Angel Isle (43 page)

“And I’m going to be Captain Commander in the Women’s Regiment of the Imperial Army,” said Saranja. “I can’t be anyone grand, like you, because the Pirates probably know there aren’t any women generals, but there’s a lot of disaffection in the lower ranks of the army, Strick told us. I’ve seen a bit of fighting among the warlords beyond the Great Desert. But I’d better go and get the horses done, so I can dress the part too.”

Striclan’s thin lips moved into a smile as he watched her go.

“I’m looking forward to this,” he said. “Well, I’m Alkip Ruddya. I represent the Imperial Administration. I was Under-secretary in the department dealing with the registration and control of supernatural affairs, Magdep for short. I assembled our coalition at the request of my own Permanent Secretary and several of his colleagues of equal rank.

“There is a further point about yourself that you should know. Chararghi society was originally matriarchal. The men went off to hunt or fight and the women controlled the homestead. The trait persists. Even powerful men such as those we will be meeting have an instinct to respect women such as yourself.”

“We sound a formidable enough group,” said Maja, “few though we are. There are no professional magicians among us?”

“That is deliberate,” said Ribek. “One of the things we want to persuade the Pirates about is that they won’t be able to walk all over the Empire now that the Watchers are gone. So far they’ve just been nibbling away at the edges from the protection of the sea. They know almost nothing about the interior. So if they find that three of the four of us, who aren’t professional magicians, seem to have considerable magical powers…”

“But none of us have them. I certainly have nothing of the sort. The opposite, if anything.”

“You will appear to have them. Look, the simplest thing would be if I tell you how we hope the show will go. We aren’t in any hurry. It’ll be much easier for Benayu and Chanad if they’re close inland, where their powers are stronger. The Pirates are planning to anchor off Larg this evening and come ashore in the morning. All right?”

He was still talking when Saranja came back. The dress uniform of a female Captain Commander in the Imperial Army was a brass helmet with a purple plume worn over a shorter version of the standard head-scarf framing the face. Below that a dark olive jacket, tight-laced up to the collar, with gold epaulettes, belted in at the waist; short, many-pleated skirt over close-fitting breeches; black boots, belt and belt-pouch, highly polished. A light curved sword hung from the belt.

They’d all been sitting while Ribek talked. Striclan rose and kissed Saranja’s hand. She flushed, adding to the aura of romantic dash, but collected herself and turned to Maja, drew her sword and saluted her. The salute looked exactly right, long practiced, though it couldn’t have been anything she’d done before. As with Maja, she wasn’t acting the part, but being it. Her body knew how to do that.

“Thank you, Captain,” said Maja. “We are grateful that you were able to join us.”

They ate their midday meal off a table and sitting in chairs, while Benayu waited on them. He ate separately when they had finished. Maja’s old body told her that it was used to a nap at that point, so she had one, sitting upright in her chair, and woke refreshed. Then Ribek asked her permission to join her and they talked for an hour or more about their imaginary lives. He was a self-made man, she learned, having inherited a small water mill in a distant northern valley, done well by good luck and hard work, bought more mills and was now a wealthy industrialist with three children already in the business. To Maja, it all seemed perfectly real, as true as anything her buried self knew about him. And in another way he was still the same Ribek, himself through and through. He showed no sign at all of being overawed either by her high social standing or her formidable presence. As for herself, she had no need to invent. Every minute that passed, more of the real Lady Kzuva’s knowledge, her memories, her experience of the world was there, present on Angel Isle. She told Ribek the name of the pet greyhound she had had when she was a child. She couldn’t have done that when she’d woken.

Benayu had stood throughout a respectful distance away. At one point Maja had thought of beckoning him over to ask how long the effect of the potion he’d given her that morning would last, and whether it would be a good idea to renew it before they set off, but though his eyes had been looking toward where she sat he’d clearly been in one of his trances. Now, however, he came over with the salver already in his hands, and when she’d taken the cup and thanked him he turned to the others.

“Your pardon, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I think we should practice invisibility. It’s not as easy as you’d think, because you won’t be able to see each other. But if you all hold hands that’ll stop you bumping into each other. It makes it simpler for me, anyway. You don’t want to move around more than you can help, but if you have to you’ve got to remember where the others are and leave them room to get past things and so on. I may be too busy to put thoughts into your heads, so you’ll have to pass messages along the line by squeezing or shaking the next person’s hand. If you’ll please hold hands you can sort that out between you now, and then I’ll fetch the animals.”

