Domes of Fire Part 43

'Its a characteristic of people with a certain level of intelligence, your Majesty,' Zalasta advised Ehlana. 'They talk very fast because their ideas are spilling over. Emperor Sarabian may not be quite as brilliant as he thinks he is, but his is a mind to be reckoned with. The amazing thing is that he's managed to keep it a secret from everybody in his government. Those people are usually so erratic and excitable that they trip themselves up.'

They were all gathered in the royal apartment to discuss the previous night's startling revelation. Amba.s.sador Oscagne had arrived early, bringing with him a diagram of the hidden pa.s.sageways and concealed listening posts inside the Elene castle which was their temporary home. A half-dozen spies had been rooted out and politely but firmly invited to leave.

'There's nothing really personal involved, your Majesty,' Oscagne apologised to Ehlana. 'It's just a matter of policy.'

'I understand completely, your Excellency,' she replied graciously. Ehlana wore an emerald green gown this morning, and she looked particularly lovely.

'Is your espionage system very well-developed, your excellency?' Stragen asked.

'No, not really, Milord. Each bureau of the government has its spies, but they spend most of their time spying on each other. We're far more nervous about our colleagues than we are about foreign visitors.'

'There's no centralised intelligence service, then?'

'I'm afraid not, Milord.'

'Are we sure we cleaned all the spies out?' Emban asked, looking a bit nervously at the gleaming walls.

'Trust me, your Grace,' Sephrenia smiled.

'I didn't follow that, I'm afraid.'

'She wiggled her fingers, Patriarch Emban,' Talen said dryly. 'She turned all the spies we didn't catch into toads.'

'Well, not exactly,' she amended, 'but if there are any spies left hiding behind the walls, they can't hear anything.'

'You're a very useful person to have around, Sephrenia,' the fat little churchman observed.

'I've noticed that myself,' Vanion agreed.

'Let's push on here,' Ehlana suggested. 'We don't want to overuse our subterfuge, but we will want to exchange a few gifts with Sarabian just to make sure that no one's going to intercept our messages and to get the courtiers in the hallways accustomed to seeing Melidere trotting back and forth with trinkets.'

'I won't really trot, your Majesty,' Melidere objected. 'I'll swish seductively. I've found that a man who's busy watching your hips doesn't pay too much attention to what the rest of you is doing.'

'Really?' Princess Danae said. 'I'll have to remember that. Can you show me how to swish, Baroness?'

'You're going to have to grow some hips first, Prin-cess,' Talen told her.

Danae's eyes went suddenly dangerous. 'Never mind,' Sparhawk told her.

She ignored him. 'I'll get you for that, Talen,' she threatened.

'I doubt it, your Highness,' he replied impudently. 'I can still run faster than you can.'

'We have another problem,' Stragen told them. 'The absolutely splendid plan I conceived some months ago fell all to pieces on me last night. The local thieves aren't going to be much help, I'm afraid. They're even worse than Caalador led us to believe back in Lebas. Tamul society's so rigid that my colleagues out there in the streets can't think independently. There's a certain way that thieves are supposed to behave here, and the ones we met last night are so hide-bound that they can't get around the stereotypes. The Elenes in the local thieves' community are creative enough, but the Tamuls are hopelessly inept.'

'That's certainly the truth,' Talen agreed. 'They don't even try to run when they're caught stealing. They just stand around waiting to be taken into custody. It's the most immoral thing I've ever heard of.'

'We might be able to salvage something out of it,' Stragen continued. 'I've sent for Caalador. Maybe he can talk some sense into them. What concerns me the most is their absolute lack of any kind of organisation. The thieves don't talk to the murderers, the wh.o.r.es don't talk to the beggars and n.o.body talks to the swindlers. I can't for the life of me see how they survive.'

'That's bad news,' Ulath noted. 'We were counting on the thieves to serve as our spy-network.'

'Let's hope that Caalador can fix it,' Stragen said. 'The fact that there's no central intelligence-gathering apparatus in the government makes those thieves crucial to our plans.'

'Caalador will be able to talk some sense into them,' Ehlana said. 'I have every confidence in him.'

'That's probably because you like to hear him talk,' Sparhawk told her.

'Speaking of talking,' Sephrenia said, 'I think our efforts here are going to be limited by the fact that most of you don't speak Tamul. we're going to have to do something about that.' Kalten groaned. It won't be nearly as painful this time, dear one,' she said. 'We don't really have the time for you to actually learn the language, so Zalasta and I are going to cheat.'

'Could you clarify that a bit for me, Sephrenia?' Emban said, looking puzzled.

'We'll cast a spell,' she shrugged.

'Are you trying to say that you can teach somebody a foreign language by magic?' he asked.

