Dark Lord of Derkholm (39 page)

Elda shot Blade a friendly, talk-to-you-later look, and went straight on talking. “Anyway, I was telling you. Kit had just got over the top of the big tree when he yelled out that his strength had gone and he let go—just like that. And Blade and the swing fell straight down into the tree.” Blade shot Elda a look at that. He remembered this only too well. Elda swung her beak around defiantly at him and continued. “I was ever so small then—I was only six—and I yelled, but there was no one else anywhere near, and Blade was coming down through the tree, sort of bouncing on his back and screaming, and I had to do something. So I flew up into the tree and tried to catch him. And then we both came down through the tree, but much slower, and my wings didn't seem to help much. Dad said that was because they weren't properly developed yet. He was furious with me as well as Kit and Blade. And Kit made an idiot of himself going up and down over the tree howling out that it was an accident all afternoon, and Dad told him to pull himself together, but he couldn't. Anyway, we were two griffins and one human, and Dad treated us just the same, that's what I'm trying to tell you.”

Blade made another face at Elda. “Just the same?” he asked. “You got off lightly compared to Kit and me.”

“Hush,” said Elda. “
I'm
telling it.” She tossed her tiaraed head at him and turned back to the Pilgrim girl.

Beyond Elda, Mara was reclining on a couch. Geoffrey was perched on a stool beside the couch, and Mara and he were talking, very seriously. Blade did not want to interrupt them, any more than he wanted to listen to Elda's memories. He went over to the dais and listened to the music.

But it all went on for hours. Every so often Shona and the choir took a rest, sitting on the edge of the platform with filled rolls and drinks. Whenever they did, the Pilgrims all got up and changed tables. By the end of that long, long evening, each Pilgrim had listened to all the speakers, Miss Ledbury's notebook was three-quarters full, and every one of Blade's party had had a talk with Mara herself, though none for so long as Geoffrey. Blade's head ached, and he was sick of the rumble of voices and the sweet scents that seemed to come from the draperies. They
are
working hard, he thought, if they do all this every day.

Finally, however, the Pilgrims and Shona suddenly got up and went to bed, moving like sleepwalkers. Everyone else stretched and relaxed. Mara fished a dressing gown from under her couch, wrapped it around her, and came to hug Blade. Elda bounded up and pressed against the back of him.

“That was exhausting!” Mara said. “It's the double spell that makes it so tiring. You have to make sure they go away thinking they've been thoroughly seduced but still remembering all the things we've told them. It was a great help that you've got one who takes notes, Blade. Querida reckons that if we send everyone home knowing the real facts, some of them are going to make trouble there for Mr. Chesney. And I really think that some of this lot of yours might, Blade. You've got some rather interesting people here. Do you understand what we're trying to do?”

“Yes,” Blade said, although he still did not think it justified the clothes under Mara's dressing gown.

“And it's fun,” Elda said.

“I had a long talk with the young man Shona seems to have fallen for,” Mara said.

“Geoffrey. I saw,” said Blade.

“He's fallen for her, too. He seems very nice,” Mara said, and hesitated, as if she was wondering whether or not to say something else.

“But, Mum,” Blade protested, “it's not just that he's a Pilgrim; he's down as expendable!”

“Oh,” said Mara. “That … makes a difference. Then I think, for Shona's sake, you'd better make sure he survives.”

Blade thought of Prince Talithan efficiently running his sword into that Pilgrim during the battle. “How
can
I, Mum?”

“Do you know how to put protections around a person?” Mara asked.

“No!” Blade said crossly. “Nobody's taught me anything useful—you know that!”

“All right. I'll do it. I'll go and do it now,” Mara said wearily. “And I suppose while I'm at it, I'd better do the same for his odious little sister.”

“Sukey's not expendable,” Blade said. “I wish she were.”

