Emperor Mage Read online

  Varice was everywhere, seeing to the comfort of the Tortallan delegation and the foreign ambassadors to Carthak who had been invited to observe the talks on behalf of their rulers. With so many lords to attend to, she didn’t appear to notice that Numair barely touched his food.

  Daine noticed, and felt sorry for her tall friend. Varice had filled his plate herself, heaping it with delicacies like eel pastry, elephant-ear soup, and snake medallions in a black bean and wine sauce. It was the worst thing she could have done. Numair’s body did not always travel well, particularly not after a sea or river voyage. Usually he spent several days in a new place eating mild, simple foods—the only things he could keep down. He nodded and gave polite thanks when she stopped to ask how he did, but Daine could see a tinge of green around his lips.

  Luckily the dogs and cats who served as palace mouse and rat catchers were everywhere, even here in the banquet hall. Daine silently asked two dogs for help. When a paw on the mage’s knee caused Numair to look down, he saw them at his feet, willing to be fed. The look he gave Daine was filled with gratitude. She didn’t see the costly food leave his plate, but she didn’t expect to: Numair’s hobby was sleight of hand. The dogs she heard clearly. They were delighted with their feast.

  At last the emperor led them to the room where the talks would be held. Tables and chairs had been placed in a loose square, and unshuttered windows allowed breezes and garden scents to pass through. The Tortallans, the foreign ambassadors, and the Carthaki ministers were given seats, their places marked with nameplates of gold inlaid with silver. Jugs of water, juice, and herbal teas were at all the tables. Carthaki scribes sat cross-legged against one wall, ready to take notes, while the Tortallan scribes had their own table, directly behind Duke Gareth’s seat. Those who would not take part, such as Lindhall Reed and lesser nobles and officials, sat in chairs behind the delegations. Daine sat at the end of her table, uncomfortable even there. Kitten had a stool to perch on, beside the girl; Zek hid in his usual place under Daine’s hair.

  Ozorne rose to speak, dressed in a blindingly white robe and green shoulder wrap. His hair, ungilded today, proved to be reddish brown, though it was still in many fine braids, each tipped with a gold filigree bead. Black paint lined his amber eyes back to his temples. He glittered with gems.

  “We bid you welcome, representatives of our eminent cousin, King Jonathan of Tortall, and of his queen, Thayet the Peerless, and of our fellow monarchs and neighbors.” His voice filled the room. “This day has been too long in coming. At last we are met in a spirit of mutual aid and support for our lands, so long at odds. Villains conspired to bring us to the brink of war, but wisdom and vigilance have kept us from stepping over. All our hearts desire only peace.

  “Without our knowledge and consent, evil men contrived four years ago to steal arcane learning secretly held for centuries. With this ill-gained knowledge, they reversed what the writers of those spells had dedicated their lives to achieve, the banning from our human, mortal existence those creatures loosely called immortals, the semidivine beings who may live forever unless accident or force brings their life spans to a halt.

  “To our sorrow, our person and our university were blamed for this dreadful misuse of power. Our cousins of Tortall, sore beset by immortals and by those who prey on a land open to attack, felt we were to blame, and who could contest it? Loving freedom and commerce, we kept too little watch on our library, on our shipwrights, on those who hired men and paid them in Carthaki gold. To our shame and sorrow, our lack of awareness caused our Tortallan cousins to think we condoned the behavior of pirates, bandits, and rogues. Let us now set the matter straight. Let us strive together for peace between our peoples, and put aside all past misunderstandings.

  “May the gods bless our endeavors, and may they foster the peace for which we all long.” Clasping his hands together, he touched them to his forehead in a kind of salute, and sat down.

  Duke Gareth rose to make his reply, reading from a letter written to Ozorne and his ministers by King Jonathan. Daine hid a yawn under one hand. She might have found the letter more interesting if she had not heard discussions about its contents on the voyage to Carthak. Instead her mind kept skipping away from Duke Gareth’s voice, returning to the tiger-skin rug, or to the badger’s visit, over and over. She had mentioned the need to talk to Numair and Alanna on their way to the noon banquet, but she knew it might be some time before they could get the chance to safely hear what she had to say. As the emperor’s guests, most of their time away from the talks would be taken up with entertainments and activities. Both had promised to do what they could, and Daine had to be content with that.

