The Witling (13 page)

A soft yet defiant voice spoke from behind Pelio. “There is other choice.” Ionina’s interruption stopped Shozheru cold. No nobleman had ever addressed him so abruptly, much less a commoner, much less a witling. Pelio turned to look at the girl. Ionina was not cringing. She looked levelly at Shozheru, and her strange beauty held him motionless. But when she spoke again, her words broke the spell—in fact, provoked quickly suppressed laughter through the crowd:

“Pelio will travel across the Great Ocean soon, and you will have rid of him.”

The king-imperial’s body straightened as he gathered his powers. “Do not mock me!” His voice was shrill and womanish but there was death in his face, and at that moment Ionina should have fallen dead, the interior of her brain or heart jumbled into a nonfunctioning mess. Instead, Samadhom gave a pained yelp and rushed clumsily to her side.

The girl continued, her voice tense and argumentative. Didn’t she know how close she’d come to death? “I do not mock you. I speak truth.”

Shozheru came down from his rage, his body bending back into its usual infirm posture. For the first time he seemed aware of the onlookers. He glared weakly at the three witlings and said, “We will discuss this in private. Now.”

The crowd parted silenty before them as they walked to the transit pool.

Shozheru’s study was in the western foothills of the palace mountains. Beyond the open windows, brightly lit greenery stretched half a mile to where the land dropped away to the depths of the equatorial rain forest. Inside, the room was plain, its only ornamentation a collection of small paintings—portraits of Shozheru’s forty-seven predecessors. Even the table at the center of the room was devoid of the carven gargoyles so popular nowadays. Except for the addition of four portraits, the room had remained unchanged for nearly a century, since the Teratseru period—when simplicity had been thought elegant.

The study was very crowded at first, before the king ordered his advisers and all the guards to leave. In another time, Pelio would have been greatly amused at those advisers’ consternation; they came close to angry argument with their king. But finally they left. Only five people were left then: Aleru and the king on one side of the room, and the three witlings on the other.

Shozheru set his palms on the deeply varnished surface of his desk and stared at his son for a long moment. The king seemed more rational, more resolved than before. “She says I have a third choice, Pelio.” He didn’t look at Ionina as he spoke. “She says you are going to ‘travel across the ocean,’ and leave the way to succession open to Aleru.”

Pelio looked down the table at Ionina and Adgao. The girl looked back at him with that dark, mysterious gaze of hers, and Pelio knew she hadn’t been mocking anyone: her witling kingdom must lie across the sea and she must know a way to get there.

“Yes, Sir, that is true,” he said.

“How?” The single word was loaded with infinite sarcasm; there were lands beyond the oceans, but no one—not even Guildsmen—could safely go there. Pelio opened his mouth, but no words came to mind.

“I will tell you how.” The girl’s voice was so soft, yet as decisive as before. Shozheru’s eyes swung unwillingly toward her, but this time he listened.

And Ionina told them. In some detail. A chill crept up from the pit of his stomach as she spoke. The scheme was insane; how could even magic make it work? Shozheru and Aleru listened expressionlessly but from their brief questions Pelio could tell they also thought the plan was a shortcut to a particularly unpleasant death.

When Ionina finished, Shozheru turned back to Pelio. “It would be suicide, son,” he said quietly. “Is this what you three really plan to do?”

What is the alternative?
thought Pelio. He knew that Shozheru was convinced now that Pelio couldn’t rule Summer even as a figurehead king. That meant that Pelio must be removed; Pelio must die. Exile was not sufficient—so unbreakable custom dictated—for princes can always come out of exile with insurrectionist armies … .

Yet no man had
ever
returned from across the sea, no man had ever survived a jump even one-tenth so far; the king could probably persuade his advisers to let Pelio undertake that journey, rather than have him executed.

“Yes, Father,” replied Pelio; but he doubted that—even with the faith he had in Ionina and Adgao—he could ever have accepted their scheme, if the alternative were not an imperial death warrant.