Mara sighed. “Yes, but from what Geoffrey was telling me, she shouldn't be here. Her parents think she's on holiday in her own world. She seems to have twisted Geoffrey's arm to make him bring her with him.”

Blade went to bed thinking that this was entirely typical of Sukey. He could not understand why Reville seemed to like her so much.

In the morning Blade glumly regrew his beard while he was consulting the black book and the pamphlet to see where he was supposed to go next. Around by the Emirates on the way to the Inland Sea, he discovered. All right. He put his robes on and went to the kitchen, where Elda found some scissors and Mara cut him a hole in the beard for his mouth. Then they hung over him, making sure he had a large breakfast and enough food packed in his blanket to last a week. Mara told him what to do next. Blade said a reluctant good-bye and went out into the paddock, where all the horses were waiting, ready saddled. There, as Mara had told him, he raised both arms in a dramatic, wizardly gesture.

That side of Aunt's house rolled up like a blind, revealing the saloon, where all the Pilgrims and Shona were just finishing breakfast.

“Be thankful I am here to rescue you from vile enchantment!” Blade shouted.

They sprang up as if he had pricked them and came streaming sheepishly outside.

“Get mounted,” Blade told them. “We must hurry away.” And he rushed about making sure of everyone's girths, trying to avoid Shona. But it did no good. She waited by Blade's horse and grabbed his arm before he could mount.

“Was
I
enchanted, too?
Mother
did that to me?” she whispered angrily.

Blade could not think of anything to say but the truth. “She said you were going to make trouble.”

Shona was furious. Her cheeks colored, her mouth pursed, and she looked around into the opened-up saloon as if she had half a mind to storm back inside. But for some reason she changed her mind and marched away to her horse in a manner Blade knew was ominous.

He watched her anxiously all that day. He knew what Shona was like. She had waited weeks once to revenge herself on Don, and by the time she did, Don had forgotten the quarrel entirely and felt very surprised and injured. But this time Shona seemed to do nothing but chat happily to Geoffrey and sing songs for the Pilgrims. It never occurred to Blade that Shona might have grown up since then. By the end of the day he had decided that Shona must be plotting a long-term revenge of some kind. Maybe she was waiting until she saw Mara again, but she was quite as likely to be angry with Blade, too. Blade knew he had to be very wary. So he went on watching and made plans for what he would do in case Shona pushed him into a river or gave him something horrible to eat—or, worse, told the Pilgrims what age he really was.

The trouble was that Blade was so preoccupied with Shona that he had very little attention for the route. He relied on the way he knew where to go when he translocated. It never occurred to him that this might be an entirely different sort of sense of direction. He led the Pilgrims toward where he thought the Emirates were, with the result that he led them steadily in the wrong direction for the next three days. True, they arrived at a camp on the first two nights, but as Shona told Derk when he came looking for them, these were almost certainly the camps that were intended for tours on the other two routes. By the end of the third day they were crossing country that no Pilgrim Party had ever crossed before.

Some days after that Scales came coasting down into Derk's camp by the river and told him that Blade had disappeared.

N
OTHING SEEMED TO BE
going right for Derk. He was now so busy that he had not thought about his new homing pigeon for days.

Prince Talithan had found three more cities deserted when he tried to sack them, and he was, to Derk's mind, being extravagantly upset about it. “I have failed you, Lord,” he kept saying. And three angry wizards translocated in. One said that the pirates had demanded higher pay before they captured a single Pilgrim more, and the second wanted to know why the dragons had deliberately dropped his Pilgrims in the snow a day's walk from the dragon with the gizmos. The third complained that the Emir had no slave girls. “And my Pilgrims were
expecting
them,” he said. “They're talking of suing me.”

“How did they know what to expect?” Derk asked wearily. “Unless you told them.”

“They'd heard things from last year,” the wizard defended himself. “I may have dropped a hint or so, but they knew what I meant.”

“I'll take it up with Querida,” Derk promised. He sent the daylight owls to Querida with a message about it and also, hopelessly, asking whether Querida had invented a god yet. He came back from interviewing pirates and arguing with dragons to find, as he had half expected, that the owls had returned with a note signed by someone else, saying that Querida was very busy just now and would get in touch later. Derk glumly faced the fact that Querida had no intention of helping him.

He was tired. Any spare time he had was taken up with journeys to Derkholm, where at least two Pilgrim Parties arrived every day to confront him and push him into the balefire. The day after a battle, there were often as many as seven parties waiting for him. Derk was sick of falling backward into his trench, but he never had time to invent a different way of being killed.

The griffins were tired, too, and Pretty was bored. Pretty was so bored with the Wild Hunt that he started leading the dogs off in the wrong direction. Don got quite hysterical about it—even worse than Prince Talithan over the empty cities, Derk thought. But he forgave Don because it was borne in upon him that Don was too young really to be in charge of anything. He put Callette in charge of the Hunt instead, and Don wretchedly agreed to have another try at helping with the battles.

Then the geese replaced themselves with six pigs and vanished. Now not only was Callette furious, but they had six puzzled pigs getting under everyone's feet in the base. Every time he tripped over Ringlet, Derk hoped savagely that the geese had gone home and the dwarfs had eaten them. But when he flew Beauty to Derkholm to get tipped into his balefire, Derk found no sign of any geese, only increasing numbers of dwarfs. Scales seemed to have rounded up almost all of them. Look on the bright side, Derk thought. Kit's den was packed full of treasure, Old George was being quite a convincing wailing skeleton these days, and the demon turned up faithfully to terrify the Pilgrims at every confrontation. Derk gave up wondering why the demon was doing it. He was simply almost grateful.

He flew back to the base to find more things going wrong. Emperor Titus came apologetically to report that half his younger legionaries had resigned and gone home. “They all say their mothers are ill,” he said. “We sent to check, and it seems to be true. There's some kind of illness that only affects older women. We had to give them all compassionate leave.” And after the Emperor came the mercenary chief of the Forces of Good, swearing and cursing because every one of his female soldiers had deserted in the night.

Kit's brow jutted and Kit's tail lashed at this news. Derk could hardly blame him. It was a real puzzle how the Forces of Good could win convincingly when half of them were missing. Kit, Derk sometimes thought, was the only one not being a problem. Now he had stopped feeling so important, Kit had settled down and become almost sunny. Kit was the one who tried to joke Callette out of her fury over the geese. It was not Kit's fault, Derk thought, that this had only made Callette angrier.

But behind all this, Derk was increasingly anxious about Lydda. She ought to have come back from laying clues long ago. He kept hoping she had gone to Mara. In the end he sent Prince Talithan to find out. Mara would talk to Talithan, and it would take Talithan's mind off the disappearing citizens. But Talithan came back within the hour to say that Lydda was not with Mara and Mara was as anxious as Derk. “She says she will cause other lady wizards to search, Lord.”

Derk sent the daylight owls off to look for Lydda, too. Lydda was too young, just like Don, and he knew he ought not to have asked her to fly so far. He never would have asked her if he had not been ill.

He had just sent the owls off when Scales arrived with the news that Blade had disappeared. Derk's stomach twisted, and he was nearly sick with worry. At first he thought that the whole party, Shona included, had gone missing. “No. You misheard me,” Scales rumbled. The reason he knew Blade was missing, he said, was that while he was checking for dwarfs from the Eastern Range, he had flown across a Pilgrim Party wandering miles from anywhere a tour should be. “I dropped down and spoke to them,” he said. “Your Shona seemed to be in charge, and she told me. Some crisis in the night. Young Blade seems to have vanished in a clap of noise, taking two of the others with him.”

Blade now! Derk thought. Blade was too young, just like Don and Lydda. He ought to have refused to let Blade be a Wizard Guide, whatever the Oracle said. “Show me where they are on the map,” he said.