The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul Read online

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  THE REDOUBTABLE PALI AVRAMAPUL

  VICTORIA GODDARD

  Copyright © 2022 by Victoria Goddard

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For my sisters, Nichola and Kate

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER ONE

  FACULTY MEETINGS

  The Senior Common Room of Freeman College at the University of Stoneybridge in Chare smelled of dust and chalk and old, dry sherry, the sort of fug that got into the back of one’s throat and coated one’s tongue. A fly buzzed against the window behind the Dean, who was speaking.

  Pali Avramapul of the Red Company, one of the most notorious folk heroes and wanted criminals in the entirety of the former Empire of Astandalas, and current tenured Professor of Late Astandalan History, eyed the fly meditatively. Her hand twitched.

  Around the long oval table were two dozen men and women, each of them dressed in the brilliantly coloured antique formal garb of a Scholar of their colleges. Maroon and mauve, royal blue and imperial purple, green and grey, silver and white, orange and bronze, and Pali’s own sable lined with scarlet.

  As each of the Scholars shifted minutely, the rustling of the stiff brocades and heavy wools formed a soft, sleepy susurrus under the Dean’s drone. Pali sat with strictly upright posture, irritated with the too-tall seats. Freeman was a men’s college, and the chairs had not been intended for someone of her diminutive height.

  Her pen scratched across her notebook, making desultory notes about the likelihood of even lower student enrollment this coming term as a consequence of the troubles in the northeast of the continent.

  Pali enjoyed teaching, and enjoyed the relentless pursuit of understanding even more, but dear gods of her far-distant desert, there were aspects of being a faculty member that drove her up the wall. When there were rumours of war no more than the next country over—

  She stifled a sigh. There had long been restlessness to the south, in the dozens of squabbling baronies and free cities and petty kingdoms between the southern border of Chare, the river Ouzen, and the mountain country that had never quite been conquered by Astandalas in the years before its cataclysmic collapse. Pali could have gone seeking adventure any day she pleased.

  She hadn’t yet pleased. She enjoyed her place, her scholarship, her students, her life.

  Mostly.

  It was earliest spring. The snow geese had started to pass overhead on their way to the mysterious north. Pali could never quite find it in herself to be happy when the wind was full of their cries.

  Was happy the word? She pondered, doodling a little sketch of a goose on the edge of her page. There was a word in her own language, dzēren, which meant happy, and also joyful, and also joyous, and also … It was hard to translate. It had connotations of tranquility, of calm, of peace.

  Brimful was the best literal translation Pali had ever come up with. Brimful of joy, of happiness, of burgeoning peace, like a goblet of water overflowing, a spring rising up into an oasis. Something restorative, reflective, gentle. Quiet.

  Pali looked up at the Dean, who had just begun to turn his head towards her, and met his gaze frankly, attentively, alertly. He nodded, cleared his throat with a long ratcheting sort of a cough, groped for water from his glass, and then continued on.

  Her tenure at Stoneybridge was the closest Pali had ever come to dzēren, to the brimful. Certainly she had never managed it at home. She had never been gentle. It was, she thought, boring. Life was so much better with someone to fight. Here there were her colleagues to debate, her students to instruct, her own opinions and hypotheses to test and reshape and defend.

  That was joy. There were few things Pali loved more than a just fight.

  Her right-hand neighbour reached to the water carafe set before them. Professor Vane’s bright mauve sleeve was astonishing every time Pali glimpsed it, her pale-skinned hand a seeming afterthought. Pali admired her friend’s finely buffed nails, one of the other professor’s little vanities. Professor Vane poured herself water, the soft glug-glug-glug making Professor Hillcrest, across the table, startle awake from his near-doze. He caught the motion, frowned drowsily at the water, and settled again.

  Professor Vane slid a piece of paper towards Pali as she returned the carafe to its trivet. It was a movement well-rehearsed and better-practiced. The Faculty of History of the University of Stoneybridge conducted what everyone but for the Dean considered an excessive frequency and duration of faculty meetings.

  Pali’s eyes dropped down to the paper.