Invisibility was, as he’d said, much harder than Maja would have thought. She was at the right of the line so that she could use her cane, and she knew where her hands and feet were in relation to herself, but not in exact relation to the ground she was standing on except by looking down through her own feet and seeing where the grass was pressed flat. And she couldn’t have told to within several inches where the end of her cane was. They practiced getting out of Benayu’s way without jostling each other when he walked toward them, and only got it right after several tries.

“I suppose that’ll have to do,” said Benayu at last, and they returned to visibility. “Here is your brooch, my lady. Shall I pin it on for you?”

“Please.”

The brooch was a silver plain bar bearing three horses, their bodies overlapping, grazing beside a tree. Even at that scale, Maja could tell which horse was which. She nodded and he pinned it onto her dress. She turned and saw that Rocky, Pogo and Levanter were no longer where they had been, though Sponge still lay there, drowsing untroubled.

“Well, there’s clearly no question of our sneaking up behind some general and peering over his shoulder while he looks at a map,” said Ribek. “Hello, there. Coming along for the ride?”

The last few words were spoken to a golden squirrel that had come scampering up behind, climbed his body as easily as if it had been a tree trunk, and was now perched on his shoulder. A small white owl floated soundlessly down and settled beside Saranja’s left epaulette. A dark green snake slid to Striclan’s feet. He picked it up and lifted it so that it could loop itself round his neck. Something brushed against Maja’s cheek. When she reached to investigate it clambered onto her forefinger. She inspected it through her eyeglasses—a large, furry-bodied moth with rich brown wings that flickered with purple sheen where they caught the light. She lifted it so that it could settle onto her head-scarf.

“It matches your eyes, my lady,” muttered Ribek.

She smiled, accepting the compliment.

“No doubt they have a purpose, but I think I must have dozed off.”

“We felt it might impress the Pirates if—”

But Ribek’s explanation was interrupted by Benayu.

“All set, ladies and gentlemen? I’ll be going ahead to choose a clear spot on the command deck for you. If you’d be so kind as to hold hands again…”

CHAPTER
24

T
hey vanished, animals and all, and Angel Isle was empty apart from the calling seabirds. Now, suddenly, the inward Maja asserted itself and a wave of apprehension swept through her. They must all have been feeling a good bit of adult anxiety but been too proud to admit it, in the case of the Lady Kzuva perhaps even to herself. This was different. This was a child’s terrors of being set in front of an audience of important men and women and being expected to perform some feat that would be far beyond her, even if she’d had the slightest idea how to begin. Without thought she squeezed Ribek’s hand for reassurance. He didn’t return the gesture but started to shuffle to the right, then realized his mistake and laughed aloud.

“False alarm,” he called. “Whoops!”

His grip on her hand tightened. Angel Isle vanished dim on her right. She felt a rushing motion, incredibly smooth, incredibly fast. She could see the glitter of ocean to her left, the glare of sky overhead, the mainland, but all hurtling away so quickly behind her that even with her younger eyes all detail would have been lost. The movement ended as instantaneously as it had begun, without any jolt or forward lurch of her body, and she was in an enclosed space unlike anything she had ever seen before. She tucked her cane under her arm and used her free hand to put her eyeglasses to her face.

They were in a metal-and-glass room more than twice as big as the kitchen at Woodbourne, but with three curved, outward-bulging walls that consisted mainly of large clear windows. One of these was immediately behind her. Through the one opposite her Maja could see two airboats floating along, a small one fairly near and a larger one in the distance, with blue and white banners flying from their bows.

There were a couple of dozen people in the room, four of them soldiers guarding the two closed doors in the straight, windowless wall to her right. These wore baggy lime-green uniforms and carried things that must be weapons, though they didn’t look as if they’d be much use for spearing or slashing or bashing anyone. Two more soldiers were sitting at a big table in the middle of the room, working at documents, another three were sitting at small fixed tables manipulating mysterious machines, and another was talking quietly into a shiny gadget he held in his hand. On her left, with their backs to the room, a dozen or more people were looking out through the single window that stretched almost the whole length of that wall. They were listening to a tall, pale, gaunt-faced man in a much smarter lime-green uniform as he explained to them something that was happening beyond the window. Looking at him, Maja saw at once why Saranja called the Pirates Sheep-faces. The language he was using was full of odd gargling sounds. Five of his audience were also in uniform, but the rest wore a variety of clothes, slightly odd in style, neat but dull. Three of them were women.

