Dark Lord of Derkholm (27 page)

“Yes. They said all the other tribes of dwarfs pay the tribute, too,” Callette answered.

Of course they would do. Mr. Chesney was always thorough. Querida continued beaming, while her thoughts raced. So this was the way Mr. Chesney worked, by taking care to get a hold on all the most powerful beings in the world! Neat. She wondered how he had got a hold on the demons or if he had any bargain with the gods. That was something she must set the female wizards looking for quickly. She also wondered if Derk had the least idea of the meaning of this discovery. Mara certainly had, or she would not have sent Callette here. “And what was Derk going to do with the dwarfs after he had questioned them?” she asked.

Callette shrugged her wings up slightly. “I don't know. Nothing probably. He got in his hurry after he talked to them and told me to fly home and take Elda to Mum.”

“Are you going to see Derk again soon?” Querida asked.

“Yes,” Callette said. “He wants me in the base camp.”

So she was making it clear that Derk would miss her as well as Mara, Querida thought. The only thing, then, was to try to make this lovely griffin stay here voluntarily. This could be managed. “Then tell him,” she said, as if she were quite resigned to Callette's leaving, “to look out for any other odd thing that Mr. Chesney might have arranged and let me know at once if he finds anything. Tell him it's most important.”

“All right,” said Callette. She rose to her four feet, carefully unwrapped the pouch from her talons, and placed it on the furthest end of the table. “Here's the universe. I must go now.”

Querida's eyes flicked to it, gratified. It was most unlikely the spell to dissolve it would work once Callette had let go of the pouch. “You know, my dear,” she said, “this has made my day. Tell Mara and Derk that I'm most grateful. It's gone a long way to console me for having to let such a beautiful creature as you go.”

Callette stopped on her way to the door and looked at Querida across one glossy, barred wing. “Beautiful?” she said. “I'm not beautiful.”

Ah! thought Querida. The bait is taken. “I assure you that you are,” she said fervently. “You are one of the loveliest and most splendid creatures I ever set eyes on.”

“But I'm brown,” Callette objected. “Elda and Don and Lydda are golden.”

“Yellow gives me a headache,” said Querida. “Your coloring is infinitely more subtle.”

The feathers above Callette's beak jutted in a frown. “I think I'll ask Shona,” she said after a thoughtful pause. “Except she may be too used to me to tell.” She considered further. “But I thought you were like Mr. Chesney and never made jokes?”

“And here was I priding myself on my dry sense of humor!” Querida said.

Callette continued to frown at her over one wing for a moment. Then the frown melted back into the rest of her feathers. “You're cheating,” she said. “You're enticing me the way Mum entices tourists and trying to keep me here that way.”

“Only a little,” Querida protested—rather desperately, with a feeling she was fighting in the last ditch of her defenses. “For the most part I was telling you my honest opinion. You are my idea of the perfect griffin.”

“Then I will speak to Shona. Thank you,” Callette said. She bent her head and squeezed her way out of the conference hall.

Querida sighed out a hiss of breath and stared at the table. Fancy being bested by a griffin! She felt ill and old and full of losses. She hadn't felt as bad as this since the day Mara's father left her for Mara's mother. Long, long ago, that had been. Still, she had coped with her feelings then, and she could cope with them now. She squared her shoulders and reached for the blank pigeon slips. Now that she knew what to tell the women wizards to look for, she had better tell them at once.

S
CALES CAME BACK
the following morning, dangling two protesting hampers of geese and accompanied by a snowy, gliding echelon of daylight owls. Perched between the saw edges on his shoulders, and looking rather the worse for it, was Derk. Shona screamed with delight and ran out from among the trees. As soon as Scales had tossed the hampers down—honk,
yatter,
SCOLD!—and made a rather heavier landing than he nowadays did, Shona hurried to help Derk tenderly down.

“Oh, Dad! You've lost weight! And you look chilled to the bone!”

