The Summer Palace (7 page)

“I didn't,” Sword said. “Not at first. He was doing things no one had done before, building roads and canals, and clearing away monsters, and so on, and really, it seemed as if he
was
making everything better. Traders and merchants could travel freely and bring their goods everywhere the roads went. Everyone loved the Wizard Lord.
I
liked what he was doing. Some of it made me nervous—building a Summer Palace in the Uplands, for example, didn't seem like a good idea—but all in all, I thought it was wonderful.”

He stopped, and the two walked on in silence for a few steps until Whistler said, “Wonderful—but? . . .”

“But there were two things, two related things, that went wrong,” Sword said. “Is that the river, then?” He pointed.

“That's it. What two things?”

Sword stared at the “river.” It was visible as a wiggling break in the grassy plain, rather than as a body of water. He suddenly felt much less foolish about missing it in the dark the night before.

“What two things?” Whistler repeated.

“Oh. Yes. Well, one thing was that he was obsessed with the idea that the Chosen were going to depose him,” Sword explained. “I mean, I can see why he would worry about it, since that's what the Chosen are
for,
but he didn't just worry, he was
convinced
that
sooner or later we would come after him just because he was doing new and different things and not following the traditional patterns.”

“Would you?”

Sword shrugged. “I don't think so, no—but I'm just the Swordsman; the Leader might have talked us all into it if she decided not to trust him.”

“Could . . .
she
? She? The Leader is a woman?”

“Not much more than a girl, really,” Sword said, remembering. “Younger than I am, and no taller than my shoulder. The old Leader, the man who picked her for the job, was trying to make a joke of the role.” He threw Whistler a glance and saw the youth's baffled expression. “It's a long story,” he said. “The old Leader was not happy with how things went when we confronted the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills, so he tried to pass the title to the most inappropriate person he could find. Some powerful
ler
must have intervened, though, because she was actually a very good Leader, much better than the one who chose her had ever been.”

“Was? Not is?”

Sword nodded. “She's a prisoner in the Wizard Lord's dungeon now.”

“But she still lives?”

“So far as I know, yes.” They were nearing the river now, and the ground underfoot was getting soft.

“The hole's over here,” Whistler said, pointing off to the left.

“Hole?”

“Yes.”

Sword decided to wait and see what the lad was talking about, rather than asking more questions; he followed along, and it soon became clear what the “hole” was.

The river was little more than a muddy ditch with a trickle in the bottom, perhaps six inches deep and two or three feet across, with no sharp edge. The rivulet at the bottom was not much more than an inch deep, and the only way Sword could see to get water out of it into the jug was with a straw.

But a few feet downstream, someone had dug a hole in the middle of the ditch. If Sword laced his fingers and formed his arms into a circle, that would just about be the size of the hole. The yellow dirt that had been displaced was piled up to one side, several feet away, where it would not easily wash back in.

The water in the hole looked surprisingly clean. A thin streak of brown flowed in on the upstream side, but most of it was clear enough for Sword to see that the hole was roughly waist-deep.

“Fill your jug on the downstream side,” Whistler said, stooping to demonstrate.

Sword followed his example, and a moment later both jugs were full.

“If we were sent to fetch water, we'd be expected to use the big vessels, and carry two apiece,” Whistler said as Sword lifted his jug out of the pool.

“Of course,” Sword said as he set the jug aside and looked at the water. “Is it safe to drink this, straight from the stream? Does it need to be blessed or boiled?”

“We don't bless anything,” Whistler said. “We have no priests, and we do not speak to
ler
. Our clothes are all made from
ara
so that the
ler
cannot trouble us.”

“I see.” Sword was well aware of the magic-blocking properties of
ara
feathers, and the Uplanders used them everywhere; every man and woman in the Clan of the Golden Spear walked around wearing what would have been a fortune in
ara
feathers down in Barokan. “Do you boil it?”

“Sometimes, but if you're healthy, drinking it shouldn't hurt you.”

Sword nodded, then bent down and scooped up water with his hands. He still felt dry from his long walk across the plateau, and drank thirstily.

Whistler watched him for a moment, then asked, “What was the other thing?”

Sword looked up and blinked. “What?”

“You said there were two problems with the Wizard Lord. One
was that he thought the Chosen would turn on him. What was the other?”

“Oh,” Sword said. He took one more drink, then shook the water from his hands and got to his feet. “You said that you have no priests up here?”

“That's right.”

“Do you have wizards?” He bent down to retrieve his now-f jug.

“No. Our ancestors came up here partly to escape Lowland magic.”

“Ah. That's very much why the Wizard Lord built himself the Summer Palace,” Sword said. He turned back toward the Golden Spear camp and started walking. “He believes that Barokan's magic is fading, and that we must learn to live without it.”

“
That's
the other thing? The problem?” Whistler walked alongside him, and the two ambled along at a casual pace.

“Oh, not that he thought magic was fading,” Sword said. “It was what he did about it.”

“What did he do?”

“Several things. He built the Summer Palace, for one. His magic doesn't work there; did you know that?”

Whistler threw a glance to the west, past the camp toward the distant cliffs. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “I don't think any of us did.”

Sword nodded. “Well, it doesn't. Which meant that when he was living there, he had no direct control over events in Barokan. The weather misbehaved a little, and there was some concern that he wouldn't be able to protect everything effectively.”

