter-lived men.

Maybe, Varthlokkur thought, he and this immortal were two of a kind. Maybe Fangdred could provide what he so desperately needed: a home and a friend.

Varthlokkur feared he was slowly going mad. In the midst of a raging, barbaric world where each man interacted with hundreds of others, living, loving, laughing, weeping, dying, and giving birth, he alone was outside, an observer totally alienated from human involvement. He didn't want to be outside, didn't want to be alone-yet he didn't know how to pa.s.s through the doorway of human intercourse. When he helped, he was cursed. When he didn't help, he was hated. Yet there was no way he could abandon the Power that d.a.m.ned him.

And Ilkazar had made him fear human relationships. A romanticized relationship with a mother whose face he couldn't remember had set his feet plodding a narrow, hard, joyless road cruel to the life-paths it had intersected. Relationships never worked the way they did in his dreams; dreams where love dwelt, and peace, without pain, became something real, while harsh, double-edged reality gradually became ghostly.

The sole dam holding the madness at bay was the woman waiting downtime.

He followed that road for weeks, across East Heatherland, into foothills, then up and down the flanks of tremendous, brooding mountains. His path tended ever upward. Each mountain rose taller than the last.Soon he was higher than he had believed possible. The trail hung a half mile above the tops of the trees.

Eagles planed below him. But the road continued upward over gray stone and snowy mountains, a barely discernable trail carved from living rock, following ridgetops, sometimes pa.s.sing through tunnels, climbing, climbing. Finally, in a place so high he could hardly breathe, Varthlokkur paused. The road had taken a sharp turn around a knifelike corner of cliff, and ended.

Weary, cold, he wondered if he had come a thousand miles for nothing. Then, barely discernable through the ice and snow, he noticed steps cut into the flank of the mountain. Tracing their rise, he spied a tower with crenellated battlements peeping over a looming scarp above. With a groan, resigned, determined, he began that last thousand feet of travel.

The stairs ended on a narrow ledge fronting the fortress. The tower, that he had seen from below, perched on the very peak of the mountain, and, like a lighthouse, reached high into the wind. It had no visible doors or windows. The bulk of the stronghold rambled down to this ledge, which overlooked a thousand-foot precipice. So this was Fangdred, and Mount El Kabar. Briefly, before hammering on the sagging gate, Varthlokkur looked out across the Dragon's Teeth.

It was obvious how they had come by their name. Each peak was a giant gray-and-white fang ripping at the underbelly of the sky. Countless hungry fangs huddled deep, narrow, shadowed canyons all the way to a shadowed horizon.

Varthlokkur faced the gate.

An odd current stirred the musty air of the chamber atop Fangdred's Wind Tower. Dust moved nervously, as if suddenly charged with static electricity. Soft sounds, dust-dampened, whispers-a breath of movement. In a seat of ancient carven stone a gaunt figure, so covered with dust and enmeshed in cobwebs that it seemed a mummy, drew a tiny breath. It echoed through the sealed room. Eyes bright with life-pleasure opened in a wizened face. A long white beard tumbled down over a dusty blue smock which itself became dust the moment its wearer stirred.

The eyes, once open, were surprising. Though set in an ancient face, they seemed young and laughter-vibrant. Yet they weren't the eyes of a sane man. He had lived too long to have escaped the kiss of madness.

For a long time the old man remained motionless, his face drawn in concentration. He had been asleep a hundred years, waiting for something interesting to happen. What was it this time? he wondered. His glance halted at a mirror set into the wall. The mirror reflected not the dusty chamber, but a view of the trail to El Kabar. "Ah! A visitor." The sigh so soft barely stirred the dust in his whiskers. It had been ages since anyone had come looking for the Old Man of the Mountain. Life at Fangdred was lonely. He was pleased. A visitor. That was worth waking for.

He gathered strength for an hour before investing energy in anything more than breathing and moving his eyes. Those eyes aged quickly, the life-joy fading. Too old, too old. His wrinkled hand finally moved a tiny phial in a niche in the arm of his throne. He pushed it with a wrinkled finger. It fell. The sound of its breaking was a cymbal-crash in the empty chamber. Crimson vapor spread, rose. The Old Man inhaled deeply. Each breath of red mist sent a wave of life through his spare frame. Soon there was rosiness in his skin and strength in his long-unused muscles.

At last he rose and stumbled across the chamber, the dust of his smock falling from his otherwise naked body. His bare feet made muted, hollow slaps in the dust. He went to a cabinet of bottles, beakers, and urns, leaned against it while catching his breath. Then he took a small bottle down, unstopped it,swallowed its contents. What was it? Certainly something bitter. He made a frightful face. Also, something of amazing potency. His body visibly livened.

So. This Old Man was a magician, a specialist in the life-magicks, a difficult field indeed. There were other magicks about that chamber, but, with the exception of the far-seeing mirror, none were beyond any sorcerer's apprentice.

Another hour pa.s.sed. The Old Man grew stronger. When he felt truly ready, he went to a door-invisible till he pulled a lever disguised as ornamentation-which opened on a dark staircase leading downward.

Rambling through the castle proper, he observed changes that time had wrought, noting what needed doing to put the place in order.

As he reached a door opening on the courtyard behind the castle gate, there came a sudden boom!

boom! boom ! from the great bronze portal. His visitor had arrived. Hobbling slightly because he had twisted an ankle on the way, he hurried to a huge lever. He shook in the chill wind as he heaved against it. Creaks and groans bespoke a counterweight moving. Turning purple in the cold, he wondered if the gate would yield. Then a line of light appeared at one edge and slowly grew.

They stood a moment, staring at one another, considering. They were much alike, yet different. The Old Man's hair and beard were totally white. There was still a little color in Varthlokkur's. The wizard was taller, but loneliness had engraved similar lines on their faces. They knew one another immediately, not by name, but by their mutual needs. They were friends before words were spoken.