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  As I rose, Louis said, “But wait a minute. I have a book.…”

  He got up and swung a cabinet on a hinged pivot, opening a bookcase concealed behind it. He touched the spines of two books with his index finger, then removed one and handed it to me.

  “Take this,” he said. “I read it years ago and I’ll never look at it again. I remember it mentioned these cysts, only it called them ‘road buds.’ If you can make any sense of it, you’re a better scholar than I am. And of course if I can be of any help when you find Guntram, let me know.”

  He paused, considered for a moment, and added, “You’ll have the help of anyone in the Commonwealth. On Jon’s command if you need it, but I think anyone who knows Guntram will help you without orders.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, shaking hands.

 

  Louis walked me through his suite. I went back to the house and read the book I’d borrowed. It was a religious tract and probably heretical, because it said that what priests called God was actually the Road itself.

  I didn’t care about theology—that or any other—but nothing it said about the road buds was any more useful to me than it had been to Louis. It did confirm that cysts existed, though, just as the Beast had said.

  The problem now was to find the cyst in which Master Guntram was trapped.

  I wasn’t good company for May, that night or the next morning. She wanted to talk about Lord Osbourn, and I wouldn’t have done that even if my mind hadn’t been sunk in worry about my friend Guntram.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Mills of God

  It was a few days later that I dropped in on Lord Morseth in the Chancellor’s Office. The clerk whose sidewise desk more than half-blocked the entrance wasn’t somebody I recognized. As I came in sight, he glared at me and said, “Sir, I can take your request for an appointment, but I’m afraid the Acting Chancellor is too busy to see anyone for at least the next seven days.”

  Jumped up little prick, I thought, but he had a job to do and I was too unhappy about life to get into a stupid fight. “Sir,” I said, “I came to see the Clerk of Here. I’d rather not wait now, but if you could tell me a good time to come back—”

  “Pal!” Morseth boomed through an inner doorway. He stepped into the lobby, a big man and even tougher than he looked. “Come into my office and tell me you’re going to drag me out to the field and knock my block off!”

  I could have made it through the doorway by turning sideways, but instead I shoved the desk back a bit and went through. The clerk yelped.

  “Well, I’d be willing to try,” I said. “But as I recall, milord, you had things pretty much your way the last time we were out.”

  “Well, it’s time to get your revenge, then,” Morseth said as we entered the private office. The door had been open when I arrived; he closed it after me. “Pal, I hate this job. I bloody hate it.”

  “Can’t Reaves spell you on it?” I said, taking the chair in front of the desk.

  Lord Clain had done the administrative work ever since he and the Leader started rebuilding the Commonwealth. At first there can’t have been much, but that had changed with success. The attention to detail and organization which helped make Clain an unbeatable warrior had been just as useful when he became Chancellor.

  Besides being Chancellor and a warrior, Clain was a man…and Lady Jolene, the Leader’s Consort, was very definitely a woman. There was talk and more than talk; and the talk didn’t stop after I killed Lord Baran, though the gossips made sure to hold their tongues where I was going to hear them. They might think I’d cheated by using magic to kill a better man, but he was dead all the same.

  Lord Clain went off to inspect his dominions for an indefinite length of time. Lord Morseth became Acting Chancellor, though he hated the job and was miserable in it—maybe even as miserable as Jon and Jolene were, without their closest friend in Dun Add.

  And I suspect Lord Clain was pretty uncomfortable where he was, too. I don’t know who gained by the whole mess.

  “You couldn’t ask for a better man than Reaves to back you in a fight,” Morseth said, glaring at me across his desk. “Or to take point and leave you to clean up behind him. But numbers to him are just like so many clouds in the sky—they don’t mean a bloody thing. And I’ve seen him try.”

  Morseth leaned forward. “Look, Pal,” he said earnestly. “Everybody knows how smart you are. Couldn’t you take this over for me till Clain gets back? You know you can do the work.”

