The Summer Palace

THE
SUMMER
PALACE

 

 

 

TOR BOOKS BY LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS

 

THE OBSIDIAN CHRONICLES

Dragon Weather

The Dragon Society

Dragon Venom

 

LEGENDS OF ETHSHAR

Night of Madness

Ithanalin's Restoration

 

Touched by the Gods

Split Heirs
(with Esther Friesner)

 

THE ANNALS OF THE CHOSEN

The Wizard Lord

The Ninth Talisman

The Summer Palace

VOLUME THREE OF THE
ANNALS OF THE CHOSEN

LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
New York

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

 

THE SUMMER PALACE: VOLUME THREE OF THE ANNALS OF THE CHOSEN

 

Copyright © 2008 by Lawrence Watt-Evans

 

All rights reserved.

 

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

 

www.tor-forge.com

 

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Watt-Evans, Lawrence, 1954–

The summer palace / Lawrence Watt-Evans.—1st ed.

  p. cm.—(the annals of the Chosen ; v. 3)

“A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”

ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1028-6

ISBN-10: 0-7653-1028-7

I. Title

PS3573.A859S86 2008

813'.54—dc22

2008005307

 

First Edition: June 2008

 

Printed in the United States of America

 

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To William Sanders,
for making my life more interesting

Thanks to Brian Thomsen, Russell Galen, Kristin Sevick, Deborah Wood, and Terry McGarry for making this series better than it might otherwise have been; and again, my thanks to Timothy S. O'Brien for essential aid in world-building.

THE
SUMMER
PALACE

Erren Zal Tuyo, also known as the Chosen Swordsman, or simply Sword, stood in the late afternoon shadows of a Winterhome street, head tilted back, and stared up at the sunlit face of the Eastern Cliffs. He could see a hawk perched on a bit of ledge a few hundred feet up, and a few strands of vine clinging to the rock here and there; rivulets trickled down the stone, leaving streaks of moss and lichen.

Those gray stone cliffs loomed thousands of feet above the town, blocking out almost half the sky. Although they could be seen for a hundred miles or more, Winterhome was built directly under them, at the foot of the one and only crooked path that led from the sheltered realm of Barokan to the vast, windy Uplands above.

Millennia ago, a relatively small triangular portion of that immense, almost vertical face had crumbled, and a few centuries later, human beings had managed to make a trail that led up across those hundreds of feet of fallen stone. It zigzagged up the cliff itself and then turned up the wedge-shaped canyon formed by that long-ago collapse.

That was the only road that connected the warm, wet lowlands of Barokan to the cool, dry plains above, and every year, when the weather turned cold, the several hundred nomadic Uplanders made their way down that narrow path, to spend the winter in the town of Winterhome, in the great guesthouses the Host People maintained for them.

No one, they said, could survive the harsh winters of the plateau.

No one ever had, at any rate.

And when the spring thaw came, the Uplanders journeyed back up
to the plateau to resume their normal life, pursuing the great flightless birds called
ara
across the endless open plain of the highlands.

For centuries, only Uplanders had ever climbed that trail.

Only Uplanders had seen the lands above the cliffs.

But then Artil im Salthir, the Red Wizard, had become the Wizard Lord, the magical protector of Barokan, and he had decided that he wanted to escape the stifling summer heat of Winterhome—heat that had not been so bad under previous Wizard Lords.

For hundreds of years the Wizard Lords had controlled the weather in Barokan, and had kept the summers tolerable, but Artil im Salthir believed that Barokan's magic was fading away, and that people needed to learn to live without it. He had relinquished control of the weather, and now allowed the
ler
of the sky, the spirits that controlled the weather, to do more or less as they pleased; under his reign rain fell in the daytime as often as at night, the winters were colder than his predecessors had permitted them to be, and the summers were hotter than they had ever in mortal memory been before.

Artil did not even use his magic to cool himself or his court; instead he had ordered the building of a Summer Palace in the Uplands, at the cliff's edge a few miles to the north of the trailhead. He took refuge from the heat up there, outside the lands he had sworn to defend.

