The Kingless Land Read online

  The

  KINGLESS

  LAND

  A Tale of the Band of four

  ED GREENWOOD

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  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE KINGLESS LAND

  Copyright © 2000 by Ed Greenwood

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN-13: 978-0812-58014-3

  ISBN-10: 0-812-58014-1

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-089056

  First edition: March 2000

  First mass market edition: February 2001

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5

  All we can boast about

  All we hold proud

  Comes to us drenched in blood:

  The spilled lives of those who won it

  For us all. Revere them.

  Forget not their names.

  In time of need,

  Over the flames of fires,

  We call to them

  To come again.

  For no land ever has heroes enough.

  Especially not this one.

  —whisper-chant of kurgrimmon,

  Master Bard of Aglirta,

  in the elder days, when there was a King

  Prologue

  The tavern sighed again.

  Flaeros frowned across the warm room. Jacks of burnished copper hung on a forest of stout pillars flashed fireflicker back at him. Long-whiskered men hefted pipes and tankards unconcernedly, as if none heard the mournful wail but a would-be bard visiting from oversea.

  He covered his darting glances with a sip of wine. A shiver trailed cold fingers down his back as the wailing ghosted past to his left. Peering that way, he caught the eye of a lion-maned old man two tables away: an eye that was keen, hawk-gold—and amused.

  “You’ll get used to it,” the man told him, scratching his nose with a thoughtful thumb. “Truly.”

  Flaeros Delcamper drew in a deep breath. Arching his brow in a failing attempt to look unconcerned, he asked as quietly as possible, “Is—is it a haunting, then?”

  The old man chuckled. “Came in the back door, did you? From over the wave?”

  Flaeros flushed. “From Ragalar,” he said shortly, “for the Moot. Landed at dusk, on the Storm Bird.”

  Bristling brows rose. “Costs a pearl or two for that swift a passage.” Flaeros found himself measured, that golden gaze flicking up and down like a thrusting sword. He squirmed, suddenly more uncomfortable under scrutiny than he’d been since childhood.

  Those golden eyes saw a man excited, young, and with a little too much wine aboard. From a prosperous Ragalan house, by his garb, eyes bright with all the wonders of the world on his first venture away from stern, gray Ragalar. Lilting voice, plenty of coins—a romantic, dreaming of being a master bard, probably sped hence with the blessings of parents beginning to think hopes of their youngling becoming anything were but wispy dreams.

  Nettled by that knowing gaze, Flaeros opened his mouth to say something rude—but the moaning died as the old man glided soundlessly to a seat beside him.

  “What you heard is why this house is less crowded than most, with the Moot coming down swift upon us.” Old lips curved in a wry smile. “Sirl folk come here to avoid being jostled by the ballad-hungry … or just to spare their ears.”

  The severe wine matron who’d begun ignoring the beckonings of the youngest Delcamper appeared like a silent shadow to set down a generous platter of hot herbed woodwings tarts and a decanter of decidedly finer vintage than Flaeros had yet tasted. He turned to look at her in surprise, only to find a tapestry rippling back into place in her wake—an instant too late for him to miss the flashing smile she gave the old man over her shoulder. Who was he?

  By then, the dry old voice was telling Flaeros that he was sitting in the Sighing Gargoyle. When breezes blew just so through the sculpted stone ears and many-fanged mouth of the archmount gargoyle out front, a sigh arose that was loud and lifelike.

  Flaeros nodded and then stiffened at a warm touch against his hand. The old man had pushed the heated platter his way. He looked up warily as the delicious smell of heartgaer and roast woodwings rose around him.

  “Eat,” the old man said simply. “You have to give the wine something to work on, down below. Maershee’s tarts are as good as you’ll taste in all Sirlptar.”

  Flaeros was suddenly so hungry that his mouth filled with juices. He bit into a tart like a starving man and found it as good as it smelled.

  Hot gravy was running off his chin, and the old man was grinning at him. The youngest Delcamper suddenly found that he didn’t care. He grinned back, and the old man promptly pressed another tart into his hand.

  Flaeros had come to the fabled Glittering City to behold the Moot of the master bards. Every two years they gathered at Sirlptar to exchange news, decide which towns and baronies were to go “under the ban” and hear no tales or harping for a time, and consider which bans should be lifted. For a score of nights they bought and sold instruments, sang to crowds who paid far too much to cram shoulder-close into taverns, took on or exchanged students, confirmed a few new bards … and in rare years, named a precious handful of harpists to the maroon mantle of Mastery.

  Flaeros Delcamper was years away from such a wondrous fate, and he knew it. Yet he was giddy with the sheer joy of his venture, sitting in a tavern in fabled Sirlptar with wonders on all sides. Small, but more worldly than the best tavern in Ragalar, filled with folk from far sailings … folk more confident than the anxious coin-pinching merchants of Ragalar the Stern. Aye, he was alone and far from home, in a city of ready swords and, the tales ran, expert thieves … but was he not near invincible, with the Vodal on his finger?