  “I’d like to help you out,” I said. Not that way, but I’d been closer to Morseth and Reaves than to any other Champion throughout the time I’d been in Dun Add. “But Morseth, I couldn’t do the job. I might be able to handle the work, but I don’t have the seniority or the presence. You do, so you don’t see how much you get done by just being Lord Morseth.”

  That was the truth. If I told somebody to jump, he’d say, “Why?”

  Morseth shook his head with a grimace. “It’s not bloody fair,” he muttered; and we both laughed to hear the typical Aspirant’s complaint come out of this veteran’s lips.

  “Well, if you’re not going to save me from being buried in muck,” Morseth said, “would you like to go tie one on? When Reaves is here I can unwind with him in the evening, but he won’t be back from Jellicoe for another week.”

  “What I’d really like to do is bend the ear of the Clerk of Here,” I said. “My buddy Guntram’s gone missing and I’m hoping she might have a notion where he’s off to.”

  “Toledana can do it if anybody can,” Morseth said. “If everybody in this bloody place did their jobs as well as she does, I wouldn’t feel like digging a hole and pulling the top in over me.”

  He looked as unhappy as I’d ever seen him. Morseth wasn’t a jolly man, but he’d been unfailingly cheerful and good tempered—even when he was flinging a man through a window head-first.

  “I’ll come back when the evening bell rings,” I said as I got up. “I can’t drink along with you, but I’ll down a couple cans at the Silver Shield and we’ll find somebody there to get you a little deeper into the night.”

  Although as I walked down the corridor to Mistress Toledana’s space, getting falling-down drunk didn’t strike me as such a bad idea after all. I’d gone by Room 37 first thing when I got up. Andreas was on his way down to the practice hall, but he said he hadn’t seen Lord Osbourn since the night before.

  Osbourn had gone out with several friends—Andreas didn’t know their names, but they were expensively dressed—and hadn’t come back to the room.

  I’d blithely told May that I’d turn her cousin into a Champion; but that was when I thought Osbourn would be willing to help me do that.

 

  I walked on through the office of the Clerk of Here. Mistress Toledana’s staff knew that I was a friend hers. One looked up from the interview he was transcribing. When he saw it was me, he nodded and went back to work.

  I had the impression that I might be Mistress Toledana’s only friend. I was interested in the whole world, not just the place the Leader was sending me this time.

  I know that many of the Champions ask the Clerk nothing but the route to their next destination. Beune was a place that nobody went except by accident. Maybe because that was where I came from, I found even other little hamlets exciting.

  Most of the room was a long corridor lined with filing drawers. I tapped on the door at the end, heard a grunt of reply or thought I did, and went through to a wooden deck built out from the stone fabric of the castle. It had struts for a canvas tilt, but that hadn’t been stretched on this fine, cool morning.

  Mistress Toledana was about forty with short blond hair. She could have been attractive if she’d put her mind to it, but I doubt she could imagine why she would want to do that.

  “Lord Pal!” she said, turning her head to see who’d come through the door behind her. “Have you found something interesting for me?”

  “I’m hoping it
’s the other way this time,” I said, walking around the desk to squat with my back leaning against the railing. I’d tested it the first time I came out here. It gave me the creeps to rest my weight against a frame over sixty feet of nothing, but in my mind I knew it was safe. “Mistress, have you ever heard of a cyst? Or it might be called a bud? It’s a place that’s walled off from both Here and Not-Here.”

  Toledana frowned. “What does it look like?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It—maybe they?—is on the Road, and the one that I know about used to be a village. A human village, so it was Here.”

  “But it isn’t now, apparently,” Toledana said, her eyes looking past me and beyond the horizon they were turned toward. She smiled and added brightly, “Well, that gives us something to look for, doesn’t it? Reports of villages that used to exist but don’t now. Does the whole node vanish?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I’d assumed that it did, but now that the Clerk put the question, I couldn’t be sure.

  “Well, it’s something,” Mistress Toledana repeated. “I’ll tell my people what to look for, but I’ve got some ideas and I’ll look myself as well. You’ll come back in a few days?”

