If I thought the obstacles to Nath the Needle seeing the emperor had all been overcome, then I was an onker indeed.
We debouched beneath overhanging arches lavishly decorated with exquisite mosaics depicting — oh, the pictures were filled with the fire and passion of Vallia’s turbulent past. Across the wide marble-floored space where cool fountains sparkled in the perfumed air, where fruit trees bloomed and delicately colored birds flitted from branch to branch, the long white wall barring off the emperor’s quarters as approached from this direction showed a solid crimson and black band along its foot. The guards stood shoulder to shoulder, a Crimson Bowman and a Chulik, alternating. Pacing toward us came two Jiktars, high officers, one a Bowman of Loh, the other a Chulik. Delia proved herself a princess in her handling of them.
Haughtily, yet with just the right amount of friendliness stopping this side of condescension, she avowed the Prince Majister was now free to walk in Vondium, that she intended to see her father, and her suite would go with her. The guards stood back. We walked through. Although I did not smile, my fist no longer rested on the rapier hilt. A little thing — but revealing. . There was no mistaking the abrupt dispatch of a Bowman runner, a lithe young man fresh from Loh, learning his trade.
The light chilled. Heavy doors swung inwards. I knew just where we were, now, and had studied the plans of the palace drawn up many seasons ago when this wing had been built. At last, past a bevy of waiting nurses and minor doctors, we entered the sick room.
The place struck me with a chill repulsion. Delia visited her father constantly, had been drawn away by Tilly’s startling news. He lay in the wide bed, on his back, the covers drawn to his chin and pettishly pulled half down one side. His wasted face spider-webbed with etched lines, the cheeks sunken in. I saw the hand he extended to his daughter and was shocked at its skeletal aspect. He had always been a firmly fleshed man.
His flesh was wasting away. His condition really was serious, and Delia’s concern struck me, suddenly, with an anguish for her I detested and found biting and acid and altogether hateful. My Delia! Well, everyone must go through the agonies of seeing loved ones die. Because Delia and I had bathed in the Sacred Pool of the River Zelph in far Aphrasoe, the city of the Savanti, the Swinging City, we were assured of a thousand years of life and the rapid recovery from wounds and illness. The wounds I had taken in the Jikai of the Brotherhood of Iztar against the Shanks were already healed. And yet, I had held my daughter Velia in my arms as she died. What agonies mortality tortures us with. Nath the Needle moved carefully forward in his best professional manner and shooed us from the bed. He took immediate command of the four nurses, pale women, nervous, worried, and at his directions one of them turned back the coverlets and the others lifted the emperor’s shrunken body and opened the fancy silk shirt over his sunken chest. I went with Seg to stand over in the bay window where a flick-flick plant looked as though it needed a heaping handful of fat flies. The six flunkeys, armed, who stood along the far walls, blankly regarding the proceedings, could be ignored. The emperor, apart from certain follies, lived a spartan life.
I said to Seg: “D’you know what’s happened to Queen Lush? I thought for sure she’d be sobbing at the bedside.”
“She had to return to Lome. Some pressing affair of state. The emperor saw her off — Thelda says he was in full health then.”
“We haven’t seen the last of her. She has designs on the emperor. This dire news will bring her scurrying back.”
“Aye. It’s bad, Dray.”
“Yes. How stands Falinur?”
He knew what I meant. The old recklessness of his face sobered, for the men of Erthyrdrin, Seg’s homeland, are fey and wild and also highly practical. “I have worked hard there, trying to make the kovnate into the kind of paradise you have in Valka. There are always cramphs against whatever I try to do. Their malignancy lingers on. They remember. I wouldn’t take a sheaf of arrows on their loyalty.”
I made no comment on this bleak if expected news. “And Inch? I fancy the Black Mountains will stand with us.”
“The Blue Mountain Boys have resolved their ancient quarrels with the Black Mountain Men. That is more Inch’s doing than Korf Aighos’s — he is one man I wouldn’t trust with my bow — but he is loyal to Delia. Between them they have made those mountains and the zorca plains into a stronghold.”
“There are other nobles willing to stand up and be numbered. As for Delphond-” I sighed. I thought, then, that Delia’s pretty little province of Delphond, a charming, lazy, contented place, now that the Chyyanists had gone, could never raise even a pastang of real fighting men. There had been changes in Delphond the last time I had been through, as you know; but the old carefree, easy-going ways persisted
— and I would not change them.
“Lord Farris will bring in Vomansoir.”
“Yes. And, if it comes to the fluttrell’s vane, we can strike across quickly and so pinch out-” I stopped. Delia and Thelda with Katrin came over to us and the conversation became general, still concerned, low-voiced. I glanced at the doctor. Nath the Needle looked grave. He peered into the emperor’s mouth, pulled down his lower eyelids, felt and prodded him, tut-tutting to himself. No acupuncture needles had been used by Doctor Charboi, and Nath had not opened his sturmwood case, so I gathered the sick man was in no pain.
Very carefully, using a piece of verss, that finest of snow-white linen, Nath wiped the emperor’s mouth. He folded the cloth delicately and placed it into his lesten-hide satchel. Sight of the piece of pure verss reminded me vividly of the Kroveres — for verss represented the purity for which the old vers of Valka had been famed.
Nath glanced up and met my gaze. He nodded and indicated he was ready to leave, which surprised me, and the door burst open with a crash onto the somber sick room and a group of violently angry men and women entered.
As I stared at them, at their red faces and their gesticulating, ring-laden hands, the sumptuousness of their dress, their jewels and lace, all the habitual airs of wealth and command and authority, I felt repulsion. I felt revulsion. Their vicious unthinking demands on everyone about them they could master, these I had witnessed many times, on Earth as on Kregen, and despaired of, and resisted, and, I own the matching of violence with violence to be a sin, there, in that sick room of a palace where an emperor lay dying, I was particularly revolted by their violence. I am a peaceful sort of fellow, liking the quiet life, and yet I have, to my shame, been forced many and many a time to match violence with violence. The Kroveres of Iztar were one response. I own, I have never made a secret of it, I own the matching of violence with violence to be a sin, and yet I hoped for so much from the Kroveres in milder civilized ways.
But — these people. You will meet them all as my story trundles along. Of them at the moment it is fit you should see just three.
The first was Doctor Charboi. Here on Earth he would have been impeccably dressed, crowned with a distinguished mass of silver hair. He would have worn a neat Harley Street suit, and have commanded the highest prices for nostrums and soothing words from the highest in society. On Kregen, where a person’s hair does not ordinarily turn white until past two hundred, Charboi had the red mop of Loh, and he presented the full-fleshed, country-club figure of a man in the prime of life, brisk, efficient, demanding. And violent.
“Out!” he shouted. He was violent. No doubt of it. “Out!”
The second man hulked in the room. Massive, bulky, he towered against the lamplight and it was clear from the set of his mouth and the clamping thrust of his jaws and chin that he spoke seldom. Apim, he was, but built like a Chulik. All the time his powerful figure remained planted at the shoulder of his mistress. He wore the heavy brown tunic called a khiganer, double-breasted, the wide flap caught up over his left side with a long flaring row of bronze buttons, from belt to shoulder, and from point of shoulder to collar. That collar stood stiff and hard and high, encircling his neck. Gold glittered there. He wore buff breeches and tall black Vallian boots, gleaming with polish, spurred. He wore no baldric; but the lockets for a rapier and empty main gauche swung from two jeweled belts. His sleeves were banded after the fashion of Vallia, indicating his allegiance. Brown and green bands, with three small diagonal slashes, marked him for Venga. The sheer ferocity of that lowering face impressed me, the lambent bestiality slumbering in the tiny dark eyes, the cragginess of the jaw. He was a notorious Bladesman. This was Nath the Iarvin, ruffler, Bladesman, bought body and soul by his mistress. The third person was a woman.