The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul Read online

  “I’ll just change my dress,” Professor Vane said, and disappeared through one of the doors in the room. Pali leaned against the desk in the sitting room, surveying the room idly. She had spent many happy hours in here, drinking and conversing on all sorts of topics, from the highest scholarship to the most mundane.

  Professor Vane’s rooms were cluttered and homely, full of books and papers and pretty clothes. She had a kind of passion for owls, and the room was full of owl-shaped ornaments: clay and wood sculptures, a few paintings, a round stained glass sun-catcher in the window, even a tapestry. The room smelled a bit of the perfume the professor wore, a bit of the long branches of forced cherry-blossoms in a pretty vase shaped like an owl, and a bit more like the calico cat currently asleep on the chair.

  They were friends, passing notes like students in their faculty meetings, meeting up two or three times a week for drinks or afternoon-long rambles in the countryside, sharing books and opinions. The somewhat absurd formality of Stoneybridge kept them to their titles and surnames. Professor Vane and Professor Black, never Elena or—

  Professor Vane came out, now in a gown of finely striped green muslin, and pulled the common Scholar’s black robes over her in lieu of a coat. She added a scarf, striped in Sisterlen mauve and white, and the black kid gloves Pali had given her last Winterturn. She stroked the cat down its spine; it yawned and rolled over, eyes slitted with pleasure as it folded its paws in the air and let her rub its belly gently.

  “There we are,” Professor Vane said, smiling brightly. “All set.”

  Pali returned the smile, if a little less brightly, and held the door open. It was a good friendship she had with Professor Vane, she told herself, pushing away the pang of longing for Jullanar, her first and greatest friend. It might not be brimful, but it was good, and with that Pali had learned to be content.

  Happy, she reminded herself. She was happy.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE SIRUYAL

  Pali was to meet the Zuni ambassador at the crossroads town of Yrchester in Middle Fiellan. She pondered the map.

  The Craslins were a tall mountain range that ran northeast to southwest. Chare, the Lesser Arcady, and Lind were all on the eastern side. The mountains curved around in the northeast to form the northern rim of Orio Bay, with Orio City and the university of Tara tucked into the far end of the Tarvenol peninsula.

  The main highway from Chare led up the coast to Orio City, which had once been the capital of the Imperial Province of Northwest Oriole and was still the largest city in this half of the continent. Smaller roads led up into Lind, and eventually met up with the main east-west highway.

  The shorter route led across the Craslins by the southern pass into south Fiellan, and then up the old north-south highway to Yrchester. The only difficulty with that route was that it was a much higher pass and would be impassible with snow for several more months.

  Pali’s favourite student, who had graduated the previous spring, lived in southern Fiellan. He had written to her several times over the winter to inform her of increasingly intriguing developments in his region.

  Pali had noted the signs of powerful wild magic gathering around him. She was not at all surprised to hear that he was at the epicentre of some sort of nexus of oddities. She had spent time with a powerful wild mage before, and she remembered the chaos of serendipities and inexplicable events that trailed in one’s wake. An untrained one would surely be even worse than—her old friend.

  The sensible thing to do would be to take the stagecoach up the inland route through Lind, and cross the mountains at the northern pass, and thence drop safely down to Yrchester. There were pirates and mountain brigands alike raiding the coastal road. The mercenaries and old soldiers who normally guarded merchants and travellers going to the conflicted lands south of Chare and West Erlingale were finding work on the traditionally safe northern routes.

  Not that Pali needed a guard. Or was particularly sensible.

  And then again—she had promised herself that she would take seriously any invitations to adventure the world offered.

  Well. To be truthful she had once promised Jullanar she would not follow every impossible quest that landed in front of her.

  She had been very good, all these years.

  Surely she was due for an adventure. Jullanar would understand that there came a time when the impossible was the only appropriate course of action.

  Half term came upon her with a flurry of tearful students and studiously casual colleagues. Pali consoled them both as best she could, which wasn’t very, and packed and repacked her bags more times than she had ever been used to.

  It had been a long time since she’d last set out.

  But that wasn’t the difficulty she faced, in fact. Professor Vane came to visit her one afternoon, the day before Pali had decided to leave, having promised to take Pali out for supper after she’d finished packing.

  “I am surprised,” her friend said, “to find you still unready.”

  Pali glared at the piles of offending belongings. The problem was that she knew what she should take for an adventure. Going as a Scholar was throwing her entirely off-kilter.

  “It’s been a long time since I last travelled so far,” she said, and was chagrinned to realize it was true. She hadn’t been farther than up the coast to Orio City since—well, since the Fall of Astandalas, and that was a dozen years and a distressing, unchronological, period of magical upheaval ago.

  Professor Vane perched herself on the arm of one of the uncomfortable chairs, the only unoccupied space. She looked around the room, gaze arresting on the carpet which usually hung on the wall and was currently draped on the back of the other chair. “What have you decided on so far?”

  Pali pointed to the neat pile on top of the chest. Her robes and sash and veils, which looked enough like her ordinary garments to be unremarkable; her sword; a pot and bowl and spoon. Her oiled cloak, an extra dagger. A small box of salt. Two shifts, an extra set of the snug wraps she used instead of Charese-style stays when she wasn’t wearing Charese dress, two extra loincloths. Her good comb and brush, and a small bag of other toiletries and hair accessories.

  She did not include the carpet. Professor Vane would not expect her to take one with her; and Pali was not prepared to explain it was a magical flying carpet, famous in song and story.

  Professor Vane regarded the collection with astonishment. “What about a book?”

  Pali nodded sharply. “Good point.” She set out a new notebook, her fountain pen and a bottle of good ink, and a new history of the Ouranatha by a scholar she respected—and then nodded in satisfaction. “I knew I was missing something. It’s hard, not going on horseback. Though of course the horse’s tack takes up room, in that case.”

  “What clothes are you taking?” Professor Vane asked.

  “That’s all I need.”

  “What about formal occasions?”

  “I’ll braid my hair differently.”

  The other professor laughed, though Pali was quite serious. “Surely you should have some sort of formal robe? Are you not going for research? You must uphold the honour of Stoneybridge, if not St Erlingale’s!”

  “True.” Pali considered, and fetched out her good Scholar’s robe and a blue dress of some sort of crêpy material that folded without undue wrinkles and would look well enough with her breast band and shift. “There.”

  “Shoes?”

  Pali had a secret love of shoes she had only discovered after her time with the company. “I thought I might get a new pair there,” she said. “Something fashionable in Solaara. My boots and slippers will do for the rest.”

  She fetched the slippers—tooled leather with removable felt liners, sturdy soles, and a light and flexible design, good enough for fencing or dancing as well as warm for cold nights at home. “And a couple of pairs of socks,” she finished, adding them and a pair of leggings. “I’ll wear my gloves, hat, and scarf to start with. That should do. Thank you, Professor Vane, those were good suggestions.”

  “When I went home for last Winterturn, I took a full trunk and three bags.”

  Pali smiled at her. She’d never travelled with anything so much as that. On her journey from Arkthorpe to take up the position at Stoneybridge, she’d had one trunk and her one bag. Even then, the trunk had been mostly empty, but as she’d commissioned it she hadn’t wanted to leave it behind. “You probably had gifts.”

  “Will you not be taking anything?”

  “For whom? Emperor Artorin?” Pali laughed at the thought. She had spent the past fifteen years (and the Interim after the Fall) studying the last emperor of Astandalas. She would say, if a little reluctantly, that she admired him—she might be a folk hero and infamous criminal, but she could respect his efforts to reduce the corruption she and the Red Company had decried—but despite the years of studying his reign she was hardly going to bring him presents.

  She knew too much about his character to not be baffled by the vast eccentricities at play within it. She had wondered whether it was some hereditary madness, before the news had begun to trickle back from Zunidh over the past three or four years and she had learned he had a gift of wild magic. Hiding that must have taken its toll, and probably accounted for at least a portion of his black depressions.

  There were questions even that theory had been unable to answer, however. Some of his decisions were unfathomably strange for a man in his position.

  “I might see if I can get an audience,” she said, imagining the joy of presenting those pointed, poniard questions to the man himself. She could hold him accountable for some of his disastrous decisions, couldn’t she?

  Indeed, who
else could? Or would? Domina Black of Stoneybridge, highly regarded historian of his reign, might think of the hard questions; Pali Avramapul of the Red Company certainly dared to ask them.

  She felt a warm glow at the mere thought.

  “Hmm. Did you say the ambassador had arranged this? You might give him a token of your appreciation. You could give him your last monograph and perhaps some Charese specialty.”

  “Saffron,” Pali decided, for the traditional tokens of her appreciation—which involved stabbing some enemy—were probably inappropriate for the ambassador. She added two copies of her monograph—one could be a guesting-gift for her student—and made a mental note to acquire some of the spice from the merchant in town before she left.

  With the contents decided, she packed quickly.

  “You’re so efficient,” Professor Vane marvelled, as Pali turned her pile into a stack of “things to be worn” and “in my bag.”

  Pali had designed her bag herself to be both practical and elegant when she had been home with her sister and trying so hard to be content with her place in her clan. To be brimful with the pleasure and peace of being at home, in her own culture.

  That she kept making prototypes of travelling bags that would be particularly useful for someone not travelling with camels and horses and wagons had perhaps been a sign that she would not stay. No one else had seemed surprised when she told Arzu that she thought she would take her leave again.

  The bag was caramel-brown leather, soft and supple, tooled with the designs familiar from her childhood. The lining was woven—her sister’s work, of course, bright and lovely under her hands, keeping her belongings safe and clean, unmarred by insects or dust or thieves.

  Of course, anyone who stole something from Pali Avramapul would regret it. Deeply.

  Arzu did not have such grand magic as—certain other mages of Pali’s acquaintance had possessed, and she had not been able to make the bag more than unusually roomy. Pali fit her clothes and books in one side, her cooking gear and some long-lasting foods in the other, and still had room for a bottle of wine and another of water.

  And the flying carpet.

  Not that Pali told Professor Vane any of that.

  The morning before she left, Pali woke even earlier than was her wont. She lay in her bed, listening to the wind rattling the latches on her windows. Familiar sounds, after nine years in these rooms.

