The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [113]
The Great Lord of Cardassa looked down at his writing as if considering his reply, and then looked back up at them all and said, "I was as astonished as all of you when the Sleeping King-a safely distant legend, the stuff of bards and wide-eyed children-became the Risen King, a real and disconcertingly capable and demanding man, who expects our loyalty when we've had generations to swagger our own ways and nurse our feuds, one with the other, up and down the Vale. Astonished, and… irritated."
He set down his pen and added, "I don't expect Snowsar's reign to last, I don't think he understands our Aglirta of today, and I don't hold with some of his decrees and much of what I've heard of his thinking, as said before his court. Yet even if he were a puling idiot, he would be what I doubt not he is: the rightful king."
"Bah! 'Rightful'!" Caladash made a mockery of the word.
The man behind the table looked up at him and shrugged. "Well, then, if men are free to call a king no king if they please, what then is any baron? If we are but brawling bravos in this land, where will it find peace but in the iron grip of the last tyrant left standing?"
He shrugged again, and resumed writing. "Yet we have a king on Flowfoam, and he is at least a change from too many years of baron knifing baron and festering grudges and senseless slaughter… and the sort of sneaking-in-the-night conspiracy I seem to be hosting in my own hunting-halls this night. So, all of you, hear me clearly: no, Cardassa turns not against the king."
"And that's your final stand, Baron?" Caladash snapped, raising hands that flickered with little white fires.
Ithclammert Cardassa's smile held no mirth as he said quietly, "Not as final a stand as you obviously intend it to be, Caladash. If you're foolish enough to threaten me, you'll never win power enough to be a threat to Bodemmon Sarr."
"Enough boasting, fool," Caladash sneered. "Die!"
Flames crackled from his hands like white lightning an instant before the flaring green bolts that burst from the hands of Mauveiron and Talasorn, and so reached Cardassa first.
Reached, and rebounded, cracking back and forth across the chamber like a coachman's whip, first the white fire and then the green. Wizards staggered, toppled, and were smoking meat upon the floor before their or the other bodyguards could even reach for ready swords.
When steel did sing out from ten scabbards to glitter across the table, the Lord of Cardassa looked up into the array of hungrily hovering sword-points unconcernedly and said, "A wizard who attacks a man in his own castle and expects no shield is too great a fool to be allowed any chance at the throne of this or any other realm."
"Like you, we've little love or trust for mages… but I suppose you have little tests waiting for all of the rest of us, too?" Esculph Adeln snapped.
Cardassa looked up at him with eyes that were as cold as Adeln's were blazing, and said softly, "I had nothing waiting this night but a little wine and a wench-warmed bed-for myself. I was not riding through the night planning new kings for Aglirta."
"Bah!" the Tersept of Tarlagar snarled. "Let's see if clever Cardassan barons wear spell-shields against more than several good Aglirtan sword-blades at once! Hah!"
Swords drew back and thrust forward again in lightning unison-to strike and ring off something unseen that was as hard and immobile as stone. Cardassa gave them no more than a lifted eyebrow as he turned away from them, behind his magical shield, to strike a gong on the wall behind him in a certain rhythm, with a scepter that had been lying on a small table beneath it.
As it rang forth the signal for his folk to fly from Tathcaladorn, he rose unhurriedly, the scepter still in his hand, and went to a door not far from the gong.
"As my great-grandsire said many years ago," Ithclammert Cardassa told his guests icily, "traitors are not welcome in Tathcaladorn. I take my leave of you now-to ready myself for a journey to Flowfoam, to warn the king of