“Only more or less cut in half. I don't recommend dragon riding,” Derk said. “Thanks, Scales. Can I offer you a Friendly Cow?”

“No, thank you,” Scales rumbled. “I told you. I hunted on the way, for the first time for three hundred years. I had forgotten both the pleasure of it and what skill it took.”

Derk turned as Kit and Don came bounding up, with Blade hurrying in the rear. They had all three hung back a little because they were fairly sure they were in for a scolding. But Derk beamed at them all. “You seem to have been coping rather well. Great doings. And whichever of you asked those dwarfs what they were doing did a really smart thing.”

“That was me,” said Don. “But Blade asked, too. Anyone would. It was pretty queer.”

“You're right,” said Derk. “It was pretty queer. Scales came and told me about it, and then we flew out to ask them some questions. Then we had to go back and send Elda and Callette to Mara. It's been a busy night. Why isn't Barnabas here? I thought he was supposed to be helping you.”

“We didn't really tell him you were ill,” Shona confessed.

Blade simply stood there, grinning increasingly widely as he realized that Scales could not have eaten those dwarfs after all, not with Dad there. Derk looked at him, wondering why he was so quiet. “What happened to the dwarfs in the end?” Blade asked, to make absolutely sure.

Derk laughed. “We gave them a change of destination—Scales's idea—and sent them to Derkholm. We told them, quite truthfully, that it's the Dark Lord's Citadel. They were quite pleased because it wasn't nearly so far to go.” This more or less set Blade's mind at rest, although he felt slightly dubious when Derk turned to Scales and said, “I suppose you'll want to be off looking for the rest of the dwarfs with tribute now?”

“I shall help you get these murderers into their barracks first,” Scales replied. “I can't see how you would get them there without a dragon to drive them.”

“I expect I'd have thought of something,” Derk said comfortably. “But I would be very grateful for your help.”

They got ready to march, accompanied now by the whole flock of geese and with the owls riding on the bundles piled on the spare horses. Shona willingly gave up riding Beauty. Beauty and Pretty were so pleased to see Derk again that they nuzzled around Derk and became quite a hindrance to him. “You wouldn't be half so pleased if you knew my plans for you,” Derk told Pretty, rubbing Pretty's forelock. “Your wings have grown, haven't they?”

The trouble was that the new arrivals had left them one horse short and with three empty hampers to carry. Derk thought briefly and then told Blade to pack all the leftover bundles into the hampers and translocate to the next camp with them. It was one of those neat solutions Dad was so good at, Blade thought, ramming things into creaking wickerwork. And he was going to have a very boring day because of it, waiting about in the next camp for the rest of them to arrive.

On the other hand, he thought, as Scales thrust his great snout under the magic dome and drove the soldiers forth with his usual roar of “MARCH, SCUM!” it would be good to get away from those soldiers. As they came streaming out of the dome, Blade could feel them hating and fearing his father in a way that was beyond even the way they hated Kit. They were stark terrified of Scales, and a wizard who so cheerfully rode on Scales's back they assumed to be even more horrifying than Scales himself. It was not pleasant to feel all those minds directing hate at Derk.

Blade laid himself facedown across the three hampers. Translocation might be the thing he was really good at, but he had to be touching everything he wanted to move. And as Kit had discovered by experimenting a year ago, if the thing Blade was touching was made of iron, then Blade could not move it or himself either. Blade was glad Kit had found this out. There were two spades among the bundles. Blade had made sure they were well wrapped up, right inside everything else, before he lay on the hampers.

He whisked himself onward and away. Scales's roaring, Kit's yells, and the sound of dogs, cows, and tramping feet stopped as if Blade had quite suddenly gone deaf. The sound that replaced them was that of water rushing a little way off. Blade looked up.

