The second talent to bloom was nearly the death of me.
When Prince Conrig was an unbelted youth of nineteen, not knowing what else he was, and I was twelve, still working with leather but also filling in as an undergroom, I had occasion to lead His Grace’s skittish horse to him before a hunt. He spoke to me kindly, and after looking him in the eye I dared to answer back with what I thought was an innocent observation.
Horrified by what I told him so casually, the prince thought at first to have me killed. (And told this freely to me later, as he swore me to secrecy with a formidable oath.) But even then I possessed a glib tongue and a winning manner, and after close questioning and deep thought, Conrig realized that I could be supremely useful to him in a singular way. So he made me his fourth footman, in time dubbing me Snudge because of my artful sneakiness, and thus my later patrons also styled me.
My crabby grandsire, deprived of a useful dogsbody by my promotion to the royal household, predicted that nothing good would come of me aspiring beyond my God-given place. He died a few months later, by which time I had completely forgotten his dire prophecy. Whether it was true or not I leave to the judgment of those who read this tale of mine.
I was Royal Intelligencer throughout most of my life. I fought and fled and skulked and snooped and committed red murder and magical mayhem in the service of King Conrig Ironcrown and his three remarkable sons. I was condemned and reprieved by another of that family, who continues to rule peaceably enough in the wake of the Sovereignty’s dissolution.
I was perhaps the most humble of their arcanely talented servants, but so insidious and necessary that I witnessed—and even secretly helped to bring about—many a regal triumph and defeat. That was in times long past, four thousand leagues to the north, on an island where sorcery was once taken for granted and inhuman presences still share the world with mankind.
Continental readers unfamiliar with my former home may appreciate a brief description of it, and they would also do well to consult a map as the story unfolds. Others may skip directly to the first part of the tale, here following.
==========
High Blenholme, an island in the Boreal Sea, is a rugged, roughly oblong land-mass with a broad northwesterly extension. It is about four hundred leagues in width and measures roughly six hundred leagues from north to south. Blenholme means “moon island” in the old Forailean tongue. At that northern latitude, a trick of the eye makes the heavenly orb seem much larger than normal at certain times of the year, and so the moon enjoys a prominent place in local religion and folklore.
What with the wildness of the waters surrounding the island, the reefs and frowning precipices that guard its approaches, and the Salka, Green Men, Small Lights, and Beaconfolk who haunted the place in prehistoric times, High Blenholme was shunned by Continental explorers and would-be settlers until the mighty invasion fleet of Bazekoy the Great sailed into Cala Bay, and he himself planted his standard at the mouth of the River Brent. That portentous event marked Year 1 of the Blenholme Chronicle.
The emperor’s heavily armed, disciplined forces drove the sluggish Salka monsters beyond the central mountain ranges and the Green Men into the Elderwold. The Small Lights were only a minor threat to humankind and learned the virtue of staying inconspicuous, while the mighty Beaconfolk unaccountably gave no resistance at all to the invasion. Perhaps they were in the mood for fresh amusements!
Bazekoy named the fertile southern part of the island Blencathra (“moon garden”), and it soon attracted hordes of farmers, herders, and hunters from the teeming mainland. The discovery of iron ore in the west and rich copper deposits along the River Liat led Bazekoy to establish mining and smelting operations, and even facilities for manufacturing weapons and armor to further his continental conquests. By the time of the emperor’s death in Chronicle Year 62, Blencathra was a thriving province, exporting not only metals but also grain and many other kinds of valued goods to Foraile, Stippen, and Andradh, and even to other nations more distant.
After Bazekoy’s incompetent successors allowed his empire to disintegrate, Cathra became an independent kingdom—although still attractive to continuing waves of immigrants from the politically turbulent Continent. Over the next thousand years the entire island was gradually taken over by humankind and most of the surviving Salka forced into the fens or the dreary Dawntide Isles far to the east.
Geography divides Blenholme naturally into four realms; but Cathra, south of the dividing range, has always remained the richest, most populous, and most fortunate.
