Kingdoms of the Night (The Far Kingdoms) Read online

  Perhaps it would be a lucky day after all.

  * * * *

  In my youth it had been a pleasant if lengthy trip from my villa to Orissa. I was always invigorated by the ride through the countryside, past sleepy farms, through cool woods and across musical brooks. But the city has burst its old limits and tumbled to within a mile or so of my door. Only a few of the farms remain and the woods have been gouged for timber to construct the homes and buildings that line the crowded streets.

  As much as I love our city, I am not so blind as to call her a thing of beauty. It’s grown in a haphazard fashion from the age when the first Orissan judged the best place to build his fishing hovel was upwind from where he gutted his catch to the present, where any bare spot that you can cram a stick and brick into is considered a prime building location. Land was so scarce that in some places towering tenements had been hurled up to such heights that they leaned crazily over the street, casting everything into shadow.

  The buildings reminded me of the crowded squalor of old Lycanth — the city that had been our arch enemy for generations until my sister, Rali, slew the evil Archons who ruled it and reduced it to rubble and ashes.

  My bleak mood crept dangerously close again when I thought of Rali. Now there was a hero we’d never see the likes of again. I’d admired my older sister since I was a toddler. If truth be told, my exploits were puny things beside hers. She’d been a warrior’s warrior. Commander of the all woman Maranon Guard. Rali had pursued the last Archon of Lycanth to very ends of the earth in what had to be the greatest voyage in history. She’d caught and killed him and rescued Orissa from destruction.

  Rali had also been blessed — or cursed by some lights — with magical talents that rivaled our best Evocators.

  She’d gone missing on an expedition twenty years before. Every day since I’d awakened half-expecting news of her return. Then the ugly truth would dawn and I’d realize once again that she must be dead.

  It seemed all my contemporaries were gone. I’d outlived friends and enemies alike. Perhaps that’s why I felt so useless. It seemed long past the hour for me to shuffle off and leave the world for the next generation to do with as they pleased.

  The carriage jolted as it hit a rut, shaking me out of my joust with villainous Regret. I’d long complained to the Council of Magistrates the roads were falling into disrepair. Their condition was not only uncomfortable and dangerous but an eater of profits as well. Goods and wagons were damaged daily while the Magistrates fought their private wars for more prestigious offices and who would get the best seats at public ceremonies.

  “It’s not us but the Evocators,” the Chief Magistrate said. “We paid good city coin for spells to protect our streets from wear. The last they cast they vowed was good for ten years or more. But that was less than a year ago and just look at the state of our roads!”

  The Chief Evocator replied it was the Magistrates’ fault for building with materials so poor not a spell in history could preserve them. This earned a bitter retort from the Chief Magistrate, who retaliated in kind and back and forth it went with nothing being done while the roads and bridges crumbled around us.

  So far the Magistrates held the upper hand in the blaming game. For although few trust a Magistrate, everyone is wary of a wizard.

  Adding to the poor public view of the Evocators was a rash of apparent failures in the past year. The gift of magical knowledge I’d brought back from Irayas had blossomed mightily. We commanded the weather that nurtured our crops, the purity of the streams, woods and fields that gave us fish, flesh and fowl and even the great plagues that once ravaged us at will, plagues that had killed my own Deoce and Emilie.

  But in recent months cracks had appeared in the protective walls. There’d been sick cattle in the countryside. The last grain harvest had been afflicted with a voracious beetle. And in the marketplace the witches had been treating a mysterious outbreak of skin infections. In my own household an entire storeroom of meat had to be destroyed because somehow it had spoiled. Even in the old days the most common spell cast by the Evocator assigned to the Butchers’ Guild would have prevented such a thing.

  Naturally the Evocators were given the direwolf’s share of the blame. There had been much public discussion at how lazy, greedy and thieving our wizards had become. Although I didn’t think on it much — the incidents, after all, were fairly minor — when I heard such talk I quickly put the rumor monger straight. In my youth the Evocators were the sworn enemies of the Anteros. Their graft was enormous, their secrecy impenetrable and some of them had even plotted with Prince Raveline of Irayas against our city. My own brother, Halab, was a victim of their evil.

