A Gathering Of Stones

5

She came herself to rouse him before dawn.

He tried to pull sleep back around him and not-hear her.

She wouldn’t let him escape that way; she muscled him out of bed, held him upright while she slapped and pinched him awake. She looked delicate as a rose petal, but she had the strength of a wrestler and a stubbornness greater than his own. After harrying him out of the room and through a series of corridors, she threw him into a bathtub the size of a small pond. It was filled with ice water. She laughed at his indignant roars and left him to his ablutions. At the door she turned. “Breakfast is waiting in the terrace room; ring the bell when you’re ready and a servant will bring you there.” She left.

Maksim shivered and gritted his teeth. He examined the taps and managed to pump up a stream of water warm enough to take the curse off that already in the tub. Shivering and running through a thousand ringing curses, mostly to hear his voice again, to hear words come pouring from his throat, he scrubbed the accumulated grime off his body. When he climbed from the tub and found clean robes laid out for him, robes tailored for his size and even for his taste in such things, he laughed aloud. Despite the loss of his souls and his miserable predicament, he felt alive and eager to get on with his work. He yanked on the bellpull and followed the servant to his breakfast.

He was surrounded by empty plates and sticky beakers and draining his last bowl of tea when the Chuttar Palami Kumindri came strolling in. She wasn’t wearing her veil and her honey hair hung loose about her face; it was long, down to her waist, finer than spidersilk; the drafts from the door and windows teased it away from her head, making it ripple and wave like grass in a stream. She wore beads about her neck, rows and rows of them, ivory, turquoise, jasper, carnelian, beads carved from scented woods, from crystallized incense. She halted just inside the door, smiled at him and stroked her beads, waiting for him to acknowledge he was finished with his meal.

He set the bowl down, got to his feet and bowed. A little courtesy wouldn’t hurt. He didn’t have to mean it.

A graceful wave of her hand acknowledged and dismissed the bow. “I have purchased a travel dulic for you and two mules to pull it.” She smoothed at her hair, tucked strands of it behind a delicate ear. “I doubt if there’s a horse in the whole North Country up to carrying a man your size.”

“My profound thanks, Chuttar Kumindri. The thought of riding that far put a shiver up my spine.” He damped a napkin in a fingerbowl, began working over his hands. When he was finished, he tossed the napkin aside, looked up. “One thing…”

She raised a brow, fluttered a hand.

“It seems to me we’d all be better off if you just snapped me there. Why don’t you? You have power and to spare for that minor bit of magic.”

“Forget that, Settsimaksimin; you will go the mortal road and keep your head down. The Magus is…” She shrugged; the beads clattered with the shift of her shoulders. “He has discovered somehow there’s a magicman pointed at his talisman. Read the omens, I suppose. His reputation says he keeps his fingers on the strings of will-be, old spider. Now that he’s alerted, he seems to be delighted with the challenge. He is a very subtle man.” She said the last indifferently, the words came out flat and cold as if they meant nothing to her.

He was furious but kept it to himself. “I’ll need financing,” he said. “Or do you want to pile that on me also?”

“My Housemaster has a map of Tok Kinsa which you might find useful and a plan of the Zivtorony where Shaddalakh is kept. These things are waiting for you when you decide you’re ready to leave. He also has a purse with fifty gold jaraufs, five hundred takks and a double handful of dugnas. Make it last, Settsimaksimin, you’ll get no more from us.” She looked him over, head to toe, a scornful sweep of sea-colored eyes, then she swung round and stalked out.

He chuckled, pleased with himself, hauled on the bellpull and asked the maid who came in to take him to the Housemaster.