The Return of Fitzroy Angursell Read online

  Here was an excellent price of passage: to be the first person to have seen Fitzroy Angursell in thirty years! To hear the story from his own mouth!

  (Assuming, that is, that I was.)

  I bestowed upon the custodian a sly sideways smile.

  “I have been in the Starry Court,” I declared. “The Moon Lady offered me a place at her side, the Morning Star as my vessel. I have been adored as a god, but am now returned to the mortal lands on a quest of great moment.”

  Every word of this, I swear, was the honest truth.

  The custodian was doubtful. “To break into tombs?”

  “I will offer you gratis my method for having astonishing adventures,” I told him, making his eyes light in curiosity. “First: you determine an object, in the sense of an end, or perhaps a telos as the philosophers would have it: a goal, that is. It might, perhaps, be something like the Three Mirrors of Harbut Zalarin. An ancient scroll I once had occasion to read tells how, in conjunction with a certain golden key Harbut Zalarin was given by his father the Sun and which I found long ago, the three mirrors permit one to open any heart. And that, my friend, is a quest worthy of any great poet.”

  I didn’t mention that I’d long since subsequently also lost said key. It wasn’t really any of his business, and I needed a back-up quest in case the first one proved easier than anticipated. Kip—my astonishingly patient and sometimes terrifyingly competent chief minister—has long since taught me the virtue of such advance preparations.

  “And then?” the custodian said, unimpressed.

  I found myself grinning at him, something I often felt but rarely expressed. It made me feel surprisingly light-hearted. Perhaps that was due to the momentary spike in heart-rate from the tomb magic.

  “And then, one comes up with a second object, or perhaps even a third, and very seriously and with the utmost effort seeks after it.”

  Finding the three mirrors was hardly the true telos of my quest, either officially or personally.

  The custodian laughed at my absurdity, though I could see how much he appreciated the story he would have to tell his friends. He then offered me the use of his bicycle, with the comment that I had once mentioned in a song that I had ridden the first that had ever been invented.

  “I have hardly ridden one since,” I objected, regarding the contraption dubiously.

  “They say you never forget,” the custodian replied complacently. He indicated a lever on the handle that seemed connected to a wire leading down to the front wheel. “These are brakes, to slow you down. They’re newer. You probably don’t have them in the Moon’s country.”

  “I certainly never noticed them there.”

  “Just tell someone, wherever you leave it, that it belongs to Gus up at the Nec.”

  I suppose I ought to have been disgruntled at how cavalier the necropolis custodian was about his duties, but as I careened inexpertly away from Gus, descended the well-groomed slope in front of Yr the Conqueror’s tomb, and sped across the open space which I had prevented many decades of well-meaning courtiers from filling with my own, I could not help but be grateful for my youthful exploits as a folk hero.

  It would have been so embarrassing to be taken up before the authorities this soon.

  While it was quite correct to say that I had ridden the first bicycle ever invented, I had done so after borrowing the contraption in question from the small town museum in which it was kept.

  Borrow may not be quite the correct word.

  Though if I recall correctly, I did eventually send it back courtesy of the post.

  Gus’s bicycle was largely made of bamboo and Iveline rubber, apart from the wires surrounding the brakes and the looped metal chain that powered it. It did not feel substantial, but neither did it shake itself to pieces as I bumped down into a dip.

  I pedalled hard and got out of the dip again, only to be confronted with a fork in the path and the edge of the escarpment.

  I tried to go left, as although I have many skills and odd powers, flight (alas!) is not one of them.

  The bicycle appeared to have a will of its own. It inclined towards the righthand path, which went down in a relentless plunge.

  The path was a narrow, well-beaten twist of a thing, dark red-brown against the lighter reddish stones. It was towards the end of the dry season, and the clumps of grass were green at their bases, golden-violet up their stems, to the waving violet banners of the seed-heads. I focused on the twists in front of me, hands gripping tightly to the handlebars.

  Faster and faster. Some bird, somewhere, was making a loud twittering noise audible even over the noise of my passage. I jounced around on the bicycle as the path wound about larger boulders, my bag flapping against my side. The air was noticeably more sultry as I descended, warm and humid and redolent, the dominant scent something resinous and minty.

  The path suddenly dropped out below the leading wheel, and for a moment I was flying, stomach weightless, until the bicycle landed again with a thump and a wobble. But I was going too fast to fall, faster and faster as the path unspooled down a boulder field at the base of the escarpment, and then canted left and around a huge boulder precariously balanced on top of a much smaller one, a phenomenon I just caught out of the edge of my eye before I was past it, and then in a spray of red gravel I was on a white road and narrowly avoiding a cart drawn by water buffalo.

  The animals objected with a whuffling series of snorts. “Hoy!” cried their attendant.

  “Sorry! Can’t stop!” I called back, the honest truth, as the bicycle was pressing forward now, left and downhill along the white road, away from the escarpment and the necropolis and the cart, and my legs seemed to be pedalling without my conscious effort. Down, and down, the slope gentler now, speed a little moderated but still fast enough that the air seemed cool against my face, and I realized I was laughing madly, whooping with delight, the air echoing with it.

