FIVE: Their Wickedness Spans the Earth
i) But the evil know no joy
At last. The end of a long and tiring journey. Burla glanced back to see if he had been overtaken at the penultimate moment, sighed, slipped into the cave. His friend Shoptaw, the winged man, greeted him with anxious questions. "Fine, now," Burla replied with a wide, fangy grin. "But tired. Master?"
"Come," the winged man said.
The old man was solicitous and apologetic. "I'm sorry you had to go through this. But Burla, you did me proud. Proud. How's the child?"
Swelling in the Master's praise, Burla replied, "Good, Master. But hungry. Sad."
"Yes, so. You weren't prepared to bring him so far. I feared..."
Burla laid the baby before the Master. The old man opened its wrappings.
"What's this? A girl?" Thunderheads rumbled across his brow. "Burla ..."
"Master?" Had he done wrong without knowing?
The old man held his temper. Whatever had happened, it had not been Burla's fault. The dwarf didn't have the brains. "But how?..." he asked aloud, wondering how a counterswitch had been made. Then he looked closer. The hereditary mark was there.
The King had lied. To support his shaky throne he had announced the birth of a son when a daughter had been born. The fool! There was no way he could have pulled it off...
Realization. His own schemes had been dealt a savage blow. A wildcat was growling in his embrace. Willy-nilly, he had inherited the Krief's plot. "Oh, damn, damn..."
Two days passed before he trusted his temper enough to confront his shadowy ally. The failure was the easterner's fault. He should have used spells to assure the sex of the child. The old man would have done it himself had he suspected the other's sloppiness.
But no one accused the Demon Prince of incompetence. No sorcerer was more powerful or touchy than Yo Hsi, nor had any had more time to perfect his wickedness. He was an evil spanning unknown centuries. Only one man dared openly challenge the Demon Prince, his co-ruler and arch-enemy in Shinsan, the Dragon Prince, Nu Li Hsi. And, perhaps, the Star Rider, the old man thought, but he was irrelevant to the equation.
The old man, who had taken great pains to remain anonymous, was a noble of Kavelin, the Captal of Savernake, hereditary guardian of the Savernake Gap. His castle, Maisak, in the highest and narrowest part of the pass, had seen countless battles fought beneath its walls. Only once had it been threatened, when El Murid's hordes, by sheer numbers, had almost swamped it. The Wesson, Eanred Tarlson, had prevented that. That near-defeat had led the Captal to reinforce his defenses with sorcery.
A greater sorcery was in the Savernake Gap now. That of Shinsan. The Demon Prince's interlocutors had come to the Captal and found a bitter, ambitious man, Ravelin's only non-Nordmen noble gone sour over the treatment he received in Vorgreberg. The emissaries had tempted him with the Crown of Kavelin in exchange for service to Yo Hsi and eventual passage west for Shinsan's legions. Yo Hsi was ready to settle his ancient struggle with the Dragon Prince. A united Shinsan would move swiftly to fulfill its age-old goal of world dominion.
The Captal, from his lonely aerie, had seen little of the world but that contained in the caravans flowing past Maisak. Since the fall of Ilkazar, the west had been weak and divided. The major powers, Itaskia and El Murid's religious state, were deadly enemies evenly matched. Neither showed much interest in using sorcery for military purposes.
Shinsan hinged its strategies on sorcery. Physical combat was a followup, to occupy, to achieve tactical goals. Rumor whispered dreadful things of the powers pent there, awaiting unity to release them.
The Captal had chosen what he thought would be the winning side. Western sorcery and soldiery had no hope against the Dread Empire.
Yo Hsi had established a transfer link between Maisak and a border castle in his sector of Shinsan. Th old man now used it. He bore the child in his arms.
The place he went was dark and misty. There were hints of evils out of sight, evils more grim than any he had created in the caverns in the cliffs against which Maisak stood.
A squad of soldiers, statue-like in black armor, surrounded his entry point. He could see nothing beyond them. He, and they, might have been the entire universe.
Was Yo Hsi expecting trouble? He had never been greeted this way before. "I want to see the Demon Prince. I'm the Captal of Savernake..."
Not a weapon wavered, not a man moved. Their discipline was frightening.
From the darkness, a darker darkness still, Yo Hsi materialized. Fear cramped the Captal's guts. The man hadn't been the same since losing his hand—though, perhaps, the change had begun earlier, with the failure in the child's sex. Consistency of oversight suggested that Yo Hsi was developing a godlike self-image that underestimated everyone around him.
"What do you want? You've dragged me away from sorceries of the highest and most difficult sort."
His face came visible in the sourceless light. It was drawn and haggard. The eyes were surrounded by marks of strain. The Captal felt a new touch of fear. Had he made an ally of a man incapable of fulfilling the scheme?
"We've got a problem."
"I don't have time for guessing games, old man."
"Eh?" The Captal controlled himself. He had just learned his status in the easterner's thoughts. "The child. Your Prince changeling. It's a girl."
The Captal had been enthusiastic when Yo Hsi had first proposed the switch. Couldn't miss, what with both Princes their creatures...
The Demon Prince flew into a screaming rage.
It was all the Captal's fault, of course. Or his minions had betrayed him, or...
After several minutes of abuse, the old man could tolerate no more. The Demon Prince had slipped over the borders of reason. The ship of alliance was no longer sound. Time to abandon it and cut his losses.
With a slight bow the Captal interrupted, said, "I see I'll find no comfort in the source of our embarrassment. You may consider our alliance dissolved." He spoke the word that would return him to his own dungeons.
As he flickered away, he grinned. The expression on Yo Hsi's face!
The moment he materialized in Maisak he initiated dissociative spells to close the transfer stream. To pursue the discussion Yo Hsi would have to walk from the hold of his nearest secret ally.
ii) He bears the burden of loyalty
Eanred Tarlson was one man who never ceased worrying the mysterious exchange.
Following his encounter in the Gudbrandsdal there was a long period for which he had no memories. His wife, Handle, said he had lain on the borderland of death for a month. Then, gradually, he had recovered. Six months had passed before he could get around under his own power. Kavelin spent that time under intense pressure from its neighbors.
At home, in the taverns with his men, or maneuvering in the field, Tarlson never stopped puzzling. Something kept ragging the corners of his mind. A clue that only he held. Some memory of having encountered the old man before, long ago. But his bout with death had left his mind unreliable.
"Maybe it's a memory from a previous life," his wife observed one evening, a year after the swap. She was the only one he had told. "I was reading one of Gjerdrum's books. There's a man at the Rebsamen, Godat Kothe, who says the half-memories we get sometimes are from other lives."
Gjerdrum had just finished a year in Hellin Daimiel, courtesy of the Krief. Handte Tarlson, with a thirst for knowledge and little opportunity to indulge it, had instantly begun devouring his books.
Eanred frowned. That reminded him of a problem he had to face soon. The Nordmen were upset that a common Wesson, on state funds, was being sent to a university considered a noble preserve.