The second kingdom to be established was Blendidion (“moon forest”) in the north-central part of the island, more austere of clime and having soil mostly thin and poor. It was settled in the mid-500s by rude barbarian adventurers from Stippen, who subdued the scattered Cathran settlements, then married into them. The vigorous newcomers exploited Didion’s vast woodlands and established their fortunes through forestry products and shipbuilding. The land also possessed valuable furs and deposits of tin, which it exported to Cathra as well as to the Continent. In time, it became a prosperous, loosely knit nation of quarreling dukedoms and isolated robber-baronies owing reluctant fealty to the Didionite monarch at Holt Mallburn.
The windswept northwestern peninsula of the island was explored late in the Seventh Century by marine marauders of Andradh who called themselves Wave-Harriers. They discovered gold nuggets and valuable opals along the pebbled shore of Goodfortune Bay, settled the area, and defended it successfully against the navies of Cathra and Didion, which lacked the Harriers’ fighting prowess at sea. Later, the Andradhian incomers discovered the sources of the gold—enormous living volcanos whose effusions warmed certain rivers and created temperate valleys in what was otherwise an arctic wilderness. Sulphur deposits from the geyserlands and saltpetre exuding from rocks in the White Rime Mountains inspired an anonymous alchymist to invent tarnblaze. That eerie weapon, immune to magical defenses, ensured that the upstarts now calling themselves the Sealords of Blentarn (“moon pool”) and their descendants would keep their bleak but wealthy homeland safe against all attackers.
The fourth island kingdom, tiny Moss in the chill northeastern marshes, was born almost by chance in Chronicle Year 1022. Originally a precarious outpost of Didionite sealhunters, fishermen, and amber-traders, the fortified castle of Fenguard came under the control of a mighty sorcerer named Rothbannon Bajor. He had acquired Seven Stones from the Salka, sigils carved from moonstone capable of high sorcery that drew their power from the Beaconfolk. This man’s demands for tribute from the locals, enforced by hideous atrocities, energized the Didionite authorities, who condemned Rothbannon to death in absentia and sent a warship to carry out the sentence.
Warned of his impending fate by friendly Salka shamans, Rothbannon invoked the dreaded Beaconfolk and used one of the Seven Stones to whistle up a gale that drove the man o‘ war onto the Darkling Sands, where all but a handful of the expedition perished. The self-styled Conjure-King of Blenmoss (“moon swamp”) then demonstrated other of his formidable powers to the awestricken survivors of the shipwreck and afterwards sent them home to Holt Mallburn in a leaky fishing smack, carrying a list of non-negotiable demands.
The King of Didion paid substantial tribute to the terrible Conjure-King for decades; but when Rothbannon died, his successors proved much less adroit in the art of extortion, since they were afraid of the perilous Seven Stones and the Beaconfolk who empowered them. Didion stopped paying tribute, but decided that reconquering Moss was more trouble than the place was worth. After all, the Mossbacks would have to sell their sealskins and amber to someone—and the traders of Didion were always ready to do business.
The four kingdoms of High Blenholme on occasion squabbled viciously but never went to war—until 1128, when my tale begins. I was at that time sixteen years of age, and had served Prince Heritor Conrig as a fledgling snudge and secret talent for four of them. We were more than master and man, for I alone knew what it was that set the prince apart from ordinary mortals.
Or so I believed.
==========
It was a peculiar time. For three years, in a manner unprecedented, the volcanos of Tarn had been in a state of intermittent eruption, filling the Boreal skies with a haze of dark ash that folklore named the Wolf’s Breath. The phenomenon had previously been very rare and of brief duration, albeit much dreaded in Didion, where prevailing winds carried the ash-clouds eastward, casting a pall over the land that invariably resulted in a failed harvest.
A Wolf’s Breath persisting for three years in a row was a signal calamity, and Didion was finally pushed to the brink of famine. The mighty Sealords of Tarn also faced ruin, since a great proportion of their food was imported at high prices, and they had been forced to abandon most of their goldmining operations until the poisonous exhalations of the eruptions should cease. Even fertile Cathra produced scarcely two-thirds of its usual abundant crop of grain. This was sufficient to feed its own people, but left a diminished surplus available for trade. Only sorcery-ridden Moss, being foggy and poverty-stricken most of the time anyhow, seemed to suffer not a whit from the Wolf’s Breath.