To his surprise, this was obviously the permanent barracks. It stood above him on top of a gray, shaly hill, a very much bigger misty dome than the ones he had so far seen. Below the hill, a wide gray river rushed in a shallow slaty bed. There were fir trees growing up the hillside beyond the river, and behind these Blade could see the mountains, still not very near. For a moment he wondered if he had made a mistake in translocating. But when he looked into that part of his mind that did magical things, he knew this was indeed the next camp on the line of march. So it had to be right. Well, Kit had the map, not Blade. Blade had not attended much to how far they had gone. He got off the hampers and went down to the river, where he stood for a while chucking stones into it with loud watery
clunks
and trying to work out how he felt now that Dad seemed to be in charge again.

In a way it was a great relief. Blade did not need to feel rushed and worried anymore. There was no need any longer to keep thinking of all the things that might go wrong. Derk could do that now. But Blade did not feel as carefree as he expected. The loose, easy feeling he had as he stood there throwing stones struck him as rather babyish. And Dad had made him feel even more babyish by ordering him off here with those hampers. Blade hated being pushed around. He found he wanted to think of things for himself, then do them. He wondered if Kit felt the same. Kit had been really subdued when they saw Derk coming.

Blade strolled back to the hampers with the flat river stones clacking under his feet. Then, because he could see a wide opening in the magic dome, he went crunching up the hill to the barracks. It was always a funny feeling inside the bubble of mist, warm and windless and cut off, and Blade found the place rather depressing with its rows of raw wooden huts, all empty. But there must be someone here. There was a horse tied to a railing outside the big hut in the distance, and Blade could hear another, irritably shifting its hooves somewhere at the back of things. One of the horses must belong to Barnabas.

Blade crunched over to the big hut—where the horse gave him a glum look—and put his head in through the open door. It was raw new mess in there. The place was clearly meant to be the cookhouse and eating hall, but the huge stove had its iron chimney leaning against it, not yet connected to the hole in the ceiling, and the tables and chairs were stacked like timber at one end of the room. In between, there were numbers of big packing cases, which Blade supposed must be full of cups, plates, or even food. The owner of the horse was sitting on one of these big wooden boxes eating breakfast, or possibly lunch, from a silk handkerchief spread on the knees of his green velvet trousers. He was a tall dark man, beautifully groomed, and a total stranger to Blade.

“Who are
you?
” Blade blurted.

The man looked up. “I return you the same question,” he said, in a calm, unfriendly way.

“I'm Derk's son, Blade,” Blade told him.

“Conrad the Bard,” replied the man. “Does your presence mean that the Dark Lord has arrived?”

“They'll be here this evening. And,” Blade told him, “you don't want to be inside here when the soldiers come in. They'd kill you.”

“I am aware of that. My business is not with them,” Conrad said coldly. “What are you doing here yourself?”

“I'm looking for Wizard Barnabas,” Blade explained.

Conrad shrugged. “I know no such person. There's a drunk in a hut at the back who might know. He seems to have been here for some time.”

“I'll ask him then,” said Blade.

He turned to leave. The bard called after him, “This camp is in the wrong place. Did you know? It's miles too far south. I had trouble finding it.”

“Nothing to do with me,” Blade answered. But that did explain why he had been so puzzled, he supposed. He crunched around to the back of the cooking hall.

The horse standing tied outside one of the row of small huts there looked utterly miserable. The hut was obviously meant to be a latrine, but when Blade opened its door, there was no hole dug in its floor or any other provision. Barnabas was lying snoring inside a sleeping bag on the ground. There was a barrel beside him which, when Blade rocked it, seemed to be empty. The inside of the small hut smelled like a brewery.

“Pooh!” Blade nudged Barnabas with his toe. It was almost a kick really. He had to do it several times more before Barnabas rolled over, sat up, and gazed vaguely at Blade. Barnabas's curls and his beard looked wet. His eyes were red. His normal genial expression had turned into a senseless grin. “Barnabas!” said Blade. “You've got to get up. The soldiers are coming, and this place isn't more than half finished.”