Dark Lord of Derkholm (31 page)

“Oh, you needn't bother!” Blade kept saying, slightly to the side of each new lady. It was hard for him to look at them. Their clothes were so very gauzy that he knew he would stare and gape quite rudely if he once started looking properly.

“No trouble,” they answered, laughing. “Now you've arrived, this is our last day here, so we don't mind a bit.”

Another pair of ladies came to Blade with a tiny cup of very sweet coffee and a wide tray of sticky cakes. “Take the green ones,” the lady with the cakes advised him. “Those are the ones the griffin said were godlike.”

Blade forgot to tell her she needn't bother. He even looked at her. “
Lydda
was here?”

“Oh, yes!” they all said. “And we want you to tell us all about her. Did your father really make her?”

Blade enjoyed himself even more after that, telling them about Lydda and the other griffins, while they sat around him in a half circle with their hands clasped around their gauzy knees—except for the lady who had washed Blade's socks, who was now darning them—and stared at him with wide, beautiful eyes. He felt as godlike as the cakes.

And then they suddenly all stood up. “We have to go now,” said the one with his socks. She passed the socks to him, neatly mended. “Tell the Emir that there are going to be no more slave girls from now on, here or anywhere else.”

“I—ah—” Blade began, thinking he ought to explain that the Emir was not behaving as if he would listen.

But they were all gone. They had not left by any of the doors. The room was simply empty apart from somebody's silk scarf slowly fluttering to the tiled floor in a warm blast of scented air. It felt like a mass translocation to Blade. He was still wondering where they could have gone when the scarf reached the floor and became a folded piece of paper, lying on the tiles. Blade padded over and picked it up. It was, to his astonishment, a note from his mother.

“Where are all my slave girls?” thundered the Emir, just as Blade had finished putting on his socks. The Emir seemed quite normal now. He came rushing into the empty room with Derk behind him and stared about irately, more or less as anyone might who was suddenly minus twenty pretty ladies.

Blade, rather hesitantly, told him what the sock-darning lady had said.

“But there are always slave girls!”
the Emir howled. “The tourists
expect
them!”

Derk was looking weary. “This is something you have to deal with yourself, Your Highness,” he said. “We have to go to Chell. Perhaps you could consider hiring some girls.” At this the Emir began shouting that hired girls were not slave girls, and Derk turned wearily to Blade. “Blade, if you would.”

Blade took hold of his father's sleeve and brought them north a long way to where Derk had said Chell was. “They translocated,” he said as they arrived. Chell was perched in front of them on a hill, crowned with a castle and surrounded by vineyards. “Hey, it's beautiful!” Blade said. “Are they really going to destroy it?”

“Chell and nine others,” Derk said. “That's the tours for you. Who translocated?”

As they walked uphill between the vines to the city, Blade told Derk about the ladies. “I think the one who darned my socks must have been a wizard,” he said. “She had the feel—Oh, and she left a letter from Mum.” He passed the note to Derk.

Derk's face sagged as he read it. “So your mother remembers that Scales burned me. Good of her.” He passed the note back.

He looked so strange that Blade said, “Are you all right, Dad?”

Derk just grunted and took hold of a bunch of grapes hanging out over the path. “Ripe,” he said. “Looks like a good vintage, too. I suppose they're leaving them because of the siege. Barnabas would cry at this waste. I'll see if I can save the grapes.”

“Don't you want to talk about Mum?” asked Blade.

“No,” said Derk. “I want to see what's wrong in Chell.”

But they could find nothing wrong in Chell. Inside the walls everyone was going cheerfully about the business of preparing arrows and making armor, just as they should have been. Derk and Blade were shown up to the castle, where they were met by the Duchess of Chell, who seemed quite resigned to losing her city and her grape harvest.

“It's the way it goes these days, Wizard,” she said. “I'm sorry the duke's not here to meet you himself. He'd tell you the same. Can I offer you any refreshment?”

Derk refused, on the grounds that they were both full of the Emir's sticky cakes, and they went away again, through the city and downhill among the vines. “There
is
something wrong,” Derk said, “but I'm blowed if I can see what. Could you?”

“I thought,” Blade said doubtfully, “that they all seemed a bit too cheerful.”

“Me, too,” Derk agreed. “No regrets even about these grapes. But it's nothing you can pin down. Let's see if Prince Talithan's noticed anything. He's doing the besieging. He must have been and talked to them, too.”

“How do you get hold of him to ask him?” said Blade.

“He's an elf, and he's sworn allegiance,” Derk said. “He should come when I call him. I hope.” He stood still in the dusty rutted road between the vines and called out, “Talithan! Prince Talithan, I need you!”

After a short while, during which Blade was certain Derk was just making a fool of himself, a blue-green misty light swung toward them in the road like a door opening, and Prince Talithan stood there bowing. “Forgive me, my lord. I was far to the south, discussing the siege of Serata.”

“That's all right,” said Derk. “If you're on Serata, you must have been to Chell and made all the arrangements here already.”

“A week ago, lord,” Talithan said. “All seems in order, I have my list of expendables, and my elves are armed and ready. We shall sack each city between the battles at your side in Umru's land.”

“Er—you'll find the battlefield is actually about fifty miles south of where it should be,” Derk said. “But how was Chell? Did everything strike you as in order here?”

“I found nothing wrong.” Talithan was clearly puzzled to be asked. “Methought the duke seemed depressed, but that I understood. He was about to lose a city and a good vintage.”

“Ah, well,” said Derk. “It was worth a try. See if you can save these vines if you can.”

Talithan bowed. “I had that thought myself, Lord.”

When Prince Talithan had retreated away through his misty door, Derk shrugged. “Maybe that man from Chell was an alarmist. Back to camp, Blade.”