  He looked down at it—a twisted and battered nail spotted with black tar, roughly banged into a finger ring long ago. It looked as worthless as the seaman’s bauble it had been before the best mages the Delcampers of old could hire laid a score of enchantments on it and made it … the Vodal. He glanced away quickly, afraid he’d drawn attention to it. It had done the Delcampers much service and was worth (he’d been told, sharply) ten younger sons of the blood, and more. He casually closed his hand over it, feeling its familiar tingle. The Vodal could do many things, but Flaeros had been properly shown only one of its powers: when he stared at a person or a thing and set his will just so, he could see through all magical guises and gaze on the truth. Not that he
expected to encounter many spell-cloaked mages … but why else waste a truly powerful heirloom on a wayward son?

  Suddenly impatient with kin and home, Flaeros heard himself asking, “So where exactly did Aglirta lie, and how fare its remnants? I’ve heard tales of its fall, and I’m sure I’ll hear them told better and broader in the nights ahead, but merchants are fond of wild gossip, and I’d rather hear some truth.”

  The lion-maned old man slowly lost his smile. “You honor me, lad, to think my words hold truth. Know, then: all the mountain-girt vale of the Silverflow that comes down to the sea here, cutting Sirlptar in two, was once proud Aglirta. You probably know the water better as the River Coiling. Somewhere in the depths of green Loaurimm it rises. No baron ever ruled those silences, but from where the woodcutters left off, down its windings through a dozen baronies, was Aglirta. All between the Windfangs to the north, and the Talaglatlad—the peaks you see from Ragalar—to the south, is now the Kingless Land: a lawless string of battling baronies. A good place to stay out of until the Sleeping King wakes.”

  Flaeros raised an eyebrow. “That’s more than a child’s tale?”

  The old man shrugged. “You know how such things are … yet it’s curious; with bards spinning new words for centuries, that tale never changes: the last true king of Aglirta will awaken when the Dwaerindim are set just so, at the right place”

  “Yes,” Flaeros recalled eagerly. “The enchanted stones—are they just, well, stones? I was told they were gems: huge jewels that could each fill a man’s palm!”

  The old man spread his hands. “Four old stones, he who saw them said … and being a bard, Elloch would have embroidered his tale if what he’d seen left him room to do so.”

  “But that was but a dream,” Flaeros protested.

  Golden eyes flashed sudden fire. “ ‘But a dream’? Lad, what do you think bards—and mages—and lovers high and low feast on? What do you think barons and kings heed and hunger for? Dreams drive us all!”

  “But I want to hear truth. Dreams aren’t truth!”

  “They can be the goblet that holds it.”

  The young Delcamper frowned at that. Raking the air as if waving the thought aside to consider later—or never—he asked fiercely, “But you believe all that? The Sleeping King, and Aglirta rising again?”

  Golden eyes met his steadily. “Aye. I do. I doubt I’ll live to see it happen, and I scoff at the notion his rising will at one magic stroke restore peace and bounty to the land—I think it’ll bring us a war leader who’ll have to swing his blade mightily for years to hammer Aglirta together again. But there is a Sleeping King, waiting to be awakened. Somewhere.”

  The young bard-to-be muttered, “Yet I’m hardly apt to go tripping over him outside the gates, am I?”

  Old lips twisted wryly. “True enough, young lion. The corpse of a brigand, or the farmer he knifed, perhaps, but not a snoring monarch.”

  Flaeros stared at him, eyes growing large. “What? Just how dangerous is the Kingless Land? Should I buy a sword on the way back to my room?”

  The old man’s smile thinned. “Oh, it’s safe enough here in Sirlptar. Life’s not bad upriver, either, if you be long—firmly under the gauntlet of this or that whimridden baron or Tersept. Wolves and worse roam the fallen baronies. I’d not head into the forest without a blade, no—but then, were I you, alone and new to Aglirta, I’d not go out into the forest at all. A blade stops no arrows.”

  Flaeros shook his head. “I’d heard Aglirta was beautiful but dangerous; one had to be careful. You make it sound as if ‘careful’ means bring your own armed host, loyal mages and all!”

  The old man smiled and propped one battered boot up on a chair. A flourish of his arms seemed no more than a stretching of old limbs, but Maershee appeared before Flaeros could draw breath, as if summoned up out of the empty floor by a spell. Setting sparkling goblets of sweet-smelling wine before them both, she vanished again without a sound.

  “These are interesting days in Aglirta,” the old man replied calmly, “what with the fall of the Golden Griffon—Baron Blackgult, that is, who ruled the barony of Blackgult—and the rise of his old rival Silvertree.”

  “Another baron?” Flaeros hazarded, sipping. This new wine was like the juiciest berries he’d ever tasted, drowned in liquid fire.

  The old man nodded. “There’s an Aglirtan saying you’d do well to remember: ‘Never trust a Silvertree.’ He’s made swift work of pillaging Blackgult and almost built himself into a new king of the Kingless Land, with at least three barons on the verge of kneeling to him.”

  “Almost? Will he rule it all? “

  The lionlike mane of air shook in a firm no. “Faerod Silvertree’s cruelty has ever clouded his long sight. He’s made foes of a thousand men by declaring them outlaw. With a price on their heads they’ll have no choice but to take to the woods and raid farms for food. Much blood will smoke on the snow, come the cold.”

  “I never knew Aglirta had ‘thousands of warriors.’”

  “Men whelmed from all over Asmarand who fought in vain to conquer the Isles of Ieirembor for Blackgult,” the old voice explained. “Now they’re trickling home—to find homes and farms gone, and friends turned against them. Aye, the wolves’ll be busy this winter.”

  Flaeros looked across the room. Through a diamondshaped window, he could see the darkness of full night, hiding the river Silverflow endlessly sliding past behind tall, crowded houses. Somewhere out there in the dark, not so far off, desperate men with drawn swords were creeping.…

  “Why do that?” he asked suddenly. “Why turn so many battle-ready warriors into your foes? Is this Baron Silvertree mad?”

  Heads turned. With a kind of cold thrill Flaeros realized his words had come out a trifle more loudly than they should have done.

  The old man, however, smiled easily. “Some have claimed so, but I find it does a man better to use the word ‘cunning’ instead, and act accordingly.”

  As their eyes met over raised goblets, he added, “If a baron began hiring armaragors without warning, rulers up and down the Coiling would rise in alarm and do the same. All would be thrust closer to bloodshed, all would have to spend coins in plenty—and coins are something that barons never do seem to want to part with.”

  Flaeros snorted. As if other folk liked to see coins roll away from them, either …

  “Yet consider,” the old man went on, “how it seems if you loudly trumpet the perils outlying folk suffer from a few raiders and make a show of the diligence with which you rush to defend them. And lo—some of these foes are renegade wizards; your patrols suffer under dark spells! To keep Silvertree safe you need fresh swords, and put out the call, urging friendly barons to do the same, proclaiming a blood price on this dark legacy of darker Blackgult, come down on fair Aglirta like thieves in the night. None cry out at the strength you build against a phantom foe. Those who do come raiding taste your strength and turn to harry other baronies, weakening your rivals—and hastening the day you’ll reach out and snatch them down, one by one. Cunning.”

  Flaeros looked wonderingly out the window at the night and a single twinkling light he could now see, and protested, “You speak of scheming that rushes lands to war and cares not for lives shed in the doing!”

  “Ah,” the old man whispered over his goblet, “that’s where the madness comes in.”

  Eyeball to eyeball young man and old stared at each other, until Flaeros asked almost despairingly, “How is it that you know all this?”

  Old lips laughed without a sound. “I am Inderos Stormharp.”

  Flaeros gasped, thrust his chair back as if he’d strayed too close to a hot fire, and gaped at the old man—who raised his glass in an almost mocking salute.

  Inderos Stormharp! Most famous of the master bards!

  The oldest and most respected weaver of ballads in all Asmarand, the seldom-seen master of enchanted harps who could call forth the strains of a dozen instruments out of empty air to dance with his
voice. The man who’d wooed the sensuous Nuesressa of Teln, only to unmask her as a dragon using shape-shiftings to lure men as a spider catches flies. The man who’d called forth unicorns with his singing and danced with dryads in mushroom groves to learn their secrets.

  Flaeros knew he was staring like a man brain-smitten and searched for something intelligent to say. It was a doomed quest. “I-I—ahhh …,” he began.

  Stormharp waved him to silence. “Gabbling is not needful, nor the fawning I find myself in constant over-supply of,” he said lightly, and then cocked his head and asked, “You looked at me strangely when first I spoke to you … have you seen me before?”

  Flaeros blinked. “Ah, no,” he said truthfully, “I know I haven’t. Heard of the great Stormharp, yes, but … bards come seldom to Ragalar, and respected merchants look ill on their sons learning ballads when they could—should—be mastering a trade”

  The old man nodded silently. There was something of danger removed in that gaze, like a dagger being slid back into a sheath. Out of habit Flaeros called on the Vodal then, letting it govern his right eye, while he kept his left gazing unchanged on the old man with the golden eyes.

  His right eye regarded a rather different man looking back at him over a goblet. A younger man, though no youth—a man of weathered features, piercing black eyes, and the lionlike build and manner of a warlord who rides into battle rather than lounging on a baron’s throne. A man who was holding a hand-length deadly firelance wand trained at the breast of Flaeros Delcamper.

  The hairy-knuckled hand that held that wand so patiently and steadily bore a large gold ring, and its large head in turn bore the device of a golden griffon.

  Flaeros drew in a tense breath and devoted himself to looking innocent. It would have been more difficult if he’d known what, by the Three, was going on—yet thanks to those same gods, truth had always been in short supply in Darsar.

  “So,” he asked, with a joviality he did not feel, “what should a man visiting Sirlptar do to stay out of trouble?”