'Oh, yes,' Sparhawk a.s.sured him. 'She taught me to speak Troll in about five seconds in Ghwerig's cave, and I'd imagine that Troll's a lot harder to learn than Tamul. At least Tamuls are human.'

'We'll have to be careful, though,' the small Styric woman cautioned. 'if you all appear to be linguistic geniuses, it's going to look very curious. We'll do it a bit at a time-a basic vocabulary and a rudimentary grammar right at first, and then we'll expand on that.'

'I could send you instructors, Lady Sephrenia,' Oscagne offered.

'Ah-no, thanks all the same, your Excellency. Your instructors would be startled and suspicious if they suddenly found a whole platoon of extraordinarily gifted students. We'll do it ourselves in order to conceal what we're up to. I'll give our pupils here abominable accents right at first, and then we'll smooth things out as we go along.'

'Sephrenia?' Kalten said in a slightly resentful tone.

'Yes, dear one?'

'You can teach people languages by magic?'

'Yes.'

'Then why did you spend all those years trying to teach me Styric? When you saw that it wasn't going to work, why didn't you just wiggle your fingers at me?'

'Kalten dear,' she said gently, 'why was I trying to teach you Styric?'

'So that I could perform magic tricks, I guess,' he shrugged. 'That's unless you just enjoy making people suffer.'

'No, dear one. It was just as painful for me as it was for you.' She shuddered. 'More painful, probably. You were in fact, trying to learn Styric so that you could work the spells, but in order to do that, you have to be able to think in Styric. You can't just mouth the words and make them come off the way you want them to.'

'Wait a minute,' he objected. 'Are you saying that people who speak other languages don't think the same way we do?'

'They may think the same way but they don't think in the same words.'

'Do you mean to say that we actually think in words?'

'Of course we do. What did you think thoughts were?'

'I don't know. But we're all human. Wouldn't we all think the same way and in the same language?'

She blinked. 'And which language would that be, dear one?'

'Elenic, naturally. That's why foreigners aren't as clever as we are. They have to stop and translate their thoughts from Elenic into that barbarian gabble they call language. They do it just to be stubborn, of course.'

She stared at him suspiciously. 'You're actually serious, aren't you?'

'Of course. I thought everybody knew that's why Elenes are smarter than everybody else.' His face shone with blinding sincerity.

'Oh, dear,' she sighed in near-despair.

Melidere put on a lavender gown and swished off to the emperor's private apartments bearing a blue satin Elene doublet over one arm. Mirtai followed her. Mirtai did not swish. Melidere's eyes were ingenuously wide. Her expression was vapid. Her lower lip was adorably taught between her teeth as if she were breathless with excitement. Emperor Sarabian's courtiers watched the swishing with great interest. n.o.body paid the slightest attention to what she did with her hands. She delivered the gift to the emperor with a breathy little speech, which Mirtai translated. The emperor responded quite formally. Melidere curtseyed and then swished back to the Elene castle. The courtiers still concentrated on the swishing-even though they had already had plenty of opportunity to observe the process.

'It went off without a hitch,' the Baroness reported smugly.

'Did they enjoy the swishing?' Stragen asked her.

'I turned the entire court to stone, Milord Stragen,' she laughed.

'Did she really?' he asked Mirtai. 'Not entirely,' the Atana replied. 'A number of them followed her so that they could see more. Melidere's a very good swisher. What was going on inside her gown looked much like two cats fighting inside a burlap sack.'

'We should use the talents G.o.d gave us, wouldn't you say, your Grace?' the blonde girl asked Emban with mock piety.

'Absolutely, my child,' he agreed without so much as cracking a smile.

Amba.s.sador Oscagne arrived about fifteen minutes later bearing an alabaster box on a blue velvet cushion. Ehlana took the emperor's note out of the box and read aloud: Ehlana, Your message arrived safely. I get the impression that the members of my court will not merely refrain from interfering with the Baroness as she moves through the halls but will pa.s.sionately defend her right to do so. How does the girl manage to move so many things all at the same time? Sarabian.

'Well,' Stragen asked the honey-blonde girl, 'how do you?'

'It's a gift, Milord Stragen.'

The visiting Elenes made some show of receiving instruction in the Tamul language for the next few weeks, and Oscagne helped their subterfuge along by casually advising various members of the government that he had been teaching the visitors the language during their long journey. Ehlana made a brief speech in Tamul at one of the banquets the prime minister had arranged for the guests in order to establish the fact that she and her party had already achieved a certain level of proficiency. There were awkward moments, of course. On one occasion Kalten grossly offended a courtier when he smilingly delivered what he thought to be a well-turned compliment.

'What's the matter with him?' the blond Pandion asked, looking puzzled as the courtier stalked away.

'What were you trying to say to him?' Mirtai asked, stifling a laugh.