  By all the gods, how I’d missed this!

  The momentum from my plunge down the escarpment carried me along quite a ways down the back road I encountered at the bottom. I had never been along it before—official visits to the necropolis always followed a strict ceremonial route otherwise unused by mere mortals, and I’d never before been to the region unofficially—and once I caught my breath and stopped laughing, I was able to pedal along fairly decorously and enjoy my surroundings.

  The land gently sloped away from the red-stone escarpment towards the fertile valley of the River Dwahaii, which runs through Solaara on its way from the Grey Mountains to the Eastern Ocean. Up here, where the scrubland was still littered with the odd boulder, ranging in size from the size of my fist to larger than the largest elephant, the basic activity appeared to be pasturage.

  I saw mostly goats along with a few rangy dappled cows, their attendants dressed in wide green capes and round grey caps. They stared aghast at me as I passed, even after I stopped laughing. Well, I was grinning like a fool.

  I went down a dip and up the other side, with a bit of strain in my thighs, and was glad the land sloped down again, this time presenting a splendid view of my capital city ahead and slightly to the right.

  I paused there to take a drink of water from the bottle my assiduous chief attendant had packed for me, and to put away the scarlet mantle before it became damaged by dust or caught in the wheels of the bicycle, as had seemed dangerously possible more than once.

  Solaara is called The City of Cities and reckoned one of the most beautiful conurbations in the whole of the Nine Worlds. It is a city of white marble and flower-garlanded arcades, intricately carved spires and elegant domes, shady squares and colourful markets. The sun-in-glory of the Palace of Stars, which crowns a central volcanic plug, was from this angle quite visible: the golden roofs of the central block, the five major wings extending out, the well-watered gardens green as a malachite brooch.

  Everything was drenched in orange light, except for the river which was a streak of yellow fire. My shadow stretched in fr
ont of me, cutting the glare of the white clay road. I followed it away from the sunset, knowing night would fall soon but far too enamoured of the experience to think about practical matters.

  This road seemed to be heading away from the city, which was fine by me. I had already traversed Solaara on my way to the necropolis, and though I could not exactly say I knew it well—my excursions into it being rather circumscribed—it was not the heart of this new adventure.

  If any of the objects of my quest were to be found there, they would have to be found on my return. That is one of the classic stories, and though I am certainly no longer a young man off to seek my fortune, nevertheless the task of finding who you truly are and where you truly belong never ends.

  And of course, recently escaped prisoners of state generally ought not to linger in the environs.

  Thus I followed the road I was on, ignoring any side tracks leading back uphill or towards the city. It was a winding sort of road, not well-travelled—apart from the carter and the herders I had seen no one since leaving the Nec—but all the more pleasant for that. The city had been suffocating in its crowds. I am not well used to them, though this was only the second time in one thousand and twelve years I had been alone for longer than an hour at a time.

  It was, dare I say it, invigorating, but the plains around Solaara are no wasteland, and my splendid independence lasted only until full dark, when I missed a turn and toppled straight into a fen.

  Fortunately some passing arsonists found this amusing and rescued me.

  2

  In Which I Am Called Upon to Assist an Arsonist in his Craft

  It was, I take pride in stating, a spectacular fall. I rather specialize in them.

  Just at dusk I crossed a causeway marked by a line of leathery-leaved shrubs that appeared to be the source of the resinous, minty scent, for they filled the air almost to the point of intoxication as I approached. On the other side of the hedgerow the white-earth road transitioned to a wooden boardwalk.

  The vibrations caused by the bicycle moving over the corrugations were pleasing. The boardwalk was level, and the boards were fairly smooth and well-fitting, so the shaking was minimal and the pedalling easy. On either side of the boardwalk were tall grasslands, chest-high to me on the bicycle, full at first of small birds flitting here and there and fireflies starting to glow as the dusk deepened. It reminded me rather of my first adventure, when I had escaped my exile and found myself in a painted city at the edge of a vast grassy estuary.

  I cycled along, humming an old song of mine from those days, and reflected that that was another thing I had not been able to do for so long. Most of the time it is inappropriate for a head of state to be humming absently, and even when it isn’t—in the bath, for instance—I was never alone. Not that my guards were anything but discreet; but it was always the case that I wasn’t supposed to know Fitzroy Angursell’s songs, the majority of which remain banned.

  I relished my perceived isolation, moved from ‘A Riot in the Painted City’ to ‘The Glorious Defeat of the Third Army of Astandalas’ (ah, those were the days! I had yet to learn how to title songs properly but nevertheless managed to write ones that appealed to large swaths of the population), and ignored the really quite basic fact that I do not have magically enhanced night vision, and that these fens are known for their fatally attractive spirit lights.

  I was aiming for an edifice illuminated by human agency, so I felt justified in looking for a congregation of lights. Once I had realized the boardwalk was taking me along the edge of the Fens towards the river, it occurred to me that I did know of a destination I could aim towards for supper—increasingly appealing—and probably the night as well.

  The River-Horse Inn at the edge of the Fens was an establishment my long-suffering former secretary and present viceroy Kip had mentioned as a place he intended to take his family on their visit to him, and indeed had done so after a river excursion, to apparent pleasure all round. From this I deduced that it would be clean, aesthetically appealing, culinarily acceptable, reasonably priced, and almost certainly middle-class in clientele, all of which seemed a good idea for this first night out from the Palace.

  There were very few cross-paths from the boardwalk, but whenever I came across one I always chose the route that took me towards the cluster of bright lights that I thought indicated the inn.

  I should not, of course, have been following the lights.

  The Solamen Fens lie to the east of Solaara, and have an ill repute.

  The enclosing and binding of the fens was one of my first great acts as Lord of Zunidh. As Emperor of Astandalas I was preoccupied with other matters, and did not make use of what I may say is a considerable talent for wild magic. When I woke after the Fall, it was to find my empire disintegrated and the magic of the world maddened and uncontrolled. I began the work of restoration and reconstruction close to what had become home, with the Fens and their deadly spirits.

  The River Dwahaii meanders past a line of volcanic plugs of varying heights and precipitousness in the wide valley formed between the Escarpment I had just descended and the southerly Vijurnka Hills, of which I knew little besides the fact that the hill tribes and the Plainsmen had a long and storied enmity that mostly played out nowadays in enthusiastic and often violent sporting matches. The Prince of Eastern Dair, into whose demesne Solaara and its surroundings fall, takes much more interest in them than the majority of his subjects.

  The line of volcanic plugs finishes with a flourish of sorts, in the form of a double peak unimaginatively called the Twins. Although not very high, the Twins are of sufficient mass and conformation to force the river through the gap between them. On the city side of the Twins are the farms and market gardens that fed the city; on the ocean side are the Fens.

  Despite what some of the songs might indicate, I do not have a wholly unreliable sense of direction. I cannot claim any great feats of orientation, it is true—I am not the person one looks to when navigation is in question—but I can, most of the time, hold a map in my mind and relate the visible geography of a place to the cartographical image.

  I mention this not only to clear up a matter of longstanding irritation, but to indicate that I was not lost. I had come down from the Escarpment, very good. Solaara was behind me, also very good. The river was to one side of me, the sun had set behind me, and I was sloping ever downhill. The sea was some way in front of me, and before the coast was the River-Horse Inn. Also very good.

  I expected to come to the foot-path that I had been informed led alongside the Twins for the convenience of those who wanted to stay close to the riverside as they journeyed, and after that, I thought, I would have to watch out for the Fens. But since I would be on the riverbank path, there would be no need to fear losing my way or missing the River-Horse, and I happened to know that the bindings on the fen spirits protected the bank from their depredations even at night.

  What I had not taken into account was that my back-road approach had led me to the north of the Twins. Thus, when I passed through the hedgerow I had entered the Fens far from the river, and whatever lights I was heading towards had nothing whatsoever to do with the inn.

  It had been a long time since my work on the Fens. I was still proud of my work, but I confess I had spent very little time thinking about the bindings since I finished them, except in a vague self-congratulatory manner. They were a network of magic holding the Fen spirits in and ensuring that travellers were safe throughout the marshes during the day, and that at least the margins were safe at night. All around the perimeter were spirit houses, where the local witches paid the small tributes of salt and wine and so on required to keep the Fen spirits occupied. It was still assuredly not a good idea to go very far past the periphery.

  I have always thought it a very great work of magic indeed. The Fens had been places of horror and misery for as long as anyone had ever mentioned them, and now they were bound, even if not precisely tamed.

  Not that anyone can tame t
he true Wild. A certain discipline may be accepted, as even my muse will accept a certain metre, but only complete destruction will obliterate something at once so beautiful and so perilous.The boardwalk path I was following led south and east through the very middle of the Fens, where I had long been assured absolutely no one had any desire or need to go. Only the Fen spirits dwelled there, I was told. The river folk muttered about skinwalkers and hobgoblins and things of that ilk, but I had never encountered any, and so, in my arrogance, thought none were there.

  It is a hazard of the profession, arrogance. You can change the world, and so you begin to think you should.

  And of course, if one is secretly also reckoned the greatest poet and one of the greatest renegades of the Nine Worlds, one’s name known to the highest of the high and the lowest of the low alike, and one’s friends are scattered to the winds—well, it is something of a miracle I have any sense of humour left, really.

  I have Kip to guide me now, but in those days he was a lowly undersecretary of little standing and no reputation besides one for being a bit of a troublemaker, and barely a whisper of his exploits came to my ears. I was instead surrounded by people who were desperate for me to take care of all their problems, and willing to flatter me to the point where I began to think I could. Kip mentioned the Fens a few times, early in his time as my secretary, but I had not learned to listen, and I was much more concerned with—and to be frank, far more interested in—new and greater works.

  I was pondering the difficulty of finding good advisors (and that heads of state have at least as hard a time with it as notorious criminals) when the front wheel of the bicycle dropped out from under me.

  Unlike when I’d gone over the Escarpment, there was no path to catch it. The front wheel plunged down in a fountain of black water. Physical momentum ensured both rear wheel and rider followed, at an angle that flipped me over the handlebars to land flat on my back in three feet of murky water atop many more of muck.