“Hmm. You’re full of surprises, but I’m glad I don’t have to play translator for you. Speaking of voices, though, did you hear that servant? He could sing the soprano part in a choir.”

  “He’s a eunuch, Rodrick.”

  Rodrick blinked. “What, you mean someone cut his … particulars … off?”

  Hrym snickered—not the creepy demonic titter, but his more usual crass indication of amusement. “You male humanoids are so attached to your reproductive organs. Even you, though as far as I can tell you never have any intention of reproducing, at least not intentionally.”

  “I enjoy going through the motions, though,” Rodrick said. “Why would they unman the man?”

  “I don’t know much about the Vudrani, but I know it’s not uncommon in their culture to do that to servants. Cut off that part of a boy before he starts to become a man, and he’s made more reliable in various ways, or so it’s generally believed. Do you always think with your head, Rodrick, or do other parts of you sometimes make the decisions?”

  “I have made some choices based on suggestions from my lower regions that, in retrospect, were unwise. Cutting them off seems a bit extreme, though.”

  “Humanoid carnal relations are baffling and disgusting to me, of course, but I gather some men in power feel better if their women are attended by men who can’t, ah, compete with their masters in certain respects.”

  Rodrick made a disgusted face. “I suppose it makes a sick sort of sense. I’ve never demanded faithfulness from any woman, myself. It’s true I’m frequently dishonest, but asking for that would be downright hypocritical. It’s not as if the eunuchs have their tongues and fingers removed, though, so it seems a half-measure at best … I’d worry about a eunuch revolution, personally. I can’t think of many things that would make me more likely to go into a frenzy and try to kill someone than having those cut off.”

  “Do the cutting early enough and they don’t know what they’re missing,” Hrym said.

  “Poor bastards. I mustn’t tell them what they’re missing. There’s nothing sadder than a weeping servant.”

  He slid Hrym back into the scabbard and strode out into the hall, toward destiny—or, at the very least, a free meal.

  9

  The Thakur’s Proposal

  The servants, moving fast without ever exactly running, led Rodrick through the palace to yet another gorgeous hall of marble and columns, this one full of long tables made from exotic (by Inner Sea standards, anyway) wood, with chairs carved so delicately they seemed constructed of lace. There were scores of people in the room, most already seated, a few standing and mingling in little groups, the women in scarves and veils, the men in loose pants with broad sashes, except for those in monk’s robes in various hues, doubtless denoting their religious and martial affiliations.

  Rodrick was fairly adept at reading the composition of a crowd of nobles in most of the kingdoms back home, but his ignorance of Vudrani ways limited his capacity here. Who were the true powers here, and who were the strivers? Was it even worth his while to know? He picked up a tall fluted glass of something bubbly from the tray of a passing servant—another eunuch, he suspected—and took a sip.

  “Ah, good, you’ve arrived.” Nagesh appeared at his elbow and gently herded him toward one of the tables. “You will be seated not far from the thakur’s table, beside one of the teachers from the Monastery of Untwisting Iron—your mutual interest in weapons should make conversation pleasant.”

  Rodrick smiled instead of groaning. Was there anything more tedious than talking about the merits of various sorts of swords? Clearly magical swords of living ice were best, but when he made that point, it was seldom well received. He was surprised, when he reached the table, to find an elaborate sword stand beside his chair, made of silver and gold.

  “For Hrym,” Nagesh said, and Rodrick couldn’t contain a grin. Lots of people preferred to pretend that Hrym was just a sword, however remarkable, and it was nice to see his partner treated with respect. He drew the sword, perhaps a bit too hastily as the room rapidly went silent, heads turning to look at the man holding a few feet of glittering magic in his hands. He raised his other hand in a wave, gave his most rakish smile, and set Hrym point-down on the stand beside his chair.

  “Mmm. This is all right,” Hrym said. “Make sure you get to keep this stand, too. It’s not as good as resting on a big pile of gold coins, but it’s better than being propped up against a wall.”

  “There’s the thakur,” Nagesh murmured, and Rodrick looked where he gestured. At a table raised a little higher than the others, a dozen Vudrani even more richly dressed in silks and jewels than the rest—presumably important members of the Maurya-Rahm—surrounded a figure seated in the center. The thakur was on the early slopes of his later years, and had a grandfatherly aspect, all smiles and nods, with laugh lines around his eyes and mouth. His clothing was relatively simple, but impeccably made, his beard perfectly trimmed and iron-gray. His eyes seemed to catch Rodrick’s, for a moment, and those eyes were sharp, dark and intent and all-seeing despite his smiles. Not a man Rodrick would choose as a potential mark for cheating, so he hoped he wouldn’t be forced to try.

  “I will come for you after the meal,” Nagesh said. “In the meantime, enjoy.”

  Nearly everyone else was already seated, so Rodrick took his place and turned to Hrym. “So that’s the thakur. Hmm.”

  “What?” Hrym said. “Why are you talking to me? Broaden your horizons, man. Good evening, my lady. Doesn’t the thakur lay on a lovely feast?”

  A woman of middle years, dressed in drapes of glittering white cloth, was seated beside Hrym, and looked startled when the sword spoke, edging away in her chair. Undiscouraged, Hrym continued to speak, in a sonorous and gracious voice, complimenting her diamond-and-gold jewelry and comparing her pale garment to the beauty of glittering high snows on mountain peaks. She responded cautiously at first, but gradually became more enthusiastic, until the two were discussing jewelry with the intensity of two aficionados starved of conversation with fellow devotees.

  Who knew the curmudgeonly old sword could be charming? He’d certainly never bothered to show that side of himself to his wielder. Rodrick took the hint and turned in his own chair, nodding with a bland smile to the iron-faced man wearing dark orange robes beside him. The man looked Rodrick up and down frankly, frowned, and said, “You are a swordsman?”

  “In my own modest way,” Rodrick said.

  The monk grunted. “We train with swords, a bit, but mostly we teach our students how to take them away from men who don’t know how to fight without blades in their hands. Take a sword away from a swordsman and what’s left is often barely a man, and can be beaten by any student halfway through his first year.” With that, the monk turned in his own chair and began speaking to a vastly bearded man beside him, chattering about preparations for something called the Challenge of Sky and Heaven.

  Rodrick looked to the seat across the table from him, but it was unoccupied, though a plate and silverware waited there. Ah, well. Who wanted to socialize anyway? Rodrick concentrated on the wine and food which regularly appeared before him, delivered by smoothly gliding servants. Every dish was strange, with an emphasis on flatbreads, yellow rice, heaps of green vegetables, and spiced fish in strange sauces of cream or peppers. No proper meat at all as far as he could tell, no beast or fowl, just seafood, and little enough of that. A peculiar people, but it all tasted good, even if none of it touched his appetite the way a rare steak or roast lamb reliably could. The wine was odd, too, honey-sweet or strangely spiced, but more than palatable. There was entertainment, with graceful dancers on a stage, followed by acrobats (one of them winked at him, he was sure of it, and when he saw the way she bent all the way over backward and grabbed her own ankles, he was more than happy to give her a broad smile in return). Then came someone playing an instrument that was a bit like a lute with an absurdly long neck, full of twangy atonalities. Not to Rodrick’s taste, but it would be a boring world if we were all the same, he thought.

  Partway through the meal a young woman arrived, with the largest, darkest eyes he’d seen here yet, and dangling earrings in geometrical shapes the eye could not quite follow, shapes that were repeated on the silken cloth of her loosely cut blue dress. He’d heard of cloth-of-gold, but surely this was cloth-of-magic, illusory and shifting. She seated herself in the empty chair across from Rodrick, and a servant appeared immediately to fill her plate and goblet. He thought he recognized the woman from the palace courtyard full of noble youths, but he’d passed through so quickly it was hard to be sure. Her presence at this banquet was enough to tell him she was either someone important or related to someone important.

  Rodrick smiled at her, even though he might as well have been smiling at the moon for all the response he got. Her sharp, foxlike face was pretty, despite a certain ferocious quality in her expression, as if she were replaying the details of a recent argument in her mind. She finally noticed Rodrick looking at her, and after a glance that seemed to measure and weigh him to the inch and the ounce she looked over at Hrym, then nodded as if she’d received confirmation of some horrible prognosis. When she spoke, it was in his own language. “So you’re the mysterious swordsman. Your arrival has been on everyone’s lips.”

  Instinct almost made Rodrick say something like, “I wish I could be on your lips,” but while that might get him a laugh and a blush in the right tavern from the right woman, this one could be a fighting monk or a mystic or a political leader, despite her apparent youth, so he stepped more lightly. “My name is Rodrick, my lady. I don’t think I’m all that mysterious. To me, Jalmeray is the land of mystery.”

  “It’s all a matter of perspective, I suppose,” she said. “My name is Kalika.” She looked at him in that assessing way again. “As long as you’re here, you might as well help me practice your language. I’ve traveled a bit to the Inner Sea, with my father. Shall we talk of places we’ve seen until we find one we have in common?”

  She seemed very interested in the legal systems of various countries, a subject on which Rodrick was moderately well informed, having had brushes with said legal systems on a few occasions (a fact he glossed over). With just a bit of steering, he moved her toward discussing the best places to eat and drink in various of the great cities, a subject much more to Rodrick’s liking. He gave up his few attempts to flirt after they were neither rebuffed nor encouraged but simply ignored, as if he hadn’t said anything at all. In truth, the woman never exactly warmed to him—Kalika seemed to have a core of ice, something else Rodrick was moderately knowledgeable about—but the dinner conversation was at least diverting.

  He made a habit of trying to find people’s buttons or handles, attitudes or opinions or outlooks he could manipulate if need be, but she gave him almost nothing he could use. Not that he expected to embroil anyone here in a confidence game, but it was useful mental exercise, and frustrating that she had such impenetrable reserve. One thing his conversation with Kalika made clear: despite Rodrick’s sense that everything here was strange and exotic, he was the exotic one in this company, and his essentially Andoren attitudes toward everything from peacekeeping methods to slavery to good citizenship struck her as bafflingly wrongheaded when they weren’t merely amusing. All a matter of perspective, indeed.

  After a course of some sweet fruit on a bed of white rice, and thick syrupy dessert wine that must have been made from honey, Nagesh touched his shoulder. “If you and Hrym would accompany me?”

  Rodrick looked to the high table, and saw the thakur was gone. Aha. The moment of truth, and consequences.

  “Must you take him away, Nagesh?” Kalika said. “He was just telling me the most amusing things about the so-called Eagle Knights of Andoran. Do you know, when I heard of those knights as a little girl, I thought they must be garudas wearing armor, from their name?”

  “Fascinating, Kalika.” Nagesh’s voice was as dry as ash from a fresh fire. “Alas, our guests have more pressing business than entertaining you.” Rodrick could see immediately there was no love lost between these two, and naturally wondered what the cause of the tension was, and if he could somehow exploit it to enrich himself—but that wasn’t why he was here. With luck, he’d find out soon why he was here.

  “Forgive me.” Rodrick gave Kalika a bright smile. “Perhaps we’ll talk again.”

  “If your mysterious business with Nagesh allows you any freedom, perhaps we will.”

  Rodrick rose, swaying only a little—those wines were deceptively strong—and half-bowed to the older woman still deep in conversation with Hrym. “My lady, forgive me, but we have matters we must attend to.” He lifted Hrym from the golden stand and slid him into the jeweled scabbard, ignoring the sword’s muffled protests, then followed Nagesh’s lead through the tables toward a small door at one end of the hall.

  “That Kalika. Is she someone important?”

  “She thinks so,” Nagesh said. “But her greatest distinction so far was being born to important parents.”

  “Some people have all the luck. I suppose we’re going to see the thakur now? Still no hints for me? It would be nice to have some idea what I’m walking into.”

  “I will say only that if you do as the thakur asks, you will become a very rich man.”

  “I like being rich, but there are some things even gold won’t buy.”

  “This is true,” Nagesh said. “But when gold will not do for payment, I have found that blood will often suffice.”

  That certainly sounded ominous, but before Rodrick could answer they reached an arched doorway guarded not by men but by genies: a djinni with a swirling lower body, and an equally towering, horned, mostly man-shaped creature with crimson skin that Rodrick assumed was an efreeti. The air in the hall wasn’t disturbed by the djinni’s whirlwind, and the efreeti’s presence didn’t seem to raise the temperature, but Rodrick had no doubt they could unleash the forces held within their bodies at any moment. Nagesh swept past them as if they weren’t there at all, and Rodrick stayed close behind.

  They entered an open-air courtyard, small by the standards of some other gardens in the palace, but if anything even more lush and fragrant. They moved among fountains and creeping vines and heavy blossoms until they emerged into a little paved square. The thakur sat in a folding chair of canvas and wood before a spindly desk, a bound book open before him, scratching with a quill, pausing occasionally to look up at the nearly full moon, then writing again.

  Nagesh waited with seemingly infinite patience, and Rodrick tried to do the same, taking the opportunity to look at the moon in the clear sky, too. Except, it wasn’t all that clear—there was a disturbance in the air some feet over the thakur’s head. Ah—another djinn, doubtless standing guard in case the outlander decided to draw his remarkable sword for reasons other than conversation.

  After no more than three minutes, the thakur put down his pen, closed the book, lifted his gaze to Rodrick, and smiled. His eyes were just as piercing as before, but the smile seemed genuine to Rodrick, who was something of a connoisseur of artificial expressions of friendliness. “My apologies for keeping you waiting. I have been working on this poem for some time. The gods finally presented the right lines to me, and I wished to put them down before they slipped away.”

  Rodrick bowed low. “You need never apologize to me, Your Majesty. I am humbled by your hospitality. Truly, your island is a land of incomparable wonders.”

  The thakur nodded as if Rodrick had stated the obvious. “Yet you carry with you a wonder that does not have a match here. May I see … Hrym?”

  Rodrick glanced at the djinni overhead. Drawing a sword in the presence of an absolute monarch, even one who liked writing poetry about the moon, struck him as a dangerous act—but then, so was disobeying said absolute monarch. He pulled the sword out slowly, and held it at a deliberately non-threatening angle. The moonlight was caught in Hrym’s crystalline facets, making the length of the sword appear to glow.

  “Remarkable,” the thakur said. “May I hold him?”

  Rodrick cleared his throat. “I have no objection, Your Majesty, but I cannot presume to speak for Hrym.”

  The thakur raised his eyebrow. “Indeed? Very well. Hrym, may I take you in my hand?”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve been held by something resembling a king,” Hrym said. “I’d appreciate the change.”

  Rodrick suppressed a snort, half-bowed again, and presented the sword to the thakur, hilt-first. The thakur rose and took the sword in his hand, then stepped a little distance away and flowed easily into a series of sword forms. The specific moves were unfamiliar to Rodrick, doubtless a Vudrani martial style, but the thakur’s grace and comfort with the blade were obvious despite his age. He was surely a better swordsman than Rodrick himself, though that wasn’t such a high bar. “Your balance is impeccable, Hrym,” the thakur said. “Is it true, what I’ve heard, about your other properties? That you possess a mastery of cold that can rival that of an ancient white dragon?”

  “I’m made of ice,” Hrym said. “I’m good at doing icy things. Much more convenient than a dragon, too. I don’t think Rodrick would get very far with a white dragon hanging from his belt.”

  Rodrick chuckled, and even Nagesh’s beard shifted enough to reveal a smile.

  “May I have a demonstration?” the thakur said.

  “Let there be snow,” Hrym said, and thick flakes began to fall. The invisible djinni was made more visible by the way the snow fell around it, revealed in negative space. Within moments the entire garden was covered in a layer of white. A mound of snow rose up into a half-sized statue of the thakur himself, holding a sword aloft, making the old man exclaim in delight. Hrym had done the snow-sculpture trick once or twice in the past to help Rodrick impress women.