'I told him that I was pleased to see that he was smiling,' Kalten replied.

'That's not what you said.'

'Well, what did I say?'

You said, 'May all of your teeth fall out.'

'I used the wrong word for "smiling", right?'

'I'd say so, yes.'

The pretense of learning a new language provided the queen and her entourage with a great deal of leisure time. The official functions and entertainments they were obliged to attend usually took place in the evening, and that left the days generally free. They pa.s.sed those hours in idle conversation-conducted for the most part in Tamul. The spell Sephrenia and Zalasta had woven gave them all a fairly complete understanding of vocabulary and syntax, but the smoothing out of p.r.o.nunciation took somewhat longer.

As Oscagne had predicted he would, the prime minister threw obstacles in their paths at every turn. Insofar as he could, he filled their days with tedious and largely meaningless activities. They attended the openings of cattle-shows. They were awarded honorary degrees at the university. They visited model farms. He provided them with huge escorts whenever they left the imperial compound-escorts that usually took several hours to form up. Pondia Subat's agents put that time to good use, clearing the streets of precisely the people the visitors wanted to see. Most troublesome, however, was the fact that he severely restricted there access to Emperor Sarabian.

Subat made himself as inconvenient as he possibly could, but he was unprepared for Elene ingenuity and the fact that many in their party were not entirely what they seemed to be. Talen in particular seemed to completely baffle the prime minister's agents. As Sparhawk had noticed long ago, it was quite nearly impossible to follow Talen in any city in the world. The young man had a great deal of fun and gathered a great deal of information.

On one drowsy afternoon, Ehlana and the ladies were in the royal apartments, and the queen's maid, Alcan, was speaking as Kalten and Sparhawk quietly entered.

'It's not uncommon,' the doe-eyed girl was saying quietly. 'It's one of the inconveniences of being a servant.' As usual, Alcan wore a severe dress of muted grey.

'Who was he?' Ehlana's eyes were like flint.

'It's not really important, your Majesty,' Alcan replied, looking slightly embarra.s.sed.

'Yes, Alcan,' Ehlana disagreed, 'it is.'

'It was Count Osril, your Majesty.'

'I've heard of him.' Ehlana's tone was frosty.

'So have I.' Melidere's tone was just as cold.

'I gather that the Count's reputation is unsavoury?' Sephrenia asked.

'He's what's' referred to as a rake, Lady Sephrenia,' Melidere replied. 'He wallows in debauchery of the worst kind. He boasts that he's saving G.o.d all the inconvenience of condemning him, since he was born to go to h.e.l.l anyway.'

'My parents were country people,' Alcan continued, 'so they didn't know about the count's reputation. They thought that placing me in service to him would give me the opportunity of a lifetime. It's the only real chance a peasant has for advancement. I was fourteen and very innocent. The count seemed friendly at first, and I considered myself lucky. Then he came home drunk one night, and I discovered why he'd been so nice to me. I hadn't received the kind of training Mirtai had, so there was nothing I could do. I cried afterward, of course, but all he did was laugh at my tears. Fortunately, nothing came of it. Count Osril customarily turned pregnant maids out with nothing but the clothes on their backs. After a few times, he grew tired of the game. He paid me my salary and gave me a good recommendation. I was fortunate enough to find employment at the palace.'

She smiled a tight, hurt little smile. 'Since there were no after-effects, I suppose it doesn't really matter all that much.'

'It does to me,' Mirtai said bleakly. 'You have my word that he won't survive my return to Cimmura by more than a week.'

'If you're going to take that long, you'll miss your chance, Mirtai,' Kalten told her almost casually. 'Count Osril won't see the sunset of the day when I get back to Cimmura, I promise you.'

'He won't fight you, Kalten,' Sparhawk told his friend.

'He won't have any choice,' Kalten replied. 'I know any number of insults that no man can swallow-and if they don't work, I'll start slicing pieces off him. If you cut off a man's ears and nose, he almost has to reach for his sword probably because he doesn't know what you plan to cut off next.'

'You'll get arrested.'

'That's no problem, Sparhawk,' Ehlana said, grimly. 'I'll pardon him.'

'You don't have to do that, Sir Kalten,' Alcan murmured, her eyes downcast.

'Yes,' Kalten replied in a stony voice, 'as a matter of fact, I do. I'll bring you one of his ears after I've finished with him-just to prove that I've kept my promise.'

Sparhawk fully expected the gentle girl to react with violent revulsion to her protector's brutal offer. She did not, however. She smiled warmly at Sparhawk's friend. 'That would be very nice, Sir Kalten,' she said.

'Go ahead, Sephrenia,' Sparhawk said to his tutor. 'Roll your eyes and sigh. I might even agree with you this time.'