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    Past Imperative
    Past Imperative
    Past Imperative
    Ebook570 pages9 hours

    Past Imperative

    By Dave Duncan

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    • Adventure

    • Friendship

    • Survival

    • Mystery

    • Friendship & Loyalty

    • Chosen One

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Star-Crossed Lovers

    • Mentor Figure

    • Reluctant Hero

    • Divine Intervention

    • Secret Identity

    • Whodunit

    • Love Triangle

    • Quest

    • Coming of Age

    • War

    • Betrayal

    • Deception

    • Religion

    About this ebook

    First in the WWI alternate reality trilogy. “Duncan has a wonderful knack of conjuring up wacky scenarios and making them believable and fascinating” (Kirkus Reviews).

    The Great Game of Gods is afoot in a world on the brink of madness . . .   In the summer of 1914, a young man of reputation beyond reproach awakens under police guard—grievously injured and accused of heinous, impossible murder. And in a strange, distant place, the youngest member of a penniless acting troupe has been taken prisoner by the loyal minions of a corrupt, vengeful goddess. For an ancient prophecy has divided the realm’s ruling deities into warring factions—a prophecy that mentions the crippled captive child and a youth recovering from inexplicable wounds in a British hospital bed. The game weaves through worlds and dimensions as it has since time immemorial—a deadly contest of skill and manipulations that ruthlessly creates wizards, destroys human pawns, and transforms ordinary men, women, and children into something more. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateApr 29, 2014
    ISBN9781497627147
    Past Imperative
    Author

    Dave Duncan

    Dave Duncan (1933–2018) was born in Scotland, and received his diploma from Dundee High School and got his college education at the University of Saint Andrews. He moved to Canada in 1955, where he lived with his wife. Duncan spent thirty years as a petroleum geologist. He has had dozens of fantasy and science fiction novels published, among them A Rose-Red City, Magic Casement, and The Reaver Road, as well as a highly praised historical novel, Daughter of Troy, published, for commercial reasons, under the pseudonym Sarah B. Franklin. He also published the Longdirk series of novels, Demon Sword, Demon Knight, and Demon Rider, under the name Ken Hood.   In the fall of 2007, Duncan’s 2006 novel, Children of Chaos, published by Tor Books, was nominated for both the Prix Aurora Award and the Endeavour Award. In May 2013, Duncan, a 1989 founding member of SFCanada, was honored by election as a lifetime member by his fellow writers, editors, and academics. He passed away in 2018. Visit https://www.daveduncanauthor.com/ for more information on the author.

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    Reviews for Past Imperative

    3.5/5

    90 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Dave Duncan recently passed away, which made me very sad. In honor of him, I decided I would reread this series, as I think it is the only one of his older series's that I have not reread, mostly because this one is so memorable (whereas typically I forget a lot of what I read). The magic system, and even the plot, in this series, is one of the most clever I have ever read. Granted as the first book in the series, this book is mostly setup for the rest of the story, so I feel bad for the other reviewers who gave up on it, but I can kind of understand their frustration.

      To add to my enjoyment I am reading/listening to a biography on Winston Churchill which takes place in the same time and place as our main character Edward Exeter. Leaves me wondering if Churchill was actually a stranger... ;)
    • 3/5
      I've had this book for at least 10 years. It looked like fantasy but not the standard elves and dwarves Tolkien ripoff and that intrigued me. Obviously it didn't intrigue me enough because I never got around to it until I found it on Amazon in audio as part of the all-u-can-read buffet program (can't remember what it's called). I didn't know ANYTHING about the book when I started (because I usually like to be surprised). It was decent but not great for me. It definitely was NOT a Tolkien ripoff but I can't say that it really grabbed me.

      It seemed to be too long for the number of things that actually happened. It really is just the first 3rd of a trilogy and its length makes me not want to invest the time to read the other two. There is intrigue with many factions but not many answers as to who the good guys are. There's some action but not a lot. There's lots of talk about gods and one or two actually show up. Wingless "dragons" are used like horses. BUT none of this really peaked my interest. Maybe I'm just old and jaded. I probably would have loved this when I young and I definitely would have finished it but now that I have less time to read I find myself less willing to use that time to read books I'm lukewarm about.