  In my lifetime I had seen all that change. The doors of knowledge at the Evocators’ Palace were open to all with talent, and the wizards now take an oath to work only for the public good. Obviously — human nature being as it is — all hearts were not pure. But the ideals had been hoisted higher.

  My thoughts were on matters such as these as my carriage passed the hill where the Evocators’ Palace sits. It had once been contained behind forbidding walls at the summit. Since then it had grown as much as the city around it. Buildings and gardens sprawled down terraced hillsides. Even in the day the magicians’ workshops gave off a magical glow and the air — heavy with the scent of sulfur — and they fairly buzzed and tingled with energy. I could see a group of fresh-faced acolytes being marched up the hill to their classrooms by a stern Master Evocator. Although I have no talent for magic I knew the books they study well. They contained the wisdom of Janos Greycloak, or at least what wisdom I could remember and repeat.

  His theories — his search for the keys to all natural law — had turned wizardry on its head. For the first time in history magic was tested and examined for cause and effect. There were even a few young wizards, I was told, who wondered if Greycloak’s ultimate guess was correct, that magical energy and common energy were the same.

  In sorcery a thing can be changed from one form to another, can be transported, duplicated, protected, or destroyed. Greycloak speculated identical forces ruled the falling weight, the rushing stream, the twitching compass needle and the fiery hearth, as well as the very light that allowed one to see such commonplace marvels. He wondered if all things — both of this world and spiritual — might be built of identical grains of something, whatever that substance might be, and the behavior of that stuff had a single motivator.

  Find that motivator, he said, and all things will be possible. The search for such a thing was Greycloak’s greatest goal. He thought he was close on the heels of his answer when we reached the Far Kingdoms. I think he would have caught up to it if what he’d sought hadn’t turned in its tracks and killed him first.

  My carriage turned toward the river docks and I was swept through the neighborhood where I’d once pursued the fair Melina — she who was a witch of the flesh and my young, lustful soul. It had a been a dank and dangerous place then, with rotting tenements whose walls concealed pleasure palaces Orissa is unlikely to see again. There was no erotic fantasy ever dreamed of that wasn’t once satisfied by Melina and her courtesan sisters.

  The tenements had been torn down and replaced by fashionable apartments. The street had been broadened, beautified with plantings and fountains, and it was lined with expensive taverns, clothiers’ saloons and shops a glitter with trinkets for children of the rich. If the likes of Melina and her procurer, Leego, had appeared there, they’d soon be rousted from the street by a burly watch officer.

  I suppose it’s an improvement over the wretchedness of the neighborhood’s past. But whenever I pass over those daily-scoured cobbles, along the gardened avenue, I regret the loss of that tawdry jewel.

  We swept around the bend and I could see the docks and waterfront warehouses ahead. People in worker’s clothes with toil-etched faces, callused hands and hard musculature made way for my carriage. Some of them called my name in greeting. Others turned to their children to explain who
I was.

  It is my vanity to believe I am a fair man, known for honest wages for honest work. I am wealthy, but not ostentatious. I’m generous, charitable and sympathetic to the troubles of working men and women. But there are others who can claim the same and to be honest, all merchants are at heart thieves. We steal a man’s time for his labor, a woman’s purse for our goods and a voyager’s dreams for our commerce.

  So I’m not as good as I like to think. But I did one fine thing in my life and I don’t mean the great expeditions I shared with Janos. Or even the blessings I brought back for my people. It is the reason I am looked upon with fondness by the people I passed that day. It was I who forced the others of my class to free the slaves of Orissa. Some of my kind hate me for it to this day. I cherish that hatred.

  Just before the docks we turned down the river, making for the yard where my new ship was waiting to be launched.

