“The President-designate will be with us shortly,” said Ribek as easily as if they had just witnessed some everyday event. “You will need your own magicians to authenticate the seal. You may have been wondering why they weren’t present. The answer is that we took them into our temporary protection to avoid the possibility of a magical conflict, which would have been a very risky undertaking not only for the participants but also for anyone who happened to be present. Lady Kzuva, if you would be so kind.”
Maja beckoned. Benayu appeared at her shoulder, knelt, took three apples out of his belt-pouch and placed them on the floor in front of her and stood back.
Maja touched each of the apples in turn with the tip of her cane. Instantly they shriveled and vanished, leaving nothing but three small brown seeds on the floor. Rapidly these sprouted and became three slim stems, each with a single bud at the top. As they continued to grow, a pair of twigs appeared on either side of each stem a little below the bud. These lengthened into drooping branches with a few leaves sprouting from the ends.
When the saplings were about as tall as a man, Maja touched them again with her cane. They stopped growing and swelled. The buds became heads, the side branches arms and the leaves fingers, and three not-quite-human figures stood before them. One was naked to the waist, revealing a well-built muscular body with a tiger-skin draped across his shoulders. The head of the tiger was the living head of the man. The second was a woman robed from head to foot in shimmering black. Only her silver face and hands were visible. The third was a head taller than anyone in the room, but grotesquely thin. His eyes were three times the size of human eyes, vivid yellow, and had slits for pupils.
The Lady Kzuva part of Maja smiled at the sheer vulgarity of this attempt to impress the barbarians, then shook her head, still smiling, because it wasn’t, after all, much different from what they themselves had been doing. The frivolous Syndics were right. It had been a show put on for their amusement. But still, the fate of the Empire depended on it. The shadow of a memory flickered in her mind. When she’d needed a new magician and interviewed applicants…Yes…The silver woman had looked almost human then, but that robe…she would be able to confirm that she was the real Lady Kzuva.
“Please give them a moment to recover,” said Ribek. “It is an unnerving experience for any magician to be so mastered. And I should tell you that it would not have been done so easily if they had not been seriously weakened by being too long at sea, far from the sources of—”
He broke off abruptly and turned. Rocky had reappeared on their right and now stood waiting for his riders to dismount before he settled his wings. Saranja twisted down, neatly avoiding Chanad in the rear saddle, turned urgently to Maja, touched the hilt of her saber by way of salute and said, “My lady, the landing has started. We saw thirty or more boats laden with men, setting out for the shore.”
She turned to help Chanad dismount.
Maja swung round, ignoring the pang from her hip.
“Is this true, General Olbog?”
The General made a pacifying gesture with his hands and started to speak slowly and evenly, as if reasoning with a child. Striclan’s voice spoke in Maja’s mind.
“He is telling the interpreter to take it slowly. He is saying that it is an administrative error, and that the landing will now have to take place, but as soon as the soldiers are ashore they will be ordered to proceed no further.”
“Nonsense, General,” Maja snapped. “We heard you give the order with your own lips. Do you think we would have been so stupid as to come here and rely solely on your own interpreter, without the means to understand directly what you were saying? With your permission, Madam President-designate?”
“Please do what you must, Lady Kzuva,” said Chanad, shaking her head wearily, as if at the unplumbable stupidity of humankind. Maja turned back to General Olbog.
“Very well,” she said. “Since you refuse to stop the landing, we are now forced to do so ourselves. Captain, Mr. Ruddya, please carry on. Bennay, your shoulder. Stand aside, please.”
Leaning on Benayu she hobbled up to the long window with the others following. The spectators already there made room for them. Now she was able to see what they’d been looking at. Ahead of them, still three or four miles off, lay the shoreline and hills around Larg, their colors already muted by the approach of dusk. She could see the undying flame crowning the rock pillar that imprisoned the demon Azarod, the waves breaking gently against the harbor bar, the mild swell on the last reaches of ocean glistening into bars of light under the westering sun. Black against that brightness, two medium-sized airboats floated shoreward ahead of the much larger one she was on. There were several more lined out to either side of her. Below them ships of the Pirate fleet advanced slowly on the city, first a screen of smaller vessels, then several larger ones, and then, almost beneath where she was standing, three big, broad-beamed vessels, obviously not warships but carriers. These had stopped moving and had lowered platforms something like the drawbridge of a moated town, leaving a wide opening in the bows out of which had emerged three lines of open barges, each carrying forty or more armed men. They were advancing on Larg far faster than the rest of the fleet. The leading barges were already almost level with the forward screen.
“Captain, Mr. Ruddya, you had better act at once. Any nearer, and we shall discommode the good citizens of Larg.”
Saranja had Zald ready in her belt-pouch. She drew the great jewel out and held it in her left hand, with the surface toward her. The fingers of her right hand moved in a careful, dance-like pattern over the jewels surrounding the central amber. That done, she spoke five resonant syllables, with deliberate pauses between them. Each seemed to linger in the air like a bell note until she spoke the next. All were meaningless to Maja and probably to every one else in the room except Benayu, whom she’d seen telling Saranja what to do back on Angel Isle. As the last syllable faded away she lifted the amber jewel gently from its setting.
She cupped it in her right hand as if showing it to Ribek. He closed his own hand over hers and turned, not to the window, but to his right. North. They have a different magic in the north.
He started to sing, if you could call it singing. She remembered how oddly unable he’d been, on their journey through the desert, to carry the simplest tune, but this was different. Somehow she knew that he was singing it as it was meant to be sung, this steady, rippling drone, repetitive, endless but full of intricate little changes, like the surface of a flowing stream. In this hot country, far from the mountains of his home, he was singing, as his ancestors had done for generations before him, to the northern snows.
The sky darkened, and darkened further. The sea changed color, from blue-green to a curious pale mottled gray. The advancing fleet seemed to have come to a sudden halt. A snowflake drifted down past the window, and another, large as a child’s hand. The sea changed color again, as the sun, still reaching in from the west beneath the sudden astonishing darkness of the cloud layer, dazzled back off the whiteness below. Then everything vanished, blotted out by the falling snow. The room was suddenly as cold as a midwinter morning in the Valley. The owl on Saranja’s shoulder fluffed out its feathers and the squirrel on Ribek’s was huddling against his neck for warmth. She felt a fidgeting on her head and knew that her moth must have been triggered into hibernation and was burrowing in under her head-scarf.