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    Past Imperative

    Round One of the Great Game

    Dave Duncan

    Contents

    Foreword to the 2009 Edition

    Epigraph

    Map

    Translator’s Note

    The Gods

    The Trong Troupe

    Overture

    1

    2

    3

    Act I

    4

    5

    6

    7

    8

    9

    10

    11

    12

    Act II

    13

    14

    15

    16

    17

    18

    19

    20

    21

    22

    23

    24

    25

    26

    27

    28

    29

    30

    Act III

    31

    32

    33

    34

    35

    36

    37

    38

    39

    40

    41

    42

    Act IV

    43

    44

    45

    46

    47

    48

    49

    50

    51

    Act V

    52

    53

    54

    55

    56

    Curtain

    57

    58

    59

    End of Round One

    Acknowledgements

    Foreword to the 2009 Edition

    The Great Game series is set during the First World War, but most of the action takes place on a world called Nextdoor, where pseudo-gods play vicious games with mortals to while away eternity. You may read into this any moral or religious message you want, but it was intended only to entertain. The title comes from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and T’Lin Dragontrader bears no small resemblance to Mahbub Ali, Kim’s horse-dealer friend. Those are about the only direct references to Victorian or Edwardian stories that I recall inserting, so don’t treat these as puzzle books, fictional romans à clef. Nevertheless, I wrote them partly as an experiment in nostalgia.

    No, I am not old enough to remember the First World War, but I do remember the Second and the years of shortage that followed it. Books were hard to come by in Britain during my childhood and much of what I read then was already very old—works by Jules Verne, H G Wells, R M Ballantyne, Kipling, Conan Doyle, and Rider Haggard. I did read some Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, but only because I was forced to. Among the later books I recall are Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Gods of Mars (1918) and David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus (1920). Not least among the hints I picked up from those particular stories is that there are many ways to travel to other worlds.

    The Great Game has been out of print for about ten years, and I read it over again in anticipation of its reissue. I won’t offer a detailed critique, because it would be vain of me to list all the good features and folly to mention the bad ones. You can find those for yourself. But I will mention two aspects that took me by surprise. First, I admired the extent to which the plot is driven by the magic, which I regard as a mark of good fantasy. Magic can never be described as believable, but it must be consistent, and it should meld reasonably with the politics and religion of the world. In this case the nodes and charisma fit well together. (Charisma is probably the closest we come to genuine magic in this mundane world of ours—how else can you explain the way a psychopathic runt like Adolf Hitler could cow a room full of Prussian generals?) In the final book, there are hints that nodes have been created by human worship, which I probably did not suggest sooner in case it gave away too much of the magic too soon. Or maybe I just didn’t think of it then.

    There is a third strand of magic that I will return to in a moment.

    Secondly, I was annoyed by the way the hero in Past Imperative was left waiting in the wings far too long before being allowed out on stage. This is normally a fault in a story, but I committed this sin because I felt modern readers would need to be prepared for a hero as perfect as Edward. If he seems too good at times, it is because heroes of that time were always too good to be true, and not only in fiction. It was youngsters of his generation who marched at the head of their men into the barbed wire and machine gun fire of the trenches. They really believed what they said about honor and duty; they lived and died for them.

    The story is set on two worlds, and this is another tribute to the past. Until J R R Tolkien, fantasy worlds were normally related in some way to this, the real world. For example in the classic, The Worm Ouroboros, Eddison mentions that it is set on the planet Mercury. As both reader and writer I have a soft spot for two-world fantasies. They make the other place more credible by letting the reader see it from our terrestrial viewpoint, as when Edward decides that the Vales are almost ready for an industrial revolution.

    More important in this story, though, is that Edward can be shown as an Edwardian hero. Yes, he would love to stay and explore this new world, as any normal youngster would, but he is driven by his imprinted sense of duty to return to Earth. An author’s hardest job is to make the characters want what he or she wants them to want. It is Edward’s stiff-upper-lip training that motivates him, and it is the third strand of magic that I mentioned, the chain of prophecy feature, that drives Zath. Their life-and-death struggle is inevitable because they are equally opposed to the Filoby Testament and it requires that one or other of them must die.

