From what he had succeeded in teasing from her over the past few years, DeWar knew that Perrund had been brought here suffering from a terrible fever. She and eight of her sisters, brothers and cousins had been refugees from the war of succession during which UrLeyn had taken control of Tassasen following the fall of the Empire. Travelling from the southlands where the fighting had been worst, they had made for Crough, along with a large part of the rest of the population of Tassasen’s south. The family had been traders in a market town, but most of them had been killed by the King’s forces when they had taken the town from UrLeyn’s troops. The General’s men had retaken it, with UrLeyn at their head, but by then Perrund and her few remaining relatives were on the road for the capital.
They had all contracted some form of plague on the journey and only a hefty bribe had got them through the city gates at all. The least sick of them had driven their wagon to one of the old royal parks where refugees could camp and the last of their money had paid for a doctor and medicines. Most of them had died then. Perrund had been found a place in the paupers’ hospital. She had come close to death but then recovered. When she had gone in search of the rest of her family her quest had ended at the lime pits beyond the city walls where people had been buried hundreds at a time.
She had thought of killing herself then, but was afraid to, and besides considered that as Providence had seen fit to have her recover from the plague, perhaps she was not meant to die quite yet. There was, anyway, a general feeling that the worst of times might be over. The war had ended, the plague had all but disappeared and order had returned to Crough and was returning to the rest of Tassasen.
Perrund had helped out at the hospital, sleeping on the floor of one of the great open wards where people wept and shouted and moaned throughout the day and night. She had begged for food in the street and she had turned down many an offer that would have let her buy food and comfort with her sex, but then a eunuch of the palace harem — UrLeyn’s, now that the old King was dead — had visited the hospital. The doctor who had found Perrund a place in the hospital had told a friend at court that she was a great beauty, and — once she had been persuaded to clean her face and put on a dress — the eunuch had thought her suitable.
So she was recruited to the languid opulence of the harem, and became a frequent choice of the Protector. What would have seemed like a restrictive kind of luxury, even a sort of well-furnished prison to the young woman she had been a year earlier, when she and her family were living together and peaceably in their prosperous little market town, she saw instead, after the war and everything that had come with it, as a blessed sanctuary.
Then had come the day when UrLeyn and various of his court favourites, including some of his concubines, were to be painted by a famous artist. The artist brought with him a new assistant who turned out to have a mission of rather more serious intent than simply helping to fix UrLeyn’s and the others’ likenesses in paint, and only Perrund throwing herself between his knife and UrLeyn had saved the Protector’s life.
“Shall we?” DeWar asked, when Perrund still had not moved from the pavement.
She looked at him as though she had forgotten he was there, then she smiled from the depths of the hood. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, let’s.”
She held his arm tightly as they crossed the street.
“Tell me more about Lavishia.”
“Where? Oh, Lavishia. Let me think. Well now, in Lavishia everybody is able to fly.”
“Like birds?” Lattens asked.
“Just like birds,” DeWar confirmed. “They can leap from cliffs and tall buildings — of which there are a great many in Lavishia — or they can just run along the street and jump into the air and soar away up into the sky.”
“Do they have wings?”
“They do have wings but they are invisible wings.”
“Can they fly to the suns?”
“Not on their own. To fly to the suns they have to use ships. Ships with invisible sails.”
“Don’t they burn in the heat of the suns?”
“Not the sails, they’re invisible and the heat goes straight through them. But the wooden hulls scorch and blacken and burst into flame if they go too close, of course.”
“How far is it to the suns?”
“I don’t know, but people say that they are different distances away, and some clever people claim that they are both very far away indeed.”
“These would be the same clever people called mathematicians who tell us the world is a ball, and not flat,” Perrund said.
“They would,” DeWar confirmed.
A travelling troupe of shadow players had come to court. They had set up in the palace’s theatre, whose plaster windows had shutters which could be closed against the light. They had stretched a white sheet very tightly across a wooden frame whose lower edge was just above head height. Below the frame hung a black cloth. The white screen was lit from behind by a single strong lamp set some distance back. Two men and two women manipulated the two-dimensional puppets and their accompanying shadow-scenery, using thin sticks to make the characters’ limbs and bodies swivel. Effects like waterfalls and flames were achieved using thin strips of dark paper and bellows to make them flutter. Using a variety of voices, the players told ancient stories of kings and queens, heroes and villains, fidelity and betrayal and love and hate.
It was the interval now. DeWar had been round the back of the screen to make sure that the two guards he had stationed there were still awake, and they were. The shadow players had objected at first, but he had insisted the guards stay there. UrLeyn was sitting in the middle of the small auditorium, a perfect and stationary target for somebody behind the screen with a crossbow. UrLeyn, Perrund and everybody else who had heard about the two guards behind the screen thought DeWar was once again taking his duties far too seriously, but he could not have sat there and watched the show comfortably with nobody he trusted behind the screen. He had stationed guards by the window shutters too, with instructions to open them promptly if the lantern behind the screen went out.
These precautions taken, he had been able to watch the shadow players’ performance — from the seat immediately behind UrLeyn — with a degree of equanimity, and when Lattens had clambered over the seat in front and come and sat on his lap demanding to know more about Lavishia he had felt sufficiently relaxed to be happy to oblige. Perrund, sitting one seat along from UrLeyn, had turned round to ask her question about mathematicians. She watched DeWar and Lattens with an amused, indulgent expression.
“Can they fly under the water, too?” Lattens asked. He wriggled off DeWar’s lap and stood in front of him, an intent look on his face. He was dressed like a little soldier, with a wooden sword at his side in a decorated scabbard.
“They certainly can. They are very good at holding their breath and can do it for days at a time.”
“And can they fly through mountains?”
“Only through tunnels, but they have lots of tunnels. Of course, some of the mountains are hollow. And others are full of treasure.”
“Are there wizards and enchanted swords?”
“Yes, enchanted swords by the cistern-full, and lots of wizards. Though they tend to be a trifle arrogant.”
“And are there giants and monsters?”
“Plenty of both, though they are all very nice giants and extremely helpful monsters.”
“How boring,” Perrund murmured, reaching out her good hand and patting down some of Lattens’ more wayward curls.
UrLeyn turned round in his seat, eyes twinkling. He drank from a glass of wine then said, “What’s this, DeWar? Are you filling my boy’s head with nonsense?”
“There would be a wonder,” said BiLeth, from a couple of seats away. The tall foreign minister looked bored with the proceedings.