Shozheru looked down at the table. Behind him, Aleru stared through his father into the distance. It was obvious they understood the situation. This way, at least, the king would not have to be his own son’s murderer. “Very well,” Shozheru said at last. “I grant you three all the freedom the girl has asked for, all the materials, and all the labor.” He looked up at them, and Pelio realized that his father was making an expensive gesture in granting Pelio’s “wish.” The Summer court was already the butt of ridicule for the way it pampered the witling prince. “You have nine days.”

The king walked across the room and slipped into the transit pool without a word of farewell.

“I will send for your servants,” said Aleru as he too started for the transit pool. He hesitated by the water and turned to face the witlings. His head was silhouetted against the bright greenery beyond the windows, so Pelio couldn’t see his features. Was there a tinge of mockery in the words he spoke? “However this turns out, the dynasty will be saved, brother. But I hope that … somehow … you will succeed.”

Twelve

T
hey began their journey the morning of the seventh day after the Summer Festival. The sky was inauspiciously overcast and a warm drizzle slid down the sides of Pelio’s yacht as it floated in the North Wing’s transit lake. Yoninne Leg-Wot looked across the puckering water at the gray beaches and rain-slicked vegetation. There was no one to see them off. All that morning, as they finished their departure preparations, she hadn’t seen a single servant or nobleman except those assigned to Pelio’s project, and even they seemed sullen. This didn’t bother her, but Pelio took it all kind of hard. Since their confrontation with the king, many people weren’t even pretending respect for the prince. Pelio’s disgrace went so deep that he was almost like an “unperson” in some totalitarian state. And if they couldn’t accomplish Ajão’s plan in the nine days Shozheru had given them, Yoninne had the feeling they would all be dead unpersons, to boot.

Nine days. When Bjault and the Guildsman had first described the plan, that had seemed an awfully long time. She had soon found out how wrong she was. With all necessary equipment and technical support things would have been easy, since basically Ajão’s scheme was very simple. But in many ways the Azhiri technology was stuck in the iron age; even the simplest gadgets had to be made from scratch. The ballast for instance: on that item alone Yoninne had wasted three days testing various approaches.

She had worked eighteen and then twenty hours a day; it was no use. The days passed just as quickly. And more and more, Bjault had been a drag on her progress. The old man tried to keep up with everything she did, to make her explain all the steps and procedures. She was rid of him only when he slept and during those hours he spent working an interminable Runge-Kutta analysis of the plan. At one point he had the entire desk and much of the floor covered with papers bearing his neat, pen-scratched mathematics. In a way, she had to admire Bjault for that: most of Leg-Wot’s contemporaries would be at a complete loss if they couldn’t solve their differential equations on a computer—they would never think of doing something like that by hand. But Bjault had been an adult before the reinvention of digital computers, and when he orginally learned his math, numerical analysis had all been done by hand. Still, it was an irritating waste of time; Leg-Wot had
told
the old man over and over again that his plan would work. She had known that the moment he described the scheme. It wasn’t that she was a mathematical genius—she just had a feel for certain things.

But they had had several things going for them: the Guild’s secret assistance, an endless supply of hand labor, and—through Pelio—the authority of King Shozheru. Eventually they had licked all the preliminary problems; they were ready to begin the first, and safest, part of Ajão’s plan.

The boat’s warning whistle sounded. Leg-Wot slid back into her chair and pulled her harness tight. All along the deck, the crew took their places, while beside her Ajão and Pelio tied themselves in, too. The boy was nervous and tired; he had been up most of the night trying to get a couple of extra pilot-navigators. Pelio gave Yoninne a quick, nervous smile, and looked across the deck at the chief navigator. The navigator was an especially husky Azhiri dressed in baggy coveralls. The fellow never looked directly at Ajão or Yoninne, though he showed stiff courtesy to the prince. No doubt he thought Pelio was running from disgrace. The guy reminded Leg-Wot of her father: a hardcore officer willing to cooperate with his superiors’ most idiotic whims.

The navigator had been a hard man to get. Only selected combat types ever made the pilgrimage across the arctic. It had taken Shozheru’s authority to pry him away from Summer’s army. But without him and the two other navigators, they would have to take on local pilots for at least part of their journey.