  “Thank you, mistress,” I said as I rose to my feet. “This is important to me.”

  We went out together. I kept going, but Mistress Toledana stopped in the corridor and opened one of the flat manuscript drawers.

  I was feeling better. As Morseth had said, Mistress Toledana would find Guntram if anybody could.

 

  Ten days later I was coming out of the showers after an afternoon at the practice hall when Reaves caught me. “Hey, buddy,” he said. Reaves was shorter than Morseth; possibly wider across the shoulders than his friend; and at least equally tough. “We’re looking for you. Morseth’s down to the field and I came here. We got a private room at the Shield and it’s a place to talk.”

  “Should I bring May?” I said. I’d gone out with Morseth the way I’d said I would, but drinking bouts aren’t really me. I do better lying on my back in a trance, fitting atoms into place in an artifact.

  “Naw,” said Reaves. “May’s about as good as they come, but Morseth and me wanna pick your brains. She’d just get bored.”

  “I’ll tell May where I’m going,” I said. She’d introduced me to the pair of Champions on my first day in Dun Add, so I knew they were all on good terms. “And I’ll join you as soon as I’ve done that.”

 

  The Silver Shield was decent but not fancy, and it was close to where all three of us lived. Morseth and Reaves had adjacent townhouses just off South Street. They were a little bigger than mine, but they weren’t palaces. Reaves likes flashy clothes and Morseth generally has a woman staying with him—and the women have been getting younger as he ages—but neither of them comes close to spending the incomes from their extensive estates.

  There were several private rooms off the mezzanine above the tavern’s main floor. The waiter coming down the stairs when I arrived told me, “The middle one,” but I would’ve guessed that from the chorus of “Then I kissed her on the lips” coming out of it. Morseth and Reaves had good bass voices. When they were in a mood to, they could make the floor quiver.

  They were in that mood tonight. I didn’t bother knocking.

  “‘Oh, oh, there she goes,’” my friends bellowed. Morseth was looking toward the door and turned Reaves around so he could see me too. They dropped the song, and Reaves put his arm around my shoulder.

  “Pal, good buddy!” he said. “Have a drink with us. We had ’em tap a cask of ale just for you!”

  Morseth was already running a mug full of beer from a small cask on the sideboard along with wine bottles of various shapes and colors. I was touched that they’d gone to the effort to get what they thought I’d prefer…though the truth is, I’ve gotten comfortable with the lager that’s much easier to get in Dun Add.

  “I’m not going to try to drink along with you guys,” I warned as I drank. I was pretty dry after a couple hours on the machines, though, and I was glad of the ale.

  “I don’t want you drunk,” Morseth said. “I want you cold sober so you can tell me how to get me out of this bloody Chancellor’s job. Because it’s killing me.”

  “That’s no joke, Pal,” Reaves said, nodding seriously. He must’ve been chugging wine ever since he got to the tavern, because he hadn’t been drunk when he found me at the bathhouse. “I’m worried about my buddy here. I been gone two weeks and I swear to the Almighty, if he keeps going downhill he won’t last two weeks more.”

  I looked at Morseth with a critical eye and finished my mug. “Morseth,” I said. “Do you suppose we could get Lord Clain back? Because there’s nobody else on the Council who could do the job—or I’d want doing the job.”

  “He’s not going to come back as long as Jolene’s here,” Morseth said morosely. “He doesn’t figure he could keep it in his pants, and he’s not going to give anybody the chance to stir things up the way Baran did. Even if there wasn’t something to it.”

  “There would be,” Reaves said, as glum as his friend. “You know there would. But you know—”

  He brightened suddenly.

  “—what if it doesn’t have to be a Champion? You told Morseth you wouldn’t do it, but how about your buddy Guntram? He can’t knock heads, maybe, but he scares the piss out of everybody except you. He scares me for sure!”

  I smiled, because I’d never seen a sign that Reaves was afraid of anything in the world. I treated his suggestion seriously, though, because it wasn’t a bad idea if you didn’t know Guntram.