    The Great Game required a lot more research than most fantasy does. I made the terrestrial story as accurate as I could, although sometimes I had to guess. How much did tourists really pay to visit Stonehenge in 1914? I have no idea. But just about everything else I wrote about Stonehenge is accurate, even to the style of fence around it in 1914, which I discovered in an old photograph of troops drilling on Salisbury Plain.

    Finally, I must say that I am very happy to see these books back in print. I do not normally whine about editors and publishers, but this series was cursed by too many changes of both. The second and third hard covers were not the same size as the first, which you may not see as a serious problem, but it upsets collectors. The third volume was given cover art that differed in style from the first two, and then its mass market reprint (which is where the money comes from) was given a cover so totally unlike everything that had gone before that many fans failed to identify it as part of the series. Before the word could get around, a new owner pulped the warehouse stock and the books were out of print.

    I think this series deserved better. I hope you will agree.

    — Dave Duncan

    I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot.

    SHAKESPEARE

    Henry V, III, i

    Come, Watson, come! he cried. The game is afoot.

    SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

    The Return of Sherlock Holmes:

    Adventure of the Abbey Grange

    Hear all peoples, and rejoice all lands, for the slayer of Death comes, the Liberator, the son of Kameron Kisster. In the seven hundredth Festival, he shall come forth in the land of Suss. Naked and crying he shall come into the world and Eleal shall wash him. She shall clothe him and nurse him and comfort him. Be merry and give thanks; welcome this mercy and proclaim thine deliverance, for he will bring death to Death.

    The Filoby Testament, 368

    DaveDucan_PastImperative.jpg

    Translator’s Note

    In Joalian and related dialects, a geographic name usually consists of a root modified by a prefix. English equivalents (for example Narshland, Narshvale, Narshia, etc.) fail to convey all the subtleties of the original. Joalian alone has twelve words to describe a mountain pass, depending on its difficulty, but no word for a mountain range.

    The flora and fauna of the Vales are quite unrelated to terrestrial types, but convergent evolution has tended to fill similar ecological niches with species of similar appearance. Form follows function—a beetle is more or less a beetle anywhere, airborne species lay eggs so that they need not be burdened with immature young, and so on. To avoid overloading the reader’s memory with names and the page with italics, I have either coined descriptive terms (bellfruit) or assigned names on the basis of appearance. A rose is a rose is, sort of, a rose. The correspondence may be superficial; a moa is a bipedal mammal.

    Time and distance have been converted to familiar units.

    Spelling has been made as phonetic as possible, based on common English pronunciation. G is hard; c is used only in ch, x and q not at all.

    Masculine gender words begin with hard consonants (b,d,g,k,p,t), feminine with vowels or aspirates (a,e,i,o,u,y,h), and neuter with soft consonants (f,j,l,m,n,r,s,th). Abstract concepts have their own declensions and begin with v,ch,w, or z.

    Dissimilar vowels are pronounced separately, as if marked with a dieresis: Eleal is pronounced El-eh-al, not Eleel. Double vowels indicate a long sound: aa as in late, ee as in feet, ii as in fight, oo as in goat, uu as in boot.

    The English word candle is pronounced cand’l. Joalian contains many such unvoiced vowels, which are indicated with an apostrophe. The initial consonant in D’ward would be stressed more than in English dwarf.

    The Gods

    The five great gods of the Pentatheon are—

    Visek The Supreme Parent is often regarded as male, but also as a triad: Father, Mother, and First Source. Visek may be spoken of in the singular or plural, as masculine, feminine, or abstract in ways that will not readily translate into English. The Light, the All-Knowing, the Father of Gods, etc., may take on attributes of other deities, such as wisdom, creation, justice. There are hints of monotheism in Visek worship. Except in Niol, where his main temple stands, Visek seems too remote and abstract a god to be truly popular with the masses. He is associated with the sun, fire, silver, and the color white.

    His many avatars include Chiol (destiny) and Wyseth (the sun).