  If only I knew what the gods had in mind, or when it was going to happen, she thought as the foreign ambassadors read messages from their own rulers. I don’t know what Numair or Alanna can do with “Something bad is going to happen.” I don’t even know what I would do with it!

  Once the ambassadors were done, each of Ozorne’s delegates had a speech to make, followed by a speech from each Tortallan official. Daine’s yawns began to come thick and fast.

  Suddenly a clerk tapped her on the shoulder and passed her a note from Duke Gareth.

  There is no reason for you to remain for all this—your presence in Carthak has nothing to do with being bored to death. Why don’t you go? No one will mind. Just remember to be changed and ready for the supper banquet this evening, and go nowhere that is not permitted.

  When she stuffed the note into her pocket, Zek woke from his after-lunch nap. We’re done now? he asked, hopeful.

  That was enough to decide her. Maybe they aren’t done, but I am, she told the marmoset. Leaning around Alanna, she caught the Duke’s eyes and nodded. He smiled at her, and Alanna gave her shoulder a pat.

  “Kit,” the girl whispered. “I’m leaving. Come on.”

  The dragon shook her head. She appeared fascinated by the speakers. Daine tugged her paw; Kitten shook her head again. With a shrug, the girl left her, and quietly made her way out of the room. Looking back as she let the door close, she saw her dragon climb into the vacated chair.

  Outside, she found herself in a long breezeway that opened on both sides to gardens. She sat on a marble bench with a sigh of relief, and lifted Zek down into her lap. “Amazing how much two-leggers can talk, isn’t it?” she asked him.

  “Given that the alternative to speech this time is war, I imagine talk is a little better.” Lindhall had followed her. He sat on the end of the bench and offered a hand to Zek. Curious, the marmoset went to inspect his fingers. “I would like to show you something of interest—something you would not see at home. Unless you had planned to return to the deliberations of the mighty?”

  “Goddess, no!” she exclaimed with a shudder, and picked up Zek.

  As they set off through the palace, Lindhall said, “I wanted to ask—is it true marmosets form monogamous groups in the wild? No one’s ever been able to actually observe them in their native wilderness. There are other tales, of course, such as the one that claims they vanish in plain sight and reappear in another part of the forest, which is clearly false—isn’t it?”

  Daine, politely waiting for him to finish, realized that he had. “Zek says they don’t vanish. They freeze. The way their fur is colored, they seem part of the tree. Or they zip around to the far side of the trunk and keep it between them and whoever is watching. And yes, they have just one marriage. Zek used to live with his wife and their three children before they were trapped.”

  Lindhall shook his head. “Wild things should remain in the wild. Down this corridor.”

  They now entered the heart of the palace, where throne rooms, reception halls, and waiting rooms were located. Lindhall stopped before a large double door that bore a brass nameplate: The Hall of Bones. The handles on each flap were very large bones of some kind. Daine and Zek touched one with curious fingers.

  “What do you know of fossils?” the mage asked.

  “They’re creat
ures and plants that lived so long ago no mortals remember them. There are some in the royal museum—shells, batlike creatures, fishes and such. Numair says there are others, skeletons of huge beasts called dinosaurs, but no one has found any in the Eastern Lands yet.”

  “Quite true,” replied Lindhall. He spoke a word in a language she didn’t know, and both door flaps swung inward. Daine squeaked; Zek darted under her hair. Peering at them from the shadows was a very large skull. Three horns sprang from the bony face: a short one, near the end of its nose, and two longer ones that pointed forward over the eyes.

  “Oh, you beautiful thing,” the girl whispered, and went up to it, hardly believing what she saw. She only came as high as one of the large eye sockets. “What is it?” With trembling fingers she touched the beaklike plate of bone that seemed to be the creature’s upper lip.

  Lindhall clapped. Overhead, throughout that immense hall, light-globes began to glow. “One of the horn-faced lizards. We call them lizards because they resemble lizards more than other creatures, but they didn’t act like our modern reptiles do.” Daine blinked up at Lindhall, who smiled. “This one is a great three-horn. All the horn-faced lizards had some type of facial protrusions. The three-horns and one-horns also had a simple or ornate bone frill behind the skull. This fellow was the largest of his family—the others varied from eighteen to twenty feet in length.”

  She saw a massive, curved fan of bone behind the long horns. “Neck armor?” she asked. The hand with which she touched the skull itched.

  “Apparently.”

  “And they weren’t lizards?”

  “No. The appearance was reptilian, but most were quite agile, and less vulnerable to changes in temperature than modern lizards are. They seem to have behaved more like birds than lizards. We know so much thanks to those seers who are able to look back in time. The real world has little use for them, but in a university they are in great demand.”

  “Nobility—” A slave had appeared in the doorway. Lindhall went to speak to him.

  Slowly enough that at first Daine thought she imagined it, the skull turned to train a single eye socket on her. The girl stared at it, appalled. She had missed that flare of white light in the flicker of the overhead globes. “Hold still,” she hissed, flapping her hands at it. “Quit moving!”

  The head cocked slightly to one side, as if to ask why she made such an odd request. Carefully the dinosaur raised a bony foot and wriggled its three toes.

  “Daine, are you all right here?” asked Lindhall. “There’s something I must tend to.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she replied, not taking her eyes from the skeleton. She watched it for some time after the mage left, but the bones’ period of movement was over.

  That was fun, Zek remarked. Why were you angry with it? Touch some more of them.

  Dead should stay dead, she replied silently and firmly. I will not touch any of them. To emphasize her point, she thrust her hands into her pockets, where they could start no more trouble, and looked around.

  To the right of the three-horn, where the large hall connected with a smaller one, she discovered a far different dinosaur. Ten inches tall, it stood beside a nest of eggs, some whole, some broken.

  “A mountain-runner lizard. We don’t know what killed him, but at least we kept him with his nest.” Lindhall had returned. “There’s an adult of his kind standing guard.” Daine looked where he pointed, and found a somewhat larger skeleton, eight feet long, peering at her. They were clearly the same animal, and there did seem to be a protective air about the big one. It stood in front of a doorway that led to a chamber full of smaller dinosaurs.

  “They almost look as if they could move, don’t they?” the mage asked.

  Daine winced. “How did you fit the bones together?” she asked. “Did you find them like this?”

  “The process is fascinating,” replied Lindhall. “It was developed by the School of Bardic Arts and the School of Magecraft. If you understand magical theory, you know that things once bound to one another retain the occult tie, even when separated. Knowing that, the bards and mages create special musical pipes. Played correctly, they call the bones together to form the original owner.”

  Daine nodded; she had seen Numair do the same thing with skeletons at home. Together she and Lindhall roamed the collection. Behind the three-horn she had briefly awakened, she discovered another, smaller three-horn, whose neck frill was larger and flatter and whose brow horns curved up, rather than pointed straight ahead. A brass plaque set into the base of his stand identified him as a bull three-horn, listing his height, weight, and the place he was found. Following this line of skeleton stands, which ran down the center of this branch of the hall, she discovered other horn-faced lizards, whose neck frills grew more and more ornate: a spiked three-horn whose frill was topped by large, curved spines; the thick-nosed horn-face with extra bone plates instead of a nose horn; and the so-called well-horned three-horn, who boasted down-turned spikes on his frill. None of them were less than eighteen feet in length, from nose to tail tip.

  “Don’t you wish you could have seen them when they were alive?” the girl asked Zek.

  The marmoset, as fascinated as she was, shuddered. Daine translated his answer aloud for Lindhall: “Only if they were grass eaters. Even so, I should prefer to see them from the top of a very tall tree.” The mage laughed at that.