  “He wouldn’t do it,” I said, “for a lot of reasons. But the main thing is, Guntram’s gone off somewhere and a thing called a cyst is holding him.”

  “Where’s this, then?” Morseth said. “We can go talk to this cyst.”

  He sounded calm, but I flinched back at the tone because I knew the man.

  “Where he is, that’s the problem,” I explained. “Guntram went off to find something and found it, but he’s trapped there now. He didn’t tell anybody where he was going—”

  “That wasn’t smart,” Reaves said, frowning.

  “I guess he figured he could handle it,” I said. I kind of agreed with Reaves but that was hindsight. I was gone from Dun Add for nobody knew how long, and Guntram had been confident—just as any of the three of us would’ve been if we’d gone off to take care of a problem. The Leader doesn’t want people around him who doubt themselves—and none of us want that either.

  “Bloody hell,” Reaves said, his frown even deeper. He uncorked another bottle and split it between his mug and Morseth’s. “I don’t know what to do about that.”

  I passed my mug over for more ale. “You and me both,” I said. “And then I’ve got Osbourn, and I don’t know what to do about him either.”

  Reaves shrugged. “There’s lots like Osbourn,” he said. “More money than sense. Nothing to worry about. He’ll be gone in a few months or a year and there’ll be three more just as worthless to take his place.”

  “I told May…” I said, drinking deeply. “That I’d make a Champion out of him. She’s going to say I failed her when Osbourn has to walk back home with nothing to show for the trip to Dun Add.”

  “I’ve seen him out with Lord Kellean’s crowd,” Morseth said. “Nobody learned anything useful with that lot except to hold their wine. And to play dice—has he got money?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Or anyway, he did. I’ve heard Kellean plays pretty deep.”

  It was good to talk my worries over with friends—I couldn’t talk to May without it turning out to be my fault—but it was also making me more depressed. I’d known I was in a hole, but I was starting to see how deep.

  “I was quite a rip when I first got to Dun Add,” Morseth said, looking up at the ceiling as he thought about the past. “It was a woman who cured me.”

  “You fell in love?” I said, except tha
t I’m afraid my amazement at Morseth ever really caring for a woman made it come out more like “You fell in love?”

  Morseth nodded solemnly. “I did that,” he said. “Her name was Candace and I loved her right down to my boot-soles. Yeah, me.”

  “What happened?” I said. I guess it was none of my business, but this was a tragedy that I’d never guessed had happened.

  “She dumped me,” Morseth said, still looking toward the ceiling. “She dumped me for a pissant who wrote poetry to her. I don’t think he even knew a weapon from a shield so I couldn’t call him out. It’d have been like murdering a baby.”

  “By the Almighty…” I said. “I’m sorry, Morseth.”

  “I don’t know what I’d’ve done,” Morseth said. “Only Jon ordered me and Reaves here out to Lozert to settle a feud between two families.”

  “Hey, I remember that one,” Reaves said. “You kept about fifty of ’em off my back while I cut through a steel gate!”

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” Morseth said, nodding. “And when we got that sorted, I decided that if Candace wanted some half-man who wrote poetry, she could have him. I’d do things that only a Champion can do—and there’s bloody few Champions.”

  “Well…” I said. “I guess I’d better hope that Osbourn finds the right woman.”

  “The wrong one, you mean,” Morseth said.

  “I’ll drink to that!” Reaves said, raising his mug.

  “And so will I,” I said. “As soon as I get some more ale!”

  CHAPTER 8

  Problem Solving

  I woke up when May shook me; I felt muzzy. I hadn’t really tied one on, but I don’t have much of a head for drink. The spring on the farm in Beune is good water, and I just never got a taste even for ale.

  “Jon wants you at a Council meeting at noon,” May said. “You’ve got plenty of time, but I thought I’d wake you up now and tell you.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I said, sitting up carefully. I didn’t remember coming home last night. It was midmorning, judging by a glance out the window. “Do you know what it’s about?”