A Dragon at Worlds' End (33 page)

Ferla was Ferla.

Most days Relkin took walks on the hill above the grotto. At other times he exercised, working his muscles hard to retain condition. Sometimes, especially after a meal of food pod, he would just sit in the pergola and stare into space above the grotto, until Ferla came and took him back to bed.

Relkin was not a novice to the arts of love. Not after that summer in Ourdh, when he and Miranswa Zudeina, Princess of Ourdh, had been lovers. They had lived together during the crazy period after the end of the great siege of Ourdh. From Miranswa he had learned much about love. And with his beloved Eilsa Ranardaughter there was another kind of love, a love so pure and central that he could not bear to think of it now.

But with Ferla there was an oceanic sense of peace and emptiness in the act of love. With Ferla it was as if he had dived off the world itself into the deep, smooth waters of oblivion.

During these times he thought of anything but Eilsa, or a certain leatherback dragon of legendary repute with dragonsword. With Ferla he thought of nothing except Ferla and physical pleasure. Guilt and loss, disorientation and fear, even the weird little voices from far away, all were banished in the glow of Ferla.

He wanted Ferla in so many ways he couldn't count them. He wanted her when she came back from the forest, when they had eaten food pod and fruit, when she laughingly tore away her garments made from woven flowers and jumped into the warm bathing pool.

At other times he would sit by idly and just watch as she wove flower stalks or sliced food pod and marinated it for breakfast. The way she moved, her shoulders, breasts, and buttocks all had a soft, sensual grace that was so perfect that it went beyond the merely human. She rarely spoke, but when she did, her voice was always light and soft, sometimes husked with desire, sometimes tinkling with laughter.

Most of the time, though, they said nothing. Words seemed superfluous.

He went out on the balcony from the main room. The grotto below was dark, but the trees on the hill were still silvered with light from the moons. His mind was blank now. The fear brought on by the dream had faded; the sweat had cooled and was evaporating from his skin. He stared into the darkness and thought of nothing. He was drained, emotionally empty.

At that very moment there came a feeling as if something were knocking on a door in the center of his consciousness. He blinked, but had barely begun to react mentally when there was a blinding flash that ripped across his senses with a burning smell and the sound of molten metal hitting water. An image, an amorphous shining thing, rose up in his mind. It grew and distended.

"You!" It said to him—as if a whispery voice had spoken in a silent room. The surprise was mutual. Confusion reigned. He sensed that the entity he felt was not really aware of its own existence.

"Are you the one?"

Recognition blossomed. He had felt this before in the city of Mirchaz, where he had seen it in dream, lying below the city, a great whale of submerged mentality.

"What do you mean?" he said aloud.

"The one!"

And then the blinding flash was repeated, but in reverse, and left him gasping on his knees on the balcony, holding his head.

It was gone.

His mouth had gone dry, his nose tingled, there was a weird discomfort in his stomach. He had seen it. For a single moment he had glimpsed the great mass of human minds, enslaved into the mindless service of the Great Game. Endless rows of them. Lying silent in the dark marble galleries while their minds were ruthlessly used by the elf lords to give power to their Game of power and ego.

Relkin now also saw that underlying the existence of Ferla and the grotto of love was a vast magic of a complexity beyond understanding, created by the great elves in their decline. The magic was powered by the slaves, ten thousand at a time, stacked in the stalls below the pyramid of the Game.

Relkin of Quosh had seen far too much sorcery in his young life and some of the things he had seen had amazed and horrified him. But he had never experienced anything like this. The sense of mental contact had been so absolute, so complete. It had stunned him at first and then left him hungering for more.

In that moment of contact, Relkin had seen into its heart. It did not know what it was, so distracting was the multitude of mental tasks that the component minds were engaged in. It was too busy with the roaring torrents of detail to glimpse the vaster picture, using the wholeness of the gestalt consciousness that it had developed. Those minds, boosted to constant, massive effort by the magic of the elf lords, were keeping the whole vast edifice of the Game in being. All the magical pleasure worlds, all the palaces floating in air, all the moves and pieces, were given life by these slaves who would be burned out within a year and thrown into the street, witless, suddenly aged by sixty years and left to die of starvation, disease, and exposure.