They returned to chillier, grayer climate and a great deal of bustle. High Priest Umru had made them a thank-you present of a set of tents. Don was galloping about showing the young priests who brought them exactly where each tent should be set up. Very priestly tents, they were, white and embroidered with the emblems of Anscher.

“Not exactly right for a Dark Lord,” Derk said, “but I won't grumble.”

Inside the magic dome on the hill, the battle spells now seemed to be working. The men in black were exercising, doing sword practice, or marching off to the cookhouse, almost as if they were real soldiers. Derk nodded to Barnabas, who nodded cheerfully back.

The main activity, however, was around Kit. Kit was in his element. He had maps, plans, and lists spread out and pinned down with flat stones near the river, and he was surrounded by people, all listening to him attentively. “Your fanatics are lined up here,” Kit was saying to a priest. “Keep them back in the trees until midday.” Blade saw King Luther and Titus and the werewolf among Kit's listeners, but there were many others he did not know, including some elves, several dwarfs, a sturdy man holding a helmet who was probably a mercenary, a group of strange white-faced people almost as skinny as Old George, and numbers of men in gold earrings wearing a fur draped across one shoulder. Around them, less important people came and went as Kit sent them off on errands. A mercenary came in at a run as Blade watched.

“That stream does run north and south.”

“Damn,” said Kit, and made a note on a map. “Someone—you in the fur—go and find out all the places it can be crossed. I don't want to waste strength defending fords. The legionaries may have to dig it deeper.”

“They can do that,” said Titus. “But what's the timing of my attack on the Dark Elves?”

Derk watched with a broad smile. Kit's eyes were bright, and his neck eagerly arched. “You know,” Derk said to Blade, “I think getting Kit to plan the battles may have been an inspiration. How's Shona?”

Shona could not have been more of a contrast to Kit. She was still sitting staring at nothing. She did not seem to notice Callette crouching protectively beside her, nor did she look up when Pretty scampered past, showering them both with gravel as he played tag with the dogs. Blade went over to her, but she did not look at him either. He sat down beside Callette.

“Who are the people with the white faces?”

“Vampires,” said Callette. “I don't like them. They look at your forelegs and say, ‘Juicy wrists.'”

“Whose side are they on?” Blade asked.

“Ours, I think,” said Callette. “They look quite wicked.”

F
ROM THEN ON IT
was all bustle, preparing for the first of the battles. Blade could not understand how his father found time to make drawings and calculations for carrier pigeons in the midst of it all.

“It keeps me sane,” Derk said mildly. Or drives me mad another way, he added secretly. The trouble with pigeons was that they had no brains to speak of and no room to add any. Derk experimented, in between crises, with putting an extra brain somewhere in the middle of the pigeon, but that seemed to mean that the poor creatures would have even more trouble getting airborne than Lydda did. Perhaps they should fly by magic, somewhat in the way dragons did, he thought, as Scales flew in to report that he had moved the purple dragon six miles and one furlong to the southeast, and then took off again to search for dwarfs and missing soldiers.

At dawn, two days before the battle, Talithan revolved abruptly out of his misty doorway, looking pale and distressed, and crunched hurriedly to Derk's priestly tent. Pretty careered over to him, whinnying with pleasure, but Talithan put him gently aside. “Lord, I have failed you over Chell,” he said as Derk came to the tent flap.

Derk was in the middle of shaving and not wholly awake. “Lost the grape harvest, did you?” he said. “Not to worry.”

“No, no. We saved the grapes. Indeed,” said Talithan, “the city of Chell stands in every way whole and entire, save for its people. That is my failure.”

“Been a massacre, has there?” Derk asked. His heart sank.

“Oh, no, indeed!” Talithan cried out. “There were no people there at all—no citizens, that is, Lord. We found streets, halls, markets, houses all empty, and not one soul to be discovered. Thinking they must be crammed within the castle, we stormed our way thither—setting the illusion of fire on houses as we went, for appearance's sake—but within the castle were only ten parties of Pilgrims, and the wizard with each party hard pressed to conceal his own group from the rest in all that emptiness. And right angry they were, for their orders are that each party should believe the town besieged for its benefit alone. And upon the urging of these wizards, we stormed our way downward into the bowels of the dungeons, pretending to pursue the tourists. There we found the Duke of Chell locked in a dungeon, but no other soul besides. The wizards are seething angry, Lord.”

“I'd better go and calm them down.” Derk sighed. “Blade! Saddle Beauty for me. Don't worry, Prince. I consider you did everything you could to retrieve a very peculiar situation. But I'd better find out what happened in Chell. Does the Duke know?”

“He says he found himself seized and imprisoned, but he knew not by whom,” Prince Talithan said. “He had been in the dungeon for days. But where the citizens went, he knew not. Is it true I have not failed you, Lord?”

“It is true,” said Derk. He repeated this that evening when he came back totally mystified. Chell was completely empty, except for the Duke, gloomily sitting in the castle. The townspeople had gone. They had taken all the food and most of their belongings, but they had left no tracks. Derk spent most of the day flying Beauty in wider and wider circles around the city, hoping to locate the people, but there was no sign of them. “I don't understand it!” he told Prince Talithan. “You wouldn't think we could mislay several thousand people, but we surely have.”

Beauty was too tired that night for Blade to ride her out on the Wild Hunt. Blade let the geese out of the hamper after they had performed as avians and sat on it beside Shona. He had promised Callette he would look after Shona until the Hunt got back. Shona was still pale and wretched, although she ate a little and even talked sometimes. Blade wished Lydda were here to look after Shona. Everyone else was too busy. Callette was doing her best, but even she was swept up in the mounting bustle and excitement as Kit prepared to stage the battle.