  She rose, restless, knowing it was too early to collect her hired horse from the livery stable, and after pacing about her rooms, checking her gear for the hundredth time, she lifted up her great-grandmother’s sword.

  The handle settled easily, familiarly, into her hand. The curved blade was foreign in this world of straight lines and straight swords, of straight-edged buildings and straight roads. And it was famous—famous from a dozen songs. She drew the blade and kissed the thousand-folded steel. The sword nicked a drop of blood from her lower lip, and she smiled at this silent promise.

  It had been too long since she had performed the shēhen.

  She set her feet in the first position, not perpendicular as in most of the Astandalan forms, but staggered in parallel. Her weight over her knees. Her left hand found the dagger without effort; her right hand the sword.

  This was what the Warriors of the Mountain called the Song of the Siruyal.

  Pali had always thought of the Siruyal, the resplendent magical bird of her clan’s legends, as purely mythological. That was until she had seen it, she and her friends of the Red Company, when they had been sent across the Holy Desert to parley with the Wind Lords at the navel of the world.

  Or—no. She had seen it before then.

  Not on her first adventure, when she and Arzu had gone to rescue Sardeet from the Blue Wind. Nor on her second, when she had taken the bones of the Blue Wind’s first six wives home to their kin. Nor on her third, when she and Arzu had gone to visit Sardeet in the city by the sea, and climbed up a magic vine into a cloud-country that she now knew had been at the edge of Fairyland.

  On her fourth adventure, when Arzu had settled in with her newborn son and Sardeet had married her third husband, both of them happy, secure, satisfied with something Pali had never even known how to want (brimful, came the faint thought), Pali had taken her great-grandmother’s sword and her veils and her horse and ridden off after the wind.

  The Siruyal had a wingspan of thirty paces, the tales went.

  (She slid her sword through the air, as softly, as sweetly, as inexorably as the shadow crossing the sand.)

  The Siruyal had talons made of electrum, shining like lightning, sharper than the bite of the scorpion-men who guarded the Underworld.

  (Her dagger darted forward, in and out of the crescent of her blade. She had fought the Scorpion-Men, with a chunk of fool’s gold her only weapon, when she and her sister Arzu had followed the road East to rescue Sardeet from the god who had stolen her away.)

  The Siruyal had a beak curved like a rainbow and a tongue the blue of the sky, and it sang a song like rain falling, a song that like the rain brought flowers in its wake.

  (Her feet tapped lightly as the first drops of rain, as a cricket, as the sand grains leaping across the surface of the dunes. Her blade sang in her hand, an eerie wail as it cut the cold humid air, the cry of a falcon high as a star in the sky.)

  The Siruyal brought destruction with one wing, and new life with the other.

  (Pali’s hands had known both justice and mercy, and the death that was both, and that other death that was neither.)

  The Siruyal had milky-blind eyes, with which it could see into the very heart and soul of the one before it. Be careful, the stories said, for if you met the Siruyal and it judged you unworthy, it would lift you high in the sky and drop you.

  (Pali had met the Siruyal. She had found it grounded, drinking from an oasis, its lighting talons deep in the earth, its singing tongue silenced, its wings furled. She had been hunting, had an arrow strung to her bow.

  She had looked full into its eyes. She had been lifted up, high above the desert, with her great-grandmother’s sword in her hand; and she had been lifted even higher, to the ridges of the mountains that had no roots and peaks that held up the sky, and the Siruyal had given her three feathers and three wishes and three quests.

  The first, for glory.

  The second, for knowledge.

  The third, for dzēren, that brimming promise, which she had always pretended to herself was joy, for she had never wanted peace.

  Stepping foot on that high mountain, she had followed the Siruyal’s whispered directions until she had found herself in another world, where all had been strange and uncertain until she found the first friends of her heart.)

  She spun into the second set of the Shēhen, the Song of the Siruyal taken at double speed, each step and each movement of her hand precise, clear-edged as if it had been months, not years, since she had last performed it.

  She had always thought she’d found glory, and knowledge, and joy in the space of time encompassed by those three wishes, those three feathers. But yet—

  Had not the first portion of her life, from meeting the Siruyal until the dissolution of the Red Company, been her quest for glory?

  And the second portion, in the universities of Alinor, her quest for knowledge?

  Joy had never been an object she had sought. It had come with the sword in her hand and the horse between her thighs, her friends at her side and the wind blowing before her. It had come too with the hunting out of secrets and the orderly arrangement of thoughts, the precise choice of words, the arguments lined up on the battlefield of scholarship.

  But that was not dzēren, not the brimming peace.

  And yet—her hands dipped, the dagger and the scimitar, her feet tap-tapping on the stone floor, on the rugs before the fire, the scent of the desert in her nose, her mind stilling at the centre of the whirling motion, the Song of the Siruyal that brought flowers in the wake of the rain—what would it mean to seek that?

  Pali rode out of spring and back into winter as she headed north and west. She arrived at the inn at the lower end of the pass in the late afternoon of a cold, clear day. Snow still lay in the shadowed edges of fields, and there was frost in the air.