She sensed a presence behind her shoulder.

“Chanad?”
she said in her head.

“I am here. I have their magicians. I am about to remove the guards.”

A flicker of movement to her right caught her eye. She turned and saw that the armed men by the doors had vanished. She was certain that the doors themselves hadn’t moved.

Ribek squeezed her hand twice in quick succession, waited and squeezed again—the signal for “Ready?” She squeezed once—“Yes.” He let go of her hand and they were visible. The man talking to the gadget broke off, stared, and gave a shout. Everyone turned back to the room. There was a moment of astonished stillness. The men at the tables started to rise, somebody shouted an order, eyes turned toward the wall with the doors in it, expressions varied from baffled astonishment to equally baffled indignation, then several of the soldiers by the window made as if to rush at the intruders.

Maja gripped her cane at the center and held it horizontally in front of her in a gesture Benayu had taught her on Angel Isle. A pulse of yellow light traveled rapidly along it, creating an invisible barrier across the room. Every movement beyond it froze.

“Forgive the intrusion,” said Ribek. “Do any of you speak Imperial…? Yes?”

A young man at one of the desks had thawed into movement. He didn’t look like a Sheep-face. Perhaps, like Striclan, he was the child of parents whom the Pirates had bought or snatched from the Empire.

“I speak both languages, er, sir,” he said, “but I’m in Intelligence. There are professional interpreters aboard for the landings.”

“Please bring one of them to mind…. Excellent. Lady Kzuva…”

Maja clicked her fingers and a man appeared out of nowhere. His eyes were rheumy with sleep and he was wearing only his underclothes.

“Perhaps you’d better go and get dressed,” said Ribek. Maja clicked her fingers again. The man vanished.

“While we are waiting,” he went on, “would you apologize to the Syndics and officers for our intrusion and their temporary immobility, and tell them that Lady Kzuva will release them on condition that they will then listen to what we have to say.”

The man blinked and stared at Maja and spoke to the group by the big window. He was obviously saying a good bit more than Ribek had told him. Maja heard Lady Kzuva’s name, and guessed he was explaining who she was, and adding that to judge by their dress the other intruders were also fairly important people.

“You can lower the cane now,”
said Chanad’s voice in her head.

Maja did so, and the magic-stilled movements completed themselves. The men who’d been rushing to confront the intruders pulled up short. A dozen voices spoke together. A man shouted an order and the voices were silent. He turned to the interpreter and spoke again in a steady, level voice full of controlled outrage.

He was short, stocky and muscular, bald, with a pale, square, flattish face and pale blue eyes. Another Sheep-face. The creases in his uniform trousers and the pleats on the pockets of his close-fitting jacket were as straight and sharp as ironing could make them. There were two broad gold bars on his epaulettes. He was a formidable presence. The inner Maja would have been terrified of him, but Lady Kzuva studied him with interest. She didn’t like him much, but she recognized him as an equal.

“Supreme General Olbog asks who you are and why you are here,” said the intelligence officer. “He would also like to know what has become of the men who were guarding the doors.”

“The guards are elsewhere and unharmed,” said Ribek, pausing between sentences for translation. “We don’t want anyone hurt. There has been more than enough of that around Tarshu. We will introduce ourselves individually later. For the moment I will say that we are a delegation from various major interests in the Empire, and we are here in the first place to persuade you to call off your assault on Larg, or, failing that, to prevent it; and in the second place to negotiate with the Syndics and your military command on a process leading up to your complete withdrawal from the Empire. To clarify matters, I should add that the so-called Watchers have ceased to exist. The magicians you have aboard will probably have reported a major eruption of magical activity yesterday, some distance up the coast, off Barda. That was caused by our destruction of the Watchers.”

The final sentence was followed by a hush of astonishment. Several voices spoke together, all asking what sounded like much the same question. General Olbog remained expressionless, but turned to the intelligence officer and nodded to him to translate.

“The Watchers are destroyed? You did it?”

“We, at the instigation of the late President of the Grand Magical Council, who was recently returned from a long absence and on the verge of death…. Please wait for me to finish before you ask more questions.

“The first magical outburst was our destruction of the Watchers, the second the passing away of both the late President and the Guardian of Larg. Ah, your official interpreter is now dressed and ready. Shall we pause to allow him to collect his wits?”

General Olbog nodded and gestured. The soldiers moved smartly up to one end of the window and the Syndics drifted to the other. Maja’s hip was starting to ache with standing, but as she was turning to beckon to Benayu Ribek laid his hand on her arm.

“He’s going to be busy,” he muttered. “Chair? Right.”

The two groups by the window were keeping their voices down, but by the time Ribek had fetched a chair from the central table and helped her to sit snatches of what they were saying were whispering in Maja’s mind.

“Now we’ve seen it all. I’d like to see bloody Olbog match that.”

“Think they’re what they say they are?”

“The old lady’s pretty impressive.”

“I really fancy the soldier lass.”

“Just conjuring tricks.”

“Have you still got a connection on that, Lieutenant?”

“Yessir.”

“Don’t let on. I’ll call you in a minute. Come over here with a couple of documents.”

“Will do, sir.”

“And find out what the hell’s happening with our tame magicians. Supposed to have one here, weren’t we?”

“Will do, sir.”

“What’s with the menagerie? We’re not children.”

“My dad’s a bug-hunter. He’d give his soul for that moth.”

“Prevent the landing, the fellow said. D’you think they could really do that?”

“One in the eye for bloody Olbog. Hope he tries it.”

“It’ll take more than conjuring tricks.”

“Bring me the abort file, will you, Lieutenant.”

“Yessir.”

“Must say, I’d like to see our weapons in action after what we’ve paid for them.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing a couple of dragons—not too close, mind. Something to tell the kids.”

“Right, Lieutenant. Look over my shoulder. I’m showing you stuff in the file, right. You’re through to Attack Comm?”

“Yessir.”

“Tell them Code Nine Jiddi Nine. Immediate action. Got it? Yes, Pashgahr?”

“We are still moving faster than the air cover is able to. Troops will be landing without air cover.”

“Weren’t you listening? The Guardian of Larg has passed away. That means Larg must be without whatever defenses it may have had. Check, Intelligence?”

“Nothing on a Guardian as such in the files, sir. Speculation by the agent reporting lack of magical activity within and around Larg that some powerful force must be maintaining the situation.”

“Hear that, Syndic? No magic in Larg? Wasn’t in our briefing.”

“Fleet equipped to counter any magical activity they may meet, wasn’t it. Covers the point, I suppose?”

“Right, Pashgahr. How long before the boats are off, as of now?”

“We got it down to seventeen minutes forty in drill practice, General.”

“You take over the operations side then. I’ll spin things out here.”

“Very good, sir. I suggest, for the look of the thing, you get the Syndics to ask a question or two. Burdag is sound—he’s got a big holding in Gas Avionics in his sister’s name.”

“Good point. Time the bastards earned their keep instead of acting like we’re laying on a firework display for their amusement. All set? Interpreter?”

“I am ready, sir. I must apologize—”

“You can cut that out. Ask these people to tell us more about themselves and what proof they have of the authority they are claiming.”

“Everyone get all that?” muttered Ribek. “They’re playing into our hands. We’ve just got to get the timing right.”

“Find an excuse for Benayu to get me outside and disappear me,” said Saranja. “I’ll take Rocky, and if he keeps us invisible we can scout around and keep an eye on things.”

“We’ll need you back here when the moment comes.”

“Bennay, my brooch, please,” said Maja.

“Very good, my lady.”

He unpinned the brooch, placed it briefly between his palms and showed it to her before he pinned it back on. There were only two horses on it now.

The interpreter, a lanky, anxious young man in an ill-fitting uniform, turned toward them. He too didn’t look like a Sheep-face, but someone they might well have met at a way station on an Imperial Highway. Ribek nodded when he’d finished telling them some of what the general had said.

“As you wish,” he answered. “Would you begin, Lady Kzuva?”

Maja rose stiffly, stood leaning with both hands on her cane, and spoke directly to the group of Syndics. There was a pale-faced middle-aged woman among them that she liked the look of.

“I am the hereditary Landholder of Kzuva,” she said, “which is a large estate toward the north of the Empire and carries with it various offices and titles in the Imperial Household, and also considerable magical powers. I use these only when I must, as just now. I am not, of course, a professional magician. I have better things to do with my time, so I employ a woman for that purpose. Some of the renegades you have on board should at least have heard of me.”

She sat down and waited while the others introduced themselves in the roles they had talked about on Angel Isle. Ribek claimed to have inherited one particular magical power, but had never used more than a small part of it to maintain a regular supply of water through his millwheels. Striclan said he didn’t have any, as it was a condition of his job as Under-secretary in Magdep.