    Eltiana The Lady is goddess of love, motherhood, passion, childbirth, crops, agriculture, transition. Her clergy wear red; her symbol is Ø and her main temple is at Randor. She is the only major deity to be directly identified with one of the four moons.

    Her avatars include Ois, goddess of mountain passes.

    Karzon The Man is the god of creation and destruction, and thus of war, strength, courage, virility, vengeance, pestilence, nature, and animal husbandry. His clergy wear green, his symbol is a hammer. His main temple is at Tharg and he is associated with the moon Trumb.

    As Zath he is god of death, and hence the most feared of the gods. Then his color is black and his symbol a skull. Other avatars include Garward (strength), Ken’th (virility), and Krak’th (earthquakes).

    Astina The Maiden is goddess of purity, duty, justice, patron of warriors and athletes. Her clergy wear blue and her symbol is a five-pointed star. Her main sanctuary is at Joal. She is associated with Ysh, the blue moon.

    Her avatars include Iilah (athletes), Irepit (repentance), Ysh (constancy and duty), and Ursula (justice).

    Tion The Youth is god of art, beauty, science, knowledge, healing. His clergy wear yellow. His main temple is at Suss. The unpredictable yellow moon Kirb’l is identified with his avatar the god of humor.

    His avatars include Ember’l (drama), Kirb’l (the Joker), Gunuu (courage), Yaela (singing), and Paa (healing).

    The Trong Troupe

    Trong Impresario

    Ambria Impresario, Trong’s second wife

    K’linpor Actor, Trong’s son

    Halma Actor, K’linpor’s wife

    Uthiam Piper, Ambria’s daughter

    Golfren Piper, Uthiam’s husband

    Yama Actor, Ambria’s cousin

    Dolm Actor, Yama’s husband

    Piol Poet, brother of Ambria’s first husband

    Gartol Costumer, Trong’s cousin

    Olimmiar Dancer, Halma’s sister

    Klip Trumpeter, Gartol’s stepbrother

    Eleal Singer, an orphan

    Overture

    1

    THE SUMMER OF 1914 WAS THE FINEST IN LIVING MEMORY. All over Europe the sun shone, day after day, from a sky without a cloud. Holidaymakers traveled as they wished across a continent at peace, reveling in green woods and clean, warm seas. They crossed national borders unimpeded. Almost no one noticed the storm building on the political horizon; even newspapers mostly ignored it. The war struck with the suddenness of an avalanche and carried everything away.

    There was never to be another summer like it.

    Toward the end of June in that year the Greek steamship Hermes, preparing to depart from Port Said and having a vacant stateroom, embarked at short notice a gentleman whose name was entered in the log as Colonel Julius Creighton. He was polite and aloof and inscrutable. During the crossing of the Mediterranean, he remained extremely reticent about both himself and his business. He was without question an English milord, but beyond that obvious deduction, neither the officers nor the other passengers were able to progress. Everyone was intrigued when he chose to disembark at Cattaro, in Montenegro, which was not on the road to anywhere. The English, they agreed, were crazy. They would all have been considerably more surprised had they been able to follow his subsequent travels.

    He set foot on European soil on the twenty-eighth of June, which by coincidence was the day Archduke Francis Ferdinand’s death in Sarajevo opened the first crack of the collapse that was to bring down the whole world. The Montenegro border was less than fifty miles from Sarajevo. The reader is therefore cautioned that Colonel Creighton had absolutely nothing to do with the assassination.

    He progressed rapidly north and east, traveling mainly on horseback through wild country, until he reached the vicinity of Belgrade. In a wagon in a wood, he was granted audience by a gypsy voivode, whose authority transcended national borders.

    Creighton continued eastward and spent a night as guest of a certain count of ancient lineage, lord of a picturesque castle in Transylvania. In Vienna he met with several people, including a woman reputed to be the most skilled courtesan in Austria, with the fairest body in Europe, but the substance of their meeting was unrelated to such matters.

    By the fifteenth of July he had reached St. Petersburg. Although the Russian capital was racked by workers’ strikes, he succeeded in spending several hours talking with a monk celebrated for both his holiness and his political connections.