  No spitballing

  She never had been very good at keeping her expression blank. She ducked her head to examine the nib of her new fountain pen, a present from her favourite student upon his graduation the previous spring, and made a note in the book she ostensibly used for Faculty Meeting notes. She was not the recording secretary, but everyone knew if you wanted the salient points, you went to Professor Black. It was always good practice, she felt, to notice things.

  For instance: Professor Vane was bored, and Professor Black, otherwise known as Pali Avramapul, was about to crawl out of her skin in frus
tration.

  She wanted—oh, she wanted to have an adventure.

  The geese were crying in the dark before dawn, when she walked through the chill air to the stables. Pali could hardly bear this quiet.

  She would never be brimful, not of peace.

  She made a note about reduced funding, again, for out-of-country symposia, and scrawled a response to her neighbour.

  Not even the fly?

  Professor Vane, who had exchanged notes with Pali for the past five years of their shared tenure at the university, considered this sally before making her reply.

  Can you hit it?

  Pali considered the distance, the half-slumbering audience, the Dean, and her own openly acknowledged skills.

  It was known that she fenced at a salle in the town three or four days a week, and that she kept a riding horse at a stable at the edge of the university campus, which she rode daily. She occasionally assisted the university falconer with his birds, which few were permitted to do, and at the cut-throat interfaculty competitions held every third Friday she was noted for her skill at darts, though it was also maintained by some of her colleagues that this was because she tended to drink less than the rest of them.

  She and Professor Vane went on long rambles once or twice a week, depending on how their lectures and tutorials overlapped, and they often stopped in at any of the many taverns or public houses around Stoneybridge for a meal and a drink. Professor Vane inevitably started talking with the other patrons about their local ghost stories or religious customs, and Pali would invariably get bored and drift off to whatever game was on offer. Quoits, shuffleboard, boules, darts, even marbles. Anything with a frisson of competition.

  Pali made another note in her book, this time about the potential hires happening in Kitteredge. One of her current students might do well there as a lecturer.

  Assuming the young man managed to stop drinking his evenings away and actually finish his degree.

  A drink tonight says no, wrote Professor Vane.

  Pali felt her lips curl into a small smile. She put her left hand into the inner pocket of her academic gown, where she tended to stash small items she found out-and-about. Interesting stones, pieces of broken pottery, intriguing seeds.

  Three apparently ordinary dried beans and a feather, white with a black tip, from oh, long ago. She stroked the feather with one finger, delicately, remembering receiving it. Three feathers had she been given, by a being out of a legend not a one of these historians would ever have heard tell.

  Three feathers, three wishes, and three quests.

  Two feathers had she made use of, two wishes had she made and been granted, and two quests had she fulfilled.

  Pali had never quite found a third wish worth the wishing; and she had never quite decided that that third quest, for dzēren, for that brimful of quiet, reflective joy, was what she wanted.

  She did not wish for an end to these faculty meetings. They were a part of the small annoyances that were halfway to being a small pleasure, for she did enjoy the society afterwards, the drinks with Professor Vane or the entire faculty depending on the week.

  And besides, very soon she would be leaving.

  She let the beans fall back down into her pocket, clacking softly against the marble she’d found on her walk to the stables this morning, a small milky-glass bauble. She rolled the cool, hard, roundness between her fingers, enjoying its texture, then reluctantly let it drop as well. She didn’t want to break either the marble or the window.

  Deep in her other pocket was a chestnut, left there from the autumn. It rattled slightly in her fingers, the inner nut dried out. She might have to have a word with the charwoman who saw to her rooms and clothes for not turning out her pockets.

  The Dean droned on about new upper university regulations, which they’d all heard about last month and would probably hear about next month as well. Pali did not bother writing anything down. She tilted her head slightly as the fly landed on the upper right window pane, three inches above the Dean’s shoulder.

  He paused to shuffle his papers, and as his head was momentarily downturned Pali flicked her wrist. The chestnut sailed across the table, arced over the head of the Professor of Pre-Astandalan Alinorel History, and nailed the fly with a sharp thwap.

  The three people who had been looking in the correct direction to witness this gave astonished and impressed looks at Pali’s spot. The Dean lifted his eyes from his papers with a befuddled glance over his shoulder. “Was there something?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Probably the students outside,” Professor Vane said blandly. She was much better at keeping her face straight than Pali ever had been.

