His eyes drew themselves to a person moving against the mob’s crazed men. He was only one person in the mass of bodies. He did run above them, as Leeka had, but still stood out because he was moving against the outflow. The black man’s arms lashed forward, as if he were trying to swim through the torrent of fleeing people. As frantically as he struggled, he made no progress. Indeed, as the exodus gained momentum he began to be dragged back by the surge of them.
Delivegu muttered about their sanity, but then caught himself. Insanity was driving people out of the stadium. That man was fighting against the madness. The Talayan, he thought, looked more and more familiar. Whatever the man was thinking, he had purpose the others did not.
Grabbing a passing soldier by the shoulder, Delivegu yanked him close. The young man wore a glazed expression. “Soldier? Soldier!” Delivegu smacked him and stared in his face, waiting for eye contact from him, as he used to do with his dogs as a boy. Only when he had his full attention did he continue. “Recognize me? I’m Delivegu Lemardine. I’m the queen’s man. Listen to me.”
The soldier could hardly have done otherwise. Delivegu was roaring in his face.
“That man. See him? The Talayan there.” He stabbed the air with his finger, trying to shoot a straight line between the guard’s eyes and the man’s chest. “Get him. Bring him to me. He knows something. Get him, and bring him to me alive.”
The soldier began sputtering excuses, but Delivegu sent him on his way with a kick to his backside. The young man went wobbly legged down the steps for a while, then carried on like a good soldier. They like their orders, don’t they? Delivegu smiled and sat down to wait right there on the dais, letting his legs dangle over the edge. All right. He was feeling a bit better. Sorcerers made him queasy. Regular folk he could handle just fine. Chaotic situations… he preferred to think of them as opportunities.
One of the dragons, Kohl, he thought it was, flapped up over the far stadium wall, black as tar and just as glistening under the now bright sun. Another one slid along the rim for a moment before catching an updraft and lifting into full view. Thais, the brown one with yellow stripes. She was rather plain looking, but Delivegu always got a thrill saying her name. Thais. It would be forever a sexy name to him, recalling the face of a young woman in Alecia who simply would not succumb to him throughout a long night of cunning and chivalrous advances. Why was it always the ones who eluded him that he remembered the most vividly? For that matter, why was he capable of thinking of a brown-eyed beauty from a decade ago right after meeting mad wizards who were likely going to plunge the world into chaos and darkness?
He shrugged. Anyway…
Two other dragons hove into view as well, long necked and angry looking.
“A bit late,” Delivegu said. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “They went that way, if you care.” They could not, of course, hear him.
By the time the soldier returned to him, with the Talayan man in tow, the confusion had mostly passed. Soldiers were establishing some rough semblance of order. A few people, good-hearted or desperate for their loved ones, had even begun to trickle back into the Carmelia to help the injured and deal with the dead. The soldier handed the man off awkwardly, looking around at his fellows and only then seeming to question why he had taken orders from someone so obviously not an officer. Delivegu dismissed him with a shooing motion of his fingers. He turned his attention to the man.
He had seen less bedraggled men laboring as life prisoners in the Kidnaban mines. The Talayan’s tunic was a thin, tattered garment hung across a wiry frame, muscles lean and taut beneath his skin. His thigh-length skirt looked to have been dragged across the ground all the way from central Talay, leaving a tattered fringe. He was coated in a layer of dust lighter in tone than his skin, with a crackly film of salt around his hairline. Most bizarrely, his right hand and wrist were completely encased in a metal cage. Delivegu considered the possibility that he had escaped imprisonment, but he had never seen anything like that gauntlet. Besides that, he knew who the man was. No criminal, he.
“You’ve seen some miles, Kelis of Umae,” Delivegu said. “The hard way, by the looks of it.”
The man looked surprised, but whether the surprise was at Delivegu knowing his name or at the fact that he was that person, Delivegu was not sure.
Kelis said, “I must see the queen.”
“You’ll not get near her looking as you do.”
Kelis, agitated, scanned the stadium. “The queen. I thought she was here.”
Delivegu caught him by the elbow as he tried to move away. “Listen! I’ve got sense enough to recognize you, but I doubt any Marah would see anything but a cushion to pin an arrow in.” Realizing he had grabbed the arm with the steel fist of a hand, he let it go. “What happened to your hand?”
“The queen,” Kelis repeated. “And Aliver, if he truly lives. And where is Leeka? He came this way before me.”
“Ah, he was with you, huh?” Delivegu asked. “He’s… around here. All over the place, really.” He gestured vaguely. “Anyway, what’s your message for the monarchs?”
“I’ll tell the queen,” the Talayan snapped.
“You’ll tell me first,” Delivegu said. “And then, maybe, if I say so, you’ll tell the queen. You’ll not get near her without me, and you’ll not find anyone else to help you. You’re lucky to have found me.” He stopped and studied him again. “I shouldn’t even waste my time with you, but I’m thinking you’ve had a part in all this?”
Kelis looked down.
“And that you have things to tell the queen. Things she really ought to hear?”
The Talayan nodded.
“I can probably arrange that. You’ll have to start by telling me, though. Have a seat. Let’s do this like reasonable men. I, by the way, am Delivegu Lemardine. The best friend you have at this moment.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
By the time Sire Dagon reached his compound in the league quarters, his clothes were so disheveled he could barely walk without tripping over portions of his flowing garments. The sole of one of his shoes flapped maddeningly, and he had lost his ceremonial skullcap. His lip was fat from having been punched by a commoner, and dark liquid soiled his front. His own vomit. Several layers of it had been squeezed out of him by more than one sight, but mostly by the glimpse he caught of the things that had writhed in and around and over Queen Corinn’s face. What were they? He asked, but he did not want to know. There could be nothing good in knowing the name of such things.
He plowed through the servants waiting to greet him and went straight to his office, ignoring their exclamations of concern. He could think of nothing save the horror of what he had seen and the dread at what he had done. Never before had his timing been so disastrous. Absurdly, fantastically disastrous.
“What have we done?” he asked himself, once seated and panting in his office chair. He really was not sure. He knew what he had done. Yes, but not what the effects of it would be now. Nor what the Santoth had done to Corinn. Nor what they would do to the world. He could not get his mind around it, but the terror squeezing every fiber of his body told him he had to, and quickly.
“Sire?” His secretary peeked in the open door. “You’re upset, I see. Should I send for Teeneth? She would want to-”
“No! This is no time for concubines, you-you…” No insult came readily enough, so Dagon let the sentence hang, unfinished.
“Of course, sire,” the man began again, his voice simpering from the first word. “Do you need-”
Anger rose in Dagon like alcohol tossed onto a fire. He suddenly hated that this man was talking to him, distracting him, making it harder to get a grasp of his thoughts. What’s more, the room was full of people! They were his people, but he loathed them. “Get out!” he shouted. “All of you. Spies and leeches. Out!” He tossed a paperweight at the secretary. It missed him but grazed a servant across the temple. In a flutter of motion, the servants abandoned their posts and dashed for the door. One knocked over an end table. Another caught it before it hit the floor.