  They saw bony-headed skeletons like giant, long-legged crocodiles, covered with back and head spikes and wearing solid bone clubs on their tail tips. All were more than ten feet long and belonged to a family called armored lizards. They gave way to cousins, plated lizards, each with leaf-shaped plates and spikes running along their backs. These, too, were giants, ranging from thirteen to thirty feet in length. Each one’s tail was laden with a collection of spikes that looked like a mace.

  “There’s so much learning here,” she remarked softly. “The king’s trying to build a university to equal yours, but it’ll take years. And when it comes to things like this . . .”

  “Once Carthak was famous largely for its treasures.” Lindhall’s voice was equally soft. “It was a citadel of learning, arts, and culture. It still has those things in abundance, but now the army and the navy garner the attention of the world and of the emperor.”

  When she glanced to her left, her jaw dropped. The skeleton before her, labeled Great Snake-neck, was ninety feet long. Its tiny head, at the end of an extremely long neck, stared down at her from nearly twenty-five feet in the air. With small teeth only at the front of a light jaw, and eyes that faced to the sides like the three-horns’, she knew it was a plant eater—“A very large plant eater,” she told Zek quietly. The marmoset, who had climbed on top of her head for a better look, agreed. Behind this one, she saw other snake-necks, though none so large.

  Near the snake-neck was another, frightening skeleton, for all he was only two-thirds as long as his neighbor. His eye sockets faced forward, and his heavy jaws bore a collection of sharp and jagged teeth, marks of a meat eater. He had cousins, too, Daine saw.

  They found a cluster of duck-billed skeletons and, behind them, dinosaurs who sported odd, bony crests on their skulls. One reminded her of a basilisk, only the skeleton had a long, freestanding head knob, like a large bone feather on its owner’s head.

  “Now there’s a hat,” she remarked. Zek sniffed with disdain.

  She had viewed nearly ten crested skeletons when she found a second hall in the rear of the collection. Curious, she ventured inside, Lindhall behind her. Here stood a double row of elephants. The four closest ones were strange-looking, with hides covered in shaggy fur and tusks curved up in an incomplete circle. The next four elephants had four tusks; two sharp ones on top, two smaller ones on the bottom.

  “Mammoths,” Lindhall told her. “The world used to be much colder, as I’m sure Numair has taught you. In those days, elephants needed fur.”

  “I don’t understand. Were these alive once? How are they here, in their skins
? Are they in a magical sleep?”

  “They were brought from ice fields in the distant south,” explained the mage. “They froze to death, and the ice preserved them until we could work the spells to keep them as they are. I use we in a general sense, since they were found a century to two centuries ago.”

  Daine stared at the great animals. “You have such wonders here. I almost wish I could stay longer and see them all.”

  “I noticed you said almost. I can’t say that I blame you, though I wish that were not the case. I have a feeling we could learn as much from you as you might learn from us.”

  Daine laughed at that. “I doubt it, Master Lindhall. I’m just a girl with wild magic, when all’s said and done. When I leave in six days, Carthak won’t even remember I was here.”

  Lindhall smiled. “But I will remember, and so will the emperor’s birds.”

  “I couldn’t ask for more,” she said with a grin.

  Nightfall saw her in a lilac muslin dress and the long, sleeveless surcoat that had just come into fashion in the north. Hers was gold silk, as frail as a butterfly’s wing, with a beaded hem to make it hang properly. The outfit made her nervous. She was sure that at any moment she would step on the hem and rip it out.

  She and the adults were in a reception room with floors tiled in squares of night-blue lapis lazuli and white marble. The talks were over for the day. While the guests sipped fruit juices and nibbled delicacies, Daine waited for Numair to finish a conversation with the ambassador from Galla. At last that gentleman bowed to him, and wandered off.

  Turning, Numair smiled. “You’re becoming a young lady.” He brushed a curl from her cheek. “If I’m not careful, you’ll be grown and married to a deserving fellow before I realize it.”