  Between the docks and the yard the broad grassy banks of the river sprang free, running nearly a mile along the course of a park marked only by paths where families, couples and solitary dreamers strolled. The park made a sharp point where retaining walls kept the river back when it was fat with showers and rising snow.

  The Month of Flowers that year was rich with both and I could see the sleek overfed river moving swiftly past the point. A spray misted up from where the water punished the rock for being stubborn. The mist from that battle which the rock must someday lose sprayed over my carriage as I went by. The rich smell roused the river rat in me and I felt my senses perk up, my nose twitching with curiosity.

  I saw a ship with storm-tattered sails limping for the docks and wondered the same wonders that so captivated me when I was a boy playing on those same banks.

  The ship was old, ill-painted; hull and sails rimed with salt. But old as it was it rode the river with authority. It was a ship that had seen every sea, every sunset, every storm. I could almost smell its tarry breath and feel the worn, firm planks under my feet. I imagined horizons fleeing before me, the pitching deck, the cracking sails, the barefooted seamen swarming up the masts.

  By the gods, I love to wander! It was what separated Janos and me. He was a seeker, I a rover. He was obsessed with reaching his goal. I am at my happiest between one gate and the next. Odd, when I think of it. Greycloak was a rough spirit who’d trod hard paths and knew the ways of the wild shore. I was raised in luxury and had known not a care until I set out with him for the Far Kingdoms. It was then that I was afflicted with this malady.

  Its symptoms are a racing pulse a chilly spine, and a sudden, uncontrollable distaste for your surroundings. It comes without warning. The sight of a deep sea merchantman can fire it, or a long-distance caravan bringing its goods to market. Small things can be equally as dangerous: A sound, a smell, the feel of old leather can summon memories of a place and time when there nothing existed but the beckoning road.

  From across the water I heard the pilot’s mate call the mark and I had to heave back a sob from the need to be going. I thought — your travels are done, Amalric Antero. There’ll be no more adventuring. You’re too old, my friend. Too damned old.

  Quatervals shouted for the crowd to make way and my matched blacks drew my creaking carcass into the yard where the Anteros had gathered with our friends and employees for the blessing and the feast.

  Strolling musicians serenaded the celebrants. Enormous roasts turned on spits over fires made of alder. There were tables of food everywhere and scores of servants ducked in and out of the crowd bearing trays of liquid refreshment. Everyone was costumed in their best, which in that month meant the most glorious colors to compliment the flowers springing up all over Orissa. The smells and sounds and colors infused me until I was almost looking forward to the remainder of the day.

  So many milled around to greet me that I exited with difficulty. My son, Cligus, broad-shouldered his way through to help. He was dressed in his finest uniform with three heavy chains of gold slung from his neck to call him general, lest someone miss the gleaming badges of rank on his shoulders and breast plate.

  “Father Antero!” he cried in his booming, crowd-pleasing voice as he bounded forward to take my arm. “We feared you might not be well and be unable to honor us with your presence.”

  I glanced at Quatervals who gave me a sardonic grin, shrugged and turned away. I shook off my son’s hand, suddenly irritable.

  “Sick?” I said. “What makes you think I’m sick? Why, I’ve never felt better in my life.”

  My son beamed, patting me affectionately and announced to the crowd: “Did you hear that? Father Antero says he’s never felt better in his life.

  “We should all take inspiration from his words. By the gods, a man is only as old as he acts! And there’s the proof standing before us, my friends. The great Lord Antero, knocking on the doors of seventy, and still feeling alert and vigorous.”

  He embraced me. It was all I could do not to draw away from his rich man’s musk and humiliate him in front of the others.

  I loved my son. I truly did. But in adulthood he had formed habits that grated on my sense of rightness. Cligus was in his forties and had made his mark in the military. I didn’t know if he was a good soldier, although he’d had his victories. He had crafted a public face he believed would make all love him: a magnificent speaking voice, an arsenal of pleasing phrases and a willingness to boast of his abilities and deeds. Also, it seemed to me he overused the Antero name; calling me Father Antero when others were present, as if he believed the name itself trumpeted honor.