The slaves did not know their power. They had but to awake and they would shake down the worlds and bring the Great Game to a halt.

This is what they meant when they said he was the Iudo Faex. And for a moment he felt a premonition of death. To be the Iudo Faex was to be the destroyer of the whole empire of dreams built up by the evil lords of Mirchaz.

To be the Iudo Faex meant being the killer of Ferla.

For a moment he stood very still. He could not kill Ferla! But he could not leave this evil edifice standing. The forces warred within him. He had to awaken the mind mass. Yet if he succeeded, then Ferla would cease to exist, along with this entire worldlet, with its moons of Mot Pulk.

His throat had gone dry. He went up to the spring and splashed some cold water on his face and then climbed to the pergola above the grotto. The moons tumbled slowly toward the horizon. The stars were beginning to show. Soon the stars would be visible, forming Mot Pulk's features in the same broad strokes as seen on the moons. There was only one constellation, and it was Mot Pulk.

He slipped into the pergola and found to his surprise that Mot Pulk himself was inside. Mot Pulk came here sometimes, to sit and think. Relkin wasn't certain of this, for Mot Pulk did not deign to speak to him on these occasions. He was protected by the demon statue, which came to life on his command and prowled around the pergola. A glance out at the lawn showed the demon on its pedestal. Mot Pulk had chosen to be without its security.

"So, there you are, the prodigy, the sought-after object of desire. I hope you have been enjoying the lovely Ferla I made for you."

"Ferla…" At the mere mention of her name, Relkin wanted Ferla. And a sudden rage blossomed in his heart at the thought of Mot Pulk doing anything to Ferla.

"Yes, child, my Ferla. I made Ferla to entertain you. This is my world, and Ferla is a construct of my own design. Did you know this world takes the power of five strengths to hold, and yet it is completely hidden?" The elf lord seemed immensely proud of this.

"All the power of a full node is concentrated here, but they can't find me. Hah! So much for the Cabal, and even for the Tendency. They disparage my game, call my gambit a fault, but is there a world more lustily beautiful than this, which I made and they have never found?"

Relkin stared stupidly at the elf lord, whose single eye glowed gold.

"Why?" he managed.

Mot Pulk frowned, caught despite himself. "Why, what?"

"Why do you want me here?" Relkin mumbled.

Mot Pulk stared at him for a moment. "Everyone wants you, child. They're harrying me to find you. But none of them know the route to this place. My Game is too good for them."

"Why do they want me?"

"Because you're the Iudo Faex, child. Or at least that's what the fools believe. It only takes one weak-witted ancient to come up with that label and that's it, mass panic ensues. 'Iudo Faex,' indeed!"

"I still don't understand."

"Of course not. You're just a young soldier, I know that. All of this nonsense just sails over your head. But you have been happy, haven't you? You have been enjoying Ferla, I am sure."

Just the way Mot Pulk said Ferla's name made Relkin's teeth go on edge.

Relkin closed his eyes to shut out the thought of Ferla. "Stop that. I know what you're doing."

The elf face cracked into a perfectly symmetrical laugh, all but for the eye patch. "Such a creature! I do not regret it. It was sitting there to be taken. That fool Pessoba is as ignorant as a cow and half as intelligent. He took no precautions against entry on the psychic plane. And so now everyone hates me and they pursue me through the worlds."

Relkin's eyes had widened.

"But they shall not find Mot Pulk!" A crazy triumphant smile flitted across the perfect features.

"Why do you play this game that uses so many slaves?" said Relkin suddenly. "What right do you have? You burn up their lives like so many candles."

The lone eye of Mot Pulk was gold, with a small blue center.

"Do my ears detect a complaint from you? Here you are in the very concept of paradise and you are complaining. What is wrong? You don't want the luscious Ferla in your bed at night?"

"Don't talk about Ferla," husked Relkin.

"The arrogance of it, the sheer unmitigated gall. Child, you appall me."

"Leave Ferla alone."

The elf face broke into a weird leer. "Oh, I see. Well, you better be good or I'll have Biroik attend to her in front of you."

"No." Relkin was irresolute, unsure.

"Biroik!"

The statue demon had come to life and descended. It advanced on the pergola, snorting fiercely.

"That is Biroik," said Mot Pulk evilly. "You had better not let him catch you in the pergola."

