The Knave of Souls - Fantasy - Sequel to The Jack of Souls

Chapter 9

Let the wary traveler keep eyes and ears open;

Wit is needful for those who travel far.

        —Arkendian Proverb

*

*

RED MOON INTERLUDE

*

Don Viero glowered into his brandy. It was Iberg brandy, perhaps intended to show how the sophistication of Arkendian tastes, but it was the sort of brandy Iberg derelicts drank in the gutters. At least, he thought, she didn't throw me in a dungeon. He leaned back in the pillowed couch of his ambassadorial suite in the palace of the Arkendian queen. Not yet, at any rate.

"May I come out now, Master?" Phix's raven voice squawked from the closet.

"No, you may not."

"Ca-hawwk! How long must I hide in this room? It has no windows."

"That is the nature of a closet."

The closet door opened a crack. "There are no Arkendians here to view me."

"We can't take any risk, Phix. If an Arkendian sees you, they'll assume you are a possessed scarecrow, and we'll all be hanged."

The closet door opened, and Phix edged out into the candle light of the room. Viero frowned, and glared over at him. The tryst servant cut a lanky figure, hung in an over-large wine-colored robe with a high, deep cowl that nevertheless miserably failed to hide a foot-long yellow beak. Glittering black eyes peered mischievously from the depths of the cowl.

"You will always hide here, Phix. You will never be accepted. Do you understand that? You must be utterly invisible. Unless you take your bird form."

"My bird form cannot drink brandy."

"Brandy burns you, which is even worse."

The bird-man was silent, his black eyes sparking beneath the cowl.

"Hawwk! You may be dead already."

"We will not know until my interview with the Queen. But I think not. I thank my timing for that. The year I make myself the most hated magus on the continent, the Arkendian Queen discovers a race of magic-using chimpies in her back yard. The year I wash up on her shores, she is desperate for a magus advisor."

"Then you owe the Kwendi a debt."

Viero brooded. Chilled by the damp air of Kingsport, he pulled the furred collar of his coat around his ears. "Do I? We are in Kingsport, after all, a place synonymous in our language for ignorance and barbarism."

"You would prefer exile in the Ice Wastes or the deserts?"

"You misname them," said Ugo, from his silent place by the window. Viero's eyebrows raised. The huge Oliitian rarely spoke.

"It is the name on the maps!" Phix squawked.

The two servants could not be a better study in contrasts. Where Phix was lanky and scarecrow thin, with nervous bird-like energy, Ugo was as huge and heavy as the snow-bears his people hunted in the north. Oliitians out-weighed all other races on the continent. They even outweighed Arkendians, though Arkendians took an easy second in the race. But where the Arkendian physique was angular with broad shoulders and narrow hips, the Oliitians were broad-shouldered, broad-chested and broad-hipped all at once. Their lines curved over layers of muscle and padding, well suited to the cold, and perfect, Viero imagined, for wrestling troll-seals from holes in the ice.