  The result was some feared him, some respected him, but from what I could gather few liked him. His own father, I’m ashamed to admit, hovered near the edges of that final crowd.

  Feeling like a traitor to my only child — fruit of my happy marriage to Omerye — I turned my sourness to a smile and took his arm again. Cligus beamed with pleasure.

  “It’s good to see you, my son,” I said. Then I raised my voice so the others could hear. “Now, shall we get these festivities started? There’s a ship that needs blessing, food that needs eating and a whole river of drink to be drunk.”

  My remarks were greeted with much cheering and loud praises for the merry Lord Antero. Now where do you suppose Cligus had learned his manner?

  As we made our way to the blessing platform, Cligus leaned close to me. “Your promised we’d talk soon, father,” he whispered. “About my future and the future of our family.”

  Cligus was alluding to the status of my estate. He and others in my family had been after me for many months to name my successor as head of the Antero’s commercial empire. As my only child Cligus naturally saw himself filling that role — dismissing the rights of any rival among my many nephews, nieces and cousins. I was not so certain he was the wisest choice and had been delaying the decision.

  The delay had become a sore point. In a way, I suppose, he was caught in a cycle of my making. The more I delayed the more he feared, and the more he feared the more his nervousness led him to do or say the wrong thing.

  Although I knew I wasn’t ready to face the issue yet, I forced certainty into my response: “I’ve not forgotten my promise of a meeting,” I said, “It’s near the very top of my list.”

  “When would it be convenient?” he pressed. “Seeing you look so well gives me hope that appointment might be soon.”

  Suspicion tangled its roots with guilt and I snapped back: “When I’m ready, by the gods, and not a moment before.”

  Cligus flushed. “I’m sorry, father,” he said. “I didn’t mean to overstep my bounds.” I saw Omerye in his eyes and the stubborn tilt of chin and regretted my outburst.

  I squeezed his arm, saying, “Pay no attention to my temper, son. I’ve much on my mind.”

  He took heart from this. “Then we will talk soon?”

  “You have my word on it,” I said.

  The platform loomed up near the riverbank, decked with bunting, streamers and huge, extravagantly decorated maps of our far-
flung trading routes. Framing the platform was an enormous pavilion blazing with color, which hid the new ship and its cradle from view until it was time for the unveiling.

  As I climbed the steps of the platform a handsome young man beamed down.

  “Uncle Amalric!” he said with honest pleasure. He grabbed a cup of cold, spiced wine from a passing server and offered it to me. “If you drink it quickly,” he said, “I can get you another.” He laughed. “I happen to be well connected to the fellow who’s paying for all this.”

  “There’s a good nephew,” I said as I took the cup from Hermias. I hoisted it up. “Just to let the gods know we’re serious,” I drank and the wine stoked my cheer at seeing him.

  “Now, this is the proper way to greet a fellow,” I joked to Cligus. “A cup of wine to light the panoply.”

  I was instantly sorry for my silly little jest. Cligus glowered, taking offense where if implied at all it was by accident.

  “Do you really think it’s good for you, father?” he said. “Wine, so early?”

  I pretended I didn’t hear — one of the few benefits of age — and merely smiled and took another deep drink.

  Cligus gave Hermias a look that needed no words to sum up his feelings. He thought the young man was an opportunist of the worst sort who pandered to the more foolish desires of his elderly father. Hermias pointedly glared back. I was surprised to see loathing in his look and wondered what Cligus had done to earn it.

  My son had cause to see him as his rival. Hermias was in his middle twenties, grandson of my late brother, Porcemus. Since he’d first come to my attention, Hermias better matched my own view of the child Omerye and I should have produced. He was intelligent, honest and aware high-birth made him no better a man than any other. He didn’t have the same flair for the traders’ art I had at his age but he labored hard to make up for it, working every position, no matter how low, as he climbed in my esteem as well as my organization.