Relkin slipped out the far side and outran the demon to the invisible perimeter of the area it patrolled.

Halfway around the world from the evil city of Mirchaz lay the blessed isles of Cunfshon, green and healthy beneath the summer sun. In Cunfshon City's great harbor, a mass of ships rode at anchor or were winched into the docks. Dominating the rest was the white ship
Barley
, her side catching the sun with blinding glare.

Across the waters of the estuary frowned the harsh walls and granite towers of the imperial city of Andiquant. Here beat the heart that gave strength to the Empire of the Rose. Here also was waged the constant struggle familiar to bureaucracies everywhere. The empire was a benevolent system, run by astonishingly few bureaucrats, for it relied on local rule in all but a few functions of government. Still, the functions quarreled over scarce resources. Wily servants of the state intrigued constantly.

These struggles ran from the lowliest of concerns, such as the ongoing battle between the city sanitation service and the office of shipping over the matter of the excess paper waste, to the highest levels, where concerns involved the entire world.

From the outside, Andiquant appeared at peace. Ivy grew on the walls of buildings, and carefully tended quadrangles of grass looked verdantly cool in the warm sun. The imperial gardens were flush with flowers and the horse chestnuts were in bloom.

Inside the gray stone buildings, it was a different matter entirely.

Outside, the sun shone brightly on the walls and windows of the Tower of Swallows. Inside a room on a high floor, behind heavy drapes, two towering figures of authority confronted each other in semidarkness, lit only by a pair of candles.

The Emperor of the Rose, Pascal Iturgio Densen Asturi, sat in his favorite chair, an old, comfortable navigator's chair, that he had favored for many years.

Across the map table sat the Greatwitch Ribela of Defwode, Queen of Mice, dressed in a black velvet gown trimmed with silver mouse skulls. More mouse skulls glittered on the ends of silver skewers in her long black hair, which was pulled back behind her head. Ribela exhibited her usual chill, lean-faced beauty, ageless but not young.

Emperor Pascal had sat his throne for more than a decade. He had weathered many storms and seen great victories for the empire. Still, these meetings with the witch were difficult. They were essential but hard to bear. At least with Lessis there had been a comradeship, a sense of mutual respect. With Ribela there was just the chilly contempt that she exhibited for all men.

In truth, these were difficult times with hard decisions to be made, but the poor chemistry of the relationship between emperor and Chief Officer of the Unusual Insight exacerbated problems and made life even more exhausting than it had to be.

Pascal had known Lessis of Valmes for most of his life. She had been an odd, occasionally glimpsed aunt who popped in and out at critical periods, observing him. Rarely had she given him advice. Ribela, on the other hand, had always been a creature of legend, an undying thing that lived in a coffin while her mind explored the vastness of the Mother's Hand. He had never expected that he would have to deal with that creature in her eerie physical form on a regular basis.

Or to put up with her insolence and contempt!

The basic problem was that Ribela was used to communicating only with inferiors. When she spoke, she gave orders. Only with Lessis and the other greatwitches would she speak in any other form. She also came from the most matriarchal and conservative of all the provinces of Cunfshon and was ill disposed toward men in general. This made a deadly combination in someone who was an adviser to an emperor.

An emperor did not take orders, especially not the Emperor Pascal Iturgio Densen Asturi. As a result, they were constantly butting heads. There was no sense of collegiality.

For the thousandth time, he regretted the loss of Lessis. She had resigned her office and gone into retirement after the campaign in Eigo. No one understood her reasons for doing so better than Pascal himself, who overnight aged ten years when she gave him the final casualty list. That night, it was said, his hair went white. Thereafter he found sleep a torment and avoided the light of day.

With Lessis lost to the mystic, there was only one other choice to head the Office of Unusual Insight. This office was the most secret part of the imperial government, completely hidden within the much larger Office of Insight. The "Unusual" ran spy networks in dozens of countries around the world and combined the efforts of many greatwitches, bringing the emperor the most vital intelligence. The office had always been headed by Lessis, the second oldest of the greatwitches of Cunfshon. She had advised the emperors, and emperors frequently followed her advice. Now she was gone, however, and the only mind that could hope to replace hers was that of Ribela, the oldest of all.