Now the man’s heavy face tensed for an instant—and the first jump was accomplished. A dozen different impressions assaulted Leg-Wot’s senses at once. There was a moment of free fall as the boat rose up and eastward. Then she was pressed firmly back into her seat, and the boat’s timbers groaned as the yacht smashed into the destination lake. Suddenly the day was bright and cheerful, for there were only scattered clouds in this new sky.

But that was only a single jump, the first of more than a hundred. Minutes later they teleported again, and jump followed jump, till their surroundings became a surreal blur in Leg-Wot’s memory. The skies stayed mostly sunny, and the warehouses at water’s edge looked pretty much the same from lake to lake, but the landscape beyond them flickered from grassy plain to city, to mountains. The sun edged jerkily southward as they traveled further into the northern reaches of the Summerkingdom. Traveling by “road boat” was like a pleasant combination of flying and sailing. It was strange to remember how frightening and mysterious their first ride on one had been. Now, even that crazy boat whistle seemed both sensible and commonplace: it blew when their navigator renged air from their next destination into its chamber—the air’s relative speed somehow determined the pitch of the whistle, so it was easy to estimate how much of a lurch to expect.

Two hours passed, and they stopped at a place Pelio called Pfodgaru. It was lunch time. They were pulled into a wharf and pots of steaming soup were brought aboard. Leg-Wot watched Bjault as the food was passed around. The archaeologist had been unnaturally quiet all morning; there had been none of the usual penetrating questions, none of the theories thrown off the top of his head. Now he fiddled with his soup, looked half-nauseated. He noticed Yoninne’s gaze. “Cramps,” he said in Homespeech, “all morning.” They stared silently at each other for a long moment, and Yoninne knew they were thinking the same thought:
Metallic poisons—lead, mercury, antimony—they’re in everything we eat, building toward sudden death within us. Are these the first symptoms? And if so, how much longer do we have
? Ajão looked abruptly away, then said to Pelio, “We are still within the Summerkingdom?”

The prince stared with some puzzlement at the two Novamerikans, then nodded, “We’re right at the northern edge, almost thirty degrees from the equator, further north even than where you were captured, though the climate here is milder than Bodgaru’s.” Yoninne looked across the stone warehouses, the weather-beaten wood residences. Pfodgaru was a pale, chilly imitation of cities further south. Yet things would get colder soon: along the railing, crewmen were enclosing the deck with slatted quartz windows.

“I know,” continued Pelio, “this isn’t the nicest place in our kingdom, especially during the winter. But it is the southern end of the only polar road which treaty allows us to use. For the next hundred leagues—all the way to County Tsarang—we’ll be within the Snowkingdom.”

Their next jump transformed the mountains surrounding Pfodgaru into a tiny gray serration on the southwestern horizon. The terrain didn’t seem too different from the northern reaches of Summer: there was a bit more snow, a bit less vegetation here. The towns they passed were built exclusively of stone. This was unsurprising, since there were no trees—much less forests—in the flat, gray land. Yet their stonework was different from what she had seen in the South. The designs were angular and faceted, their gargoyles more abstract than grotesque. And while the Summerfolk inevitably laid sections of different-colored stone next to one another, the Snowmen preferred the opposite effect: even when different sorts of stone were available, they segregated them so that each building was a solid shade of gray or brown.

There was a feeling of poverty about the towns that Leg-Wot had not noticed in her brief visits to the cities of the Summerkingdom. Nature made life hard for these people. Most of the buildings around the transit lakes were small in comparison to what she had seen in the South. She was certain that if Bjault had not been sick he would have been pestering Pelio with questions: How did the Snowfolk support themselves? Where did they get food? How did they heat their stone houses?

They jumped from town to town, each jump spanning perhaps a hundred kilometers. They were heading northeast now, so that every teleportation sent the yacht lurching up and eastward from the water of the next transit lake. The sun ran quickly toward the horizon. And it was
cold
. The wind keening through the window slats carried a subzero draft onto the passengers. The wood-burning deck stoves didn’t help much. Poor Samadhom huddled miserably by one for a while; then Pelio unstrapped him, and moved the animal into the boat’s hold.