“You’re leaving?” Ashe asked incredulously as the Bolg king gathered his belongings.
Achmed nodded. “I made an appointment with the master of the empress’s stable, and a bill of tender for the benison to sign before he collapses under the weight of all the stupidity being flung about here. I don’t want to keep the stablemaster waiting any longer than I already have.”
Ashe sighed. “Well, then, perhaps we can talk when you when you return.”
“I am not going to return. I have a cramp in my leg, a horse to buy, and a few hours of sleep to steal before I leave for Ylorc on the morrow.”
The Lord Cymrian sat up straight, thunderstruck. “You’re leaving? Before this is decided?”
Achmed took a breath. “It could be days, weeks, before a solution is reached here. I have some important things to attend to in Ylorc, and no time to wait around for these fools to sort out their petty differences.”
“I have to admit that I am amazed,” Ashe said, a tone of wonder mixing with the aggravation in his voice. “You, more than any single member of the Alliance save my paranoid uncle, are utterly distrustful of Sorbold—for good reason, given that it borders your lands. Don’t you feel at least some need to stay and see what comes to pass here?”
“I don’t think so. Whatever happens is going to be for ill,” Achmed said gravely. “Any outcome from this will be something with which we must deal, and prepare ourselves to survive. Watching it come about, being there at the moment it hatches, would only be deliberately dip the open wounds on my hands in salt water. While it’s pretty to think that something I might have to say would tip the scales, it won’t.”
“Well, there’s a positive outlook,” remarked Tristan Steward, rising from the table as well and smoothing out his trousers.
“Go get another glass of wine, Tristan,” Ashe said sharply. “Your comments at this colloquium have been bothersome, to the point of being embarrassing.”
Steward stared at the Lord Cymrian in shock that molded in a matter of seconds into fury, then glared at the Bolg king and departed.
“Stay, please,” Ashe said to Achmed when Tristan was out of earshot. “Your counsel may be of great benefit.”
“No. I came to listen, not to speak,” the Bolg king replied.
“But what are your thoughts? I want to hear them.”
Achmed rolled his eyes. “I am not your advisor, Ashe. If pressed to weigh in, if you will excuse the expression, I would lean in favor of stability, at least for my purposes, because there are many trade agreements and peace accords in place currently that would need renegotiating. They were a bother to enact in the first place, so multiplying that nuisance many times over might insure that it does, in fact, not happen again.
“More than that, a united Sorbold is worrisome enough. Sorbold in tatters would be worse; one can only imagine what would rise from a broken land where the army considers itself a faction in the decision-making process of selecting a new leader. If you did not shudder when that commander stood up and objected as if he were a head of state, you are a fool.”
“I did.”
“Well, you must understand, then, that no good is coming out of this. This dynasty didn’t end because everything was going well. These tables aren’t here because everyone is feasting a new monarch. Either the army will slaughter them all, or the merchants will have their thumbs on the scales, or the governors will break the empire by just going home. Whatever accord appears to be passed, whatever pleasantries exchanged, whatever support the losers in the contest demonstrate for the winners, this will end badly. It’s inevitable.” He turned to go, looking back only for a moment.
“If you must know, part of what I’m doing is to prepare for some instability on the border, and, in truth, I’d appreciate the details when it is settled, but I must go. I don’t have the stomach or the time to watch what comes to pass just so that I am able to say I was there and could do nothing to stop it.
“Now I must find the benison. Good night.”
24
Achmed was awake long before dawn broke.
He crept from the sleeping palace, stopping long enough to stare up at the towering minarets, the dry, imposing edifice, where the bells had thankfully abstained from ringing since the evening before. His head still vibrated from the cacophony of the funeral.
Quickly he made his way down to the livery. The gardens were glistening in the light of the setting moon, the sparse dew on the shrubs and flowers shining like spidery lace.
The stablemaster was there, as he had requested, overseeing the morning’s mucking and watering. The horse he had asked for was tacked and saddled, quartered beside his own. Achmed handed him the bill of tender, allowing his eyes to wander over the mount. The stablemaster has chosen generously; the mount was the one he would have selected himself. Achmed inhaled, pleased that, for once, his Firbolg blood had not been an excuse to be mistreated.
He withdrew from his pocket a platinum sun and gave it to the man for good measure, then led both horses away from the warm, heavy air of the stable into the cooler wind of dawn. It was the first time he remembered ever paying more than was asked; it was an interesting feeling.
He was not certain he liked it. But he felt no despair at it, either.
Quickly he vaulted onto his mount and, leading the horse he had just purchased, trotted off into the gray haze of predawn to the cliff face that overlooked the camp of the Panjeri. The advent of sunrise was causing the sky behind him to lighten in anticipation of the dawn.
As he crested the last rise, Achmed reared to a halt.
The camp was gone.
As were the nomads.
His heart began to pound as his eyes scanned the vast expanse of the steppes to the west, searching the gray mist of the world below for signs of the Panjeri caravan, but it were nowhere to be seen.
A sense of panic, or something like it, began to settle on him, burning in his thin skin. He had finally found the artisans for whom he had searched for months, one in particular who seemed precisely what he needed, a sealed master who was diligent and uncompromising in her work, who would brook no nonsense from Shaene, and could stare a Bolg in the face without flinching.
Who could help turn the Lightcatcher from a schematic into an instrumentality.
And she was gone.
By the gods, no, I will not let this slip through my hands again, he thought angrily.
He spurred the horse to canter, doubling back to the base of the hill that led up to the summit where the glass windows were embedded into the peak of Night Mountain.
As before, a quartet of guards was stationed near the crypt.
“Where are the Panjeri?” Achmed shouted to them as the two horses danced in place. The four soldiers blinked, the words rousing them from a state of half-sleep in the drowsy coolness of dawn.
The soldiers shook their heads. One of them shouted back.
“The mail caravan came through in the night. They might have gone with it for part of the way; nomads often do. It heads west through the Rymshin Pass and then north to Sepulvarta. You might try there.”
Achmed raised a hand in acknowledgment and spurred the horses again.
Two days later, an hour’s ride through the Rymshin Pass brought him in sight of the western Krevensfield Plain. The sun had crested the horizon, bathing the world below the foothills in a haze of steam, the green waves of high-grass, burned at the tips, waving in the wind as it swept through.
In the distance the guarded mail caravan, seven wagons escorted by two score and ten guards, was slowly winding its way, unhurried, north along the feeder road to the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare. They were headed to Sepulvarta, halfway through their four-week transcontinental cycle. Achmed was intimately acquainted with the schedule and workings of the mail caravan because it was he who had established it.