Which was suspicious on the face of it…
Many blamed Conjure-King Linndal of Moss for the misfortune, saying that he was taking vengeance on King Achardus of Didion for having refused to consider Linndal’s daughter Ullanoth as a fit bride for his second son. Others said that the Tarnians themselves had triggered the dire event by grubbing too much gold from the bowels of their mountains, so that hellfire seeped up to fill the empty space and spewed forth sky-darkening smoke. The Brothers of Zeth in Cathra, being more learned in science and wishing to instill hope, maintained that the eruptions were a natural distemper of the earth and would surely cease once the subterranean integrants regained their equilibrium.
But the eruptions did not cease.
As catastrophe overwhelmed his country, Achardus of Didion squandered his assets in a desperate attempt to buy food and ward off insurrection among his starving subjects. Eventually, the market for the nation’s raw timber, furs, and tin was glutted. Prompted (as was thought then) by conniving mainland shipbrokers, Didion began building vessels of war. These found an all-too-ready market on the Continent, where the powerful nations of Stippen, Foraile, and Andradh nursed expansionist ambitions.
In Cathra, King Olmigon Wincantor had taken to his bed with the ailment that would ultimately end his life. His Privy Council, riven by factional disputes, was at first unwilling to take effective action, even when Prince Conrig, the able heir to the throne, forcefully pointed out the potential dangers in the situation. What if the Wolf’s Breath blew for a fourth year—or even a fifth? Starving refugees from Didion were already attempting to cross the passes into Cathra. If numbers of them broke through, the rapacious Continental nations, who had long coveted High Blenholme’s natural riches, would probably take advantage of the resulting chaos and launch an attack on the island.
In order to forestall this peril, Prince Heritor Conrig presented his father and the Council with an ingenious plan, which they finally accepted. That the immediate consequences proved disastrous was not the prince’s fault; he was overruled by his conservative elders in the scheme’s implementation. In the wake of the debacle, he conceived yet another bold stratagem. But this time he determined to carry it out himself.
one
Conrig Wincantor, Prince Heritor of Cathra, Earl of Brent, and Lord Constable of the Realm, ate without much of an appetite, picking at the cold roast beef, eel pie, and fine white wastelbread. He had no stomach at all for the cress salad with scallions or the dessert of pears seethed in cranberry cordial. The prince’s only dining companion was his older brother Vra-Stergos, newly ordained Doctor Arcanorum in the Mystic Order of the Brothers of Zeth. No pages served them. They had come to Castle Vanguard on a secret mission, and their presence was unknown to the ordinary inhabitants of the northern fortress.
Their meal had been set out in a small chamber lit only by a glazed loophole, adjacent to the castle solar where the council of war was to take place. Neither of them said much, but the prince could not help but notice how Stergos’s eyes lost their focus from time to time, and how he would sometimes hold his head motionless as though listening, even though this arras-hung cubby where they supped was as quiet as winter midnight on Raven Moor.
Finally Conrig said, “Gossy, is there something amiss?”
The alchymist had been sitting like a man frozen, his wine cup poised halfway to his lips. Now he gave a sudden start and set the drink down with a shaky hand. “I don’t know.” His voice was fretful, but then Stergos had always been a worry-wart. “I think I sense a presence somewhere close by, someone possessed of the talent. I said nothing earlier so as not to spoil our dinner.”
“Perhaps Snudge is watching us, trying to read our lips.” Conrig flashed an exasperated smile. “Damn his impudence! But he means no harm. I’ll admonish him and box his ears later.”
“I wish you’d left that boy behind at Brent Lodge,” Stergos complained. “It was unwise to bring him along on this crucial mission. Wild talents aren’t to be trusted! He can’t be windwatched so I never know exactly what he’s up to. Deveron’s been badly spoiled by your overindulgence, Con. He needs discipline. At sixteen, he’s quite old enough to enter the novitiate at the abbey—”
“No,” said the prince with a firmness that brooked no argument. “Deveron Austrey is mine, not Saint Zeth’s, and I alone will command his loyalty, erratic though it sometimes may be. You must never tell your mystical brethren or anyone else that the lad is not a common man. Is that understood?”
“Yes, but—”
“I need my personal spy, my snudge. He sees things other talents do not— not even you, reverend brother. Folk are wary in the presence of a professed alchymist and windvoice, but who pays any attention to the youngest of the prince’s footmen?”