  “Yes, yes,” the Dean said, frowning down at his papers again. He leaned forward to peer at Pali, who thought he really had no excuse for not replacing his spectacles if they were failing him so badly.

  “Professor Black,” he said gravely.

  Pali ensured her expression was as solemn as she could manage, which wasn’t very. “Yes, Dean?”

  “I believe you are leaving us very soon.”

  That caused an uproar amongst those still awake, who roused the rest, who demanded to know what had caused all the excitement. Through it all Pali sat calmly, smiling slightly. Professor Vane, who knew what this was about, wrote, What a pack of hyaenas.

  “Now, now,” the Dean said, eventually managing to corral his unruly faculty. “Let us not act like undergraduates.”

  Perish the thought, wrote Professor Vane.

  “Professor Black is not leaving the university permanently,” he assured them all seriously.

  Alas. But where would she go?

  She might not have found that brimming cup here, but she was content. Even happy. She had learned there were pleasures in the ordinary, the common, the familiar.

  When she had been younger, she would have gone wandering at even the first inkling of boredom. She would have gone questing for wrongs to right, injustices to mend, just battles to fight.

  There were plenty of all three in the halls of Stoneybridge. When the geese called she reminded herself that her pen and tongue were weapons, too, as sharp and as effective as her great-grandmother’s sword (with which her great-grandmother had cut down the sun) or the dagger Masseo had once made for her out of a fallen star.

  “Where is she going, then?” the Professor of Pre-Astandalan Alinorel History asked. He looked a little sour, possibly from the scare the chestnut going past his ear had given him, as usually he and Pali got on quite well.

  “We should all congratulate Professor Black,” the Dean continued imperturbably, “for she has received an invitation to travel to Zunidh in the company of the Last Emperor’s ambassador and undertake some research in the Imperial Archives in Solaara.”

  There was envy on the faces of those who were only hearing this for the first time, but they all applauded her politely enough. Pali gave a brief scholar’s bow, trying not to laugh when she saw Professor Vane had written Like they couldn’t write for an invitation if they wanted too, followed by Celebratory drinks in the Lower Quad?

  “As the passage between worlds is only open on specific dates, Professor Black will be leaving Stoneybridge shortly to meet the Ambassador in Yrchester, that they can make their way to the passage together in good time.”

  And with that he started handing out reassignments of her students and classes with the brisk decisiveness that never failed to surprise those who slept through half his speeches.

  Stoneybridge was arranged in colleges, eleven of them huddled together on the north side of the river, and three at a more distant remove. Professor Vane belonged to Sisterlen, and Professor Black to St Erlingale’s. Sisterlen was in the main cluster, while St Erlingale’s, which had once been a monastery, was the farthest out of town.

  That was one of the reasons why Pali had chosen it, when she was offered a place in the Faculty of History and
half a dozen of the colleges had vied for her seat. She had brought an already-shining scholarly reputation with her, created by her own intelligence and the idiosyncratic methods derived from her cultural background, her widespread travels, and the alchemical researches of Pharia and the natural philosophy-inflected studies in the history of medicine that Ayasha had pursued. Not that Pali told anyone that members of the Red Company had been her inspiration.

  She also brought with her an endowment for a new research chair, presented to her by a very rich merchant philanthropist who had a few secrets of his own, and so the competition had been fierce. As a result, Pali had ended up with a fine suite of rooms on the ground floor of St Erlingale’s.

  She thought she looked very fine in her black robes lined with scarlet silk, as well. Scarlet was the colour of the Red Company, after all. It was a reminder to her never to let herself become too comfortable. One never knew when the fates would suddenly issue a challenge, and Pali would be called to take up her great-grandmother’s sword and set forth on adventure once more.

  She might not wish for that—for wishes were dangerous things when they might come true—but she could hope for it.

  Yearn, even, though she would never say that out loud.

  She accompanied Professor Vane to her rooms in Sisterlen after the faculty meeting, where her friend took off her heavy formal robes with a relieved sigh. Professor Vane was in her forties, with rosy pale skin, constellations of brown freckles, and curly brown hair she wore down in the Taran fashion.