Dranth poured himself another drink as well. “And what would he find, should he travel five miles into the mountains?”
“An encampment of Bolg preparing for war,” Talquist said.
Dranth paused in the course of raising the glass to his lips. “But there are no Bolg there.”
“There can be. At least enough to convince Beliac that he has a serious problem on his border.”
“A charade? A simulated encampment?”
“Exactly.”
“How? How will you persuade, intimidate, or capture enough Bolg to go along with such a farce? They are singularly loyal to their king and their commander, not to mention primitive and untrustworthy. I can’t imagine they would be willing to stage such a charade, even under torture or pain of death.”
Talquist took a sip, then opened his lips enough to allow air to pass over the burning liquid, filling his mouth with the vapors. He swallowed.
“Dranth,” he said, leaning forward, “no one in Golgarn has ever seen a Bolg. Not since before the Cymrian War a thousand years ago, anyway. I could dress an ox or a gorilla in a pink camisole and prop it in the mountains with an ugly mask and a spear beside it, and the Golgarn would believe they were about to be invaded.”
The guild scion stared at the regent for a moment. A hint of a smile cracked his otherwise impassive face; he saluted Talquist with his glass, then drank.
“So are you attempting to destroy Golgarn, then?” he asked. “Mislead them into attacking the Bolg?”
“Destroy Golgarn? Don’t be ridiculous, Dranth. Golgarn is an important ally, and Beliac is my friend.”
The guild scion shook his head in puzzlement. “I am not following your intent, then. Because if you convince the king of Golgarn that the Bolg are massing against him, and he attacks, the Bolg will eat him and the entire kingdom alive, literally.”
“Beliac will not attack the Bolg,” Talquist said. “At least not alone. He will turn to me. Sorbold has a force ten times the size of the army of Golgarn which, while sizable, is certainly ill prepared to act unilaterally. Beliac is an ally who doesn’t even know that he has thrown his lot in with me yet. But he will soon.”
“Your willingness to manipulate your friends so mercilessly is admirable,” Dranth said, finishing his drink and replacing the snifter on the table, where it caught the firelight and reflected it, in a golden pool, on the desk. “Not many men have the viscera for it.”
Talquist shrugged. “I’m a merchant, Dranth. You’ve heard the aphorism that we would sell our own mothers for a profit? Well, I actually did. Got a respectable price for her, too.”
“And when the king of Golgarn joins you in an alliance against a fictional Bolg invasion, what will that gain you?”
“An army worthy of my plans,” Talquist said.
“And what are those plans?”
The regent of Sorbold smiled. “I will let you figure that out,” he said amiably, rising as if to indicate that the meal, and the conversation, were over. “Rest assured, your desire to see the Bolg king pay his debt to you will more than be accomplished. But I will share one more little secret with you, guild brother to guild brother: I need a northern ally as well. The Diviner in the Hintervold—he is also my friend, a dear one. Virtually all of the prosperity I enjoyed in my career as a merchant I owe to him; he even saved my life once. And when you see how cruel the methods are that I will use to secure his allegiance to my goals, you will fully appreciate how truly worthy I am to be considered a brother to your guild.”
Talquist pulled up the linen hood of his robes of regency. “And now, Dranth, go with the chamberlain and have a rest; we have specific planning to do in the morning. I have other things to attend to. A carnival of freaks has come into town, and I have arranged for a private showing. I love oddities and the like. Good night.”
16
The sun’s departure was fading the sky to colors of cobalt and indigo at the eastern edges, turquoise where the light still touched it in the west. Talquist inhaled the evening breeze, cooler with night’s approach and with the turn of the seasons in more northern lands. In the desert of Sorbold, autumn was mostly just a slightly fresher gust of air in the morning and evening; otherwise, the endless desert sun continued to beat down, baking the dry land into sand.
From his balcony he could see the firebrands of the traveling circus burning steadily, sending light and thin trails of black smoke skyward in welcome, an invitation to him and him alone. He sighed; there was a time when he was merely a powerful merchant that he would have been able to indulge all of his darkest fantasies in such a place, but now that he was known to the world as the emperor presumptive of Sorbold, he would be constrained to merely wander between the wagons, amused, but unable to partake in some of the more sinful pleasures that traveled with such sideshows. A pity, he mused as he came away from the window and made his way down the stairs to the place where the carnival waited. Look, but don’t touch. Ah, well.
When he arrived at the gate of the circus, the Ringmaster was waiting for him.
“Your Excellency,” the Ringmaster said, bowing low, his striped silk pants bending comically as he did.
“Oh, come now, Garth, you and I have done business for years now,” Talquist admonished. “We’ve had many high times, have protected each other’s backs in several potentially deadly circumstances. There’s no need to be so formal, now that I am, well, emperor, for all intents and purposes. You may address me as ‘m’lord.’”
“Yes, m’lord,” the Ringmaster muttered, opening the gate.
He followed the emperor-to-be through the dark pathways, in and out of the tents, as Talquist admired the strange human inventory. In one tent, they stopped before the small woman with almond-shaped eyes who sat, chained by an enormous collar around her neck, on a small stool. The woman recognized Talquist, and began to tremble violently, causing both men to laugh aloud.
“Ah, the Gwadd! I had all but forgotten about her,” Talquist said. He leaned closer; the tiny woman shrank away in fear. “No need to worry, little lovely,” he murmured, “I’m afraid I’m too important to play with you anymore.” He turned to the Ringmaster as they moved along through the exhibits. “You had best be careful if you go back into Roland that the Lord Cymrian not discover you have her. Gwadd are not technically freaks; they are old-world people, an ancient race that came over with the Cymrian exodus. She is thereby one of his citizens, and he will take action to free her and imprison you if he discovers her presence in your carnival.”
“Now, how would the high and mighty Lord Gwydion do that, unless he were to be patronizing the Monstrosity himself?” the Ringmaster asked disdainfully. “My audiences don’t tend to be the type who have luncheon invitations at Haguefort where they might accidentally drop my secrets to him.”
“Too true,” Talquist agreed, wandering in front of a fragile glass tank with a floating morass of wrinkled human flesh in the water. “Now, this is new. What sort of freak is this supposed to be?”
“We call it the Amazing Fish-boy,” said the Ringmaster, tapping on the glass to waken the creature, “but as you can see, it could just as easily be the Amazing Fish-girl. We don’t know what it is, exactly. I bought it from two imbecilic fishermen from Avonderre.”
“Does it have a name?” Talquist asked, peering closer into the murky green water.
The Ringmaster shrugged. “Duckfoot Sally calls it Faron,” he said.