He did not seem to see anything unreasonable in avoiding the hardships he let befall his fellow Barokanese, or in building one of his palaces in a place where he had no authority and his magic did not operate. Perhaps he felt he had earned this special privilege by the changes he had wrought in Barokan.

Sword could not see the Summer Palace from his present vantage. It was not visible from Winterhome; nothing atop the cliffs could be seen at this angle. One small corner of one terrace of the palace did project out over the edge, and could be seen from the foot of the cliff a couple of miles to the north, around a curve in the cliffs, but not from Winterhome; the palace was not directly above the town.

Still, visible or not, Sword knew it was there. He had visited it once, something over a year ago, and he had seen it from below several times, from points west and north of where he now stood.

The Wizard Lord was not up there now. He had already descended the cliffs for the year and was back at the Winter Palace, in the heart of Winterhome, half a mile north of Sword, at the foot of the trail to the Uplands. The Uplanders would not come down to the guesthouses for at least another two months, but the Wizard Lord did not wait for the snows, only until the worst of the summer heat had passed. He had returned to Barokan a few days ago.

It was hard for Sword to remember just how recently that had been. So much had happened in those few days!

The Leader of the Chosen and the Chosen Scholar—Boss and Lore, as Sword called them—had gone to speak to the Wizard Lord regarding his recent actions, his defiance of tradition, his killing of certain wizards.

Both of them had been taken prisoner, in violation of law and custom.

The Wizard Lord had had no right to do that. The Chosen had simply been doing their job, defending Barokan. It was what the Chosen had been chosen
for.

Centuries ago wizards had run wild across Barokan, raping and pillaging, fighting each other in staggeringly destructive magical duels, terrorizing the population at every turn. Their magic had enabled them to ignore all restraints.

Some of them, however, had taken it upon themselves to place restraints on their brethren, restraints that could not be ignored. They had formed the grandiosely and inaccurately named Council of Immortals, and chosen one of their number to become the first Wizard Lord. That role brought with it the most powerful magic that the Council could bestow, which the Wizard Lord was charged with using to bring rogue wizards to order; any wizard who refused to cooperate with the Council, any wizard who killed or raped or stole, the Wizard Lord was expected to kill. Other criminals who fled into the wilderness, away from the isolated towns that composed Barokanese civilization, were also considered the Wizard Lord's legitimate prey.

There was no appeal, no refuge, from the Wizard Lord. The
Council had deliberately made him too powerful for any other wizard to control.

But they had realized that this power could lead to tyranny. While a single uncontrollable Wizard Lord was preferable to hundreds of lesser wizards running amok, it was still not desirable.

So they had created the Chosen, a band of heroes given limited and specific magic that would permit them, in theory, to kill the Wizard Lord. Originally there had been only three, taking roles now known as the Leader, the Seer, and the Swordsman, but over the centuries others had been added: the Beauty, whose role was to distract any males who might interfere; the Thief, who could pick any lock and find his way into any fortress; the Scholar, who remembered flawlessly every true thing he had ever heard or read; the Archer, who was to missile weapons what the Swordsman was to handheld ones; and the Speaker, who could hear and understand all the
ler
of Barokan.

Ordinarily, the Chosen were to do nothing with their abilities; they were expected to go about their lives, minding their own business. But if a Wizard Lord turned to evil, or went mad, thereby becoming a Dark Lord, the Chosen were to gather and remove him from power, through either abdication or death.

Most Wizard Lords behaved themselves.

Most of the Chosen lived out their lives without ever being called upon to dispose of a Dark Lord.

In seven centuries Barokan had suffered only nine Dark Lords, three of whom surrendered their role peacefully when confronted by the Chosen.

Six Dark Lords, though, had had to be killed. Most recently, a mere four or five years ago, Sword himself had slain the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills. He had managed this despite the treachery of the then-Leader of the Chosen, Farash inith Kerra; despite the failure of the then-Chosen Thief to play her role; and despite the last-minute cowardice of the then-Chosen Seer.