“I can see how that would be something to worry about,” Whistler said.

“Most people didn't worry about it, though,” Sword said. “Not really. They were too pleased with the roads and canals and the rest.”

“But . . .”

“But building the Summer Palace was only part of it,” Sword said. “Because he didn't just want
his
magic gone; he wanted
all
of it
gone. So he started killing all the other wizards—or rather, sending his men to kill them, so that the Seer wouldn't know what was happening. He gave the orders while he was up in the Summer Palace, where the Seer couldn't sense what was happening.”

“Killing the other wizards?”

Sword nodded again. “He intended to kill all of them, but a few escaped—at least, so far. He may find them eventually.”

“But didn't . . . I mean, I know he's allowed to kill wizards who break the law, but didn't anyone . . . he tried to kill them
all
?”

“He came up with an excuse, so the soldiers wouldn't question his orders—at least, I think that's why he did it the way he did,” Sword explained. “I told you he was convinced the Chosen would turn on him eventually. Well, he found out that the other wizards had added a ninth member to the Chosen—or at least, he claims they did—and he told his men to kill any wizard who refused to tell him who the ninth Chosen is.”

“But then, why didn't the wizards tell him?”

“They couldn't,” Sword replied bitterly. “They had put themselves under a spell that prevented them from saying anything about the ninth member of the Chosen. It was deliberate murder, killing them that way.”

Whistler nodded, and they walked several paces in silence before the Uplander asked, “
Is
there a ninth member of the Chosen? I mean, I only ever heard of eight—the Swordsman and the Leader and the Beauty and the Seer and the Thief, and . . . uh . . .”

“The Archer, the Scholar, and the Speaker.” Sword completed the list for him. “That's all
I
know of, too. But in the past, whenever the Chosen have killed a Dark Lord, another member has been added. The last one was the Speaker of All Tongues, added after the Dark Lord of Goln Vleys was removed. Well, eight years ago I slew the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills, so a ninth one should have been added.”

“Wouldn't they . . . would it have been kept secret? So secret, they used magic to keep themselves from talking about it?”

Sword shrugged. “Who knows? Lore—that's the Scholar, we call him Lore—said that the usual system is to tell the Leader of the Chosen, and no one else, but keeping it completely secret has never been required. The present Leader wasn't told anything, but she took over from the old Leader right about the time news would have reached him, so it may be they told
him,
and he didn't pass the news on to
her
.”

“Or—would she have kept it secret from the rest of you?”

“I don't think so, but I don't really know,” Sword admitted. “I haven't known her very long. She certainly
seems
trustworthy, but that's her role.”

“So you don't know whether there really is a ninth?”

“That's right.”

“I'm still not sure I see how this led to you coming to the Uplands, though.”

Sword sighed, and shifted his jug to his other hand.

“He was killing wizards because, he said, they wouldn't tell him who was the ninth member of the Chosen. The Leader and the Scholar went to talk to him about why he was killing wizards, and to ask him to stop. Because he was so certain that sooner or later the Chosen would turn on him, he assumed their request for an audience was the start of a campaign against him, and he determined to strike first. He turned it into a trap. He had soldiers whose ears were plugged, so they couldn't be swayed by the Leader's words or magic, and he took the Leader and the Scholar prisoner and had them thrown into his dungeons. Then he sent more soldiers to kill the rest of us—swordswomen to kill the Beauty, archers to kill me, swordsmen and spearmen to kill the Archer, and so on. They killed the Speaker and the Seer, but I escaped, and I think the Thief, the Beauty, and the Archer may have survived, but we were separated, and without the Seer we have no way to find one another, so I'm alone.”

“But why are you
here
?”

“Because all of Barokan is siding with
him,
with the Wizard Lord. Everywhere in the Lowlands I'm a fugitive, a criminal. He's sent
drawings of me to all the nearby towns, and soldiers are hunting for me, and I realized the only place I could go where he would never find me would be here, to the Uplands. So here I am.”

Whistler nodded. “I see,” he said. “And what will you do next?”

Sword grimaced, and shifted the jug again.

“I wish I knew,” he said.

Sword was not permitted to hunt at first; the birds belonged to the clan, and he was not a member of the clan. He was given a fair share of the meat at supper, but not allowed to join the young men in obtaining it. Instead he was kept in or near the camp, where he earned his keep by hauling water, cleaning
ara
leather, and doing various other unpleasant but necessary jobs.

In fact, he quickly realized that it was exactly the work he would have done as a slave. The only real differences in how he spent his days were that he was permitted to keep his sword, he was never chained, and his instructions were usually in the form of polite requests rather than brusque orders.

Those differences were appreciated, though, and his evenings were his own—by the Patriarch's orders, his assigned tasks stopped when the sun sank below the cliffs, where a slave might have found himself working well into the night. He decided to use part of this free time to make himself clothing in the Uplander style—he planned
ara
leather pants, a woven-feather shirt, and a long leather vest, and perhaps, if he had the time and materials, a pair of the soft leather boots the Uplanders wore. A proper Uplander vest would be adorned with elaborate patterns of feathers, but Sword did not expect to have the time needed to do that, and intended to leave his plain.

There were plenty of other things he hoped to do with his evenings, as well—planning his revenge on the Wizard Lord was high on the list. Learning more about the Clan of the Golden Spear, perhaps picking up a little of their language, getting to know some of the young women—he hoped to find time for all of those.