    On the twenty-third, when Austria issued its ultimatum to Serbia, Colonel Creighton arrived in Paris, having wasted a couple of days in a cave in the Black Forest. Paris was in the throes of the Caillaux scandal, but he ignored that, conferring with two artists and a newspaper editor. He also took an overnight train south to Marseilles to visit Fort St. Jean, European Headquarters of the Foreign Legion. He spent most of his time there in the chapel, then returned to the capital.

    On July 28, when Austria declared war on Serbia, he obtained a berth on the next boat train to London—a surprising feat, considering the near-panic in the Gare du Nord.

    On reaching England, he completely disappeared.

    2

    EDWARD ARRIVED IN GREYFRIARS ON THE 4.15 FROM London. It was the Saturday of August Bank Holiday weekend, and the little station was almost deserted. Paris had been in panic. London was a riot of trippers fighting their way out of town, heading for the seaside. Greyfriars was its usual sleepy country self.

    He emerged from the station, bag in hand, to find the Bodgley Rolls at the curb, with Bagpipe himself at the wheel.

    Edward said, Damned good of you to put me up, Bodgley, and climbed in.

    Bagpipe said, Good to see you, old man. Care to go for a spin? He was trying not to swallow his ears at being allowed to drive the Rolls.

    So Timothy Bodgley drove Edward Exeter home to Greyfriars Grange by a somewhat roundabout route, but took care that they arrived in decent time to get ready for dinner. Edward thanked Mrs. Bodgley for taking him in at such short notice—and at his own request, of course, but that part of it was too painful to mention. She insisted he was always welcome.

    Then there was a gap. This is a common result of head injuries.

    He retained no record at all of the next hour. After that came a few scattered images of dinner itself, random pages saved from a lost book. His most vivid recollection was to be of his own intense embarrassment at being in blazer and flannels, like a stray dog that had wandered into the thoroughbred kennel. One of his cases had been stolen in Paris, and he had had no time to hire evening clothes on his dash through London. He had had no English money, either, and the banks were closed on Saturdays.

    The nine or ten faces around the table remained only a blur. The Bodgleys themselves, of course, he knew well: Bagpipe and his parents—the large and booming Mrs. Bodgley, and the peppery general with his very red face and white mustache. There was a Major Someone, an ex-India type. There was a Dowager Lady Somebody and the vicar. And others. The scraps of conversation he did remember were all about the imminence of war. The major explained at length how easily the French and the Russians between them would roll up the Boche. Everyone agreed it would all be over by Christmas.

    Later, when the ladies had withdrawn and left the men to the port and cigars, the talk was of the need to teach the Germans a damned good lesson, and which regiment Edward Exeter and Timothy Bodgley should join, and how lucky they were to be young enough to serve.

    The evening concluded with patriotic songs around the piano, and everyone turned in early because the general was scheduled to read the lesson in church the next morning.

    Later still, Edward sprawled on the window seat in his room while Bagpipe in pajamas and dressing gown sat on the chair, and the two of them nattered away like old times in the junior dorm. Bagpipe raved about the book he was reading, The Lost World, and promised to lend it to Edward as soon as he had finished. They reminisced about their schooldays, amused to discover that a mere week away had already wreathed Fallow in a haze of nostalgia. They returned to the subject of the war, and Bagpipe waxed bitter.

    Me enlist? It’s not meant, old man. Won’t pass the medical. Not Pygmalion likely! Even as he said it, his lungs sounded like a dying cat. He had asthma; he had never been able to run even the length of cricket pitch without turning blue, but he was a straight enough chap in spite of it. He would miss the war, and Edward was at a loss to know how to comfort him, although he babbled nonsense about valuable alternatives, like intelligence work.

    Then Bagpipe shrugged it off and tried to hide his chagrin. What say we go down and raid the larder, like old times?

    Edward must have agreed, although he retained no recollection of doing so. A trivial boyish prank like that should have been beneath their dignity, but perhaps it suited the mood of unreality that had so suddenly descended upon their lives. They had emerged from the ordered, cloistered discipline of school into a world poised on the brink of madness.

    The kitchen was in the oldest part of the Grange, a vast stone barn of echoes and monumental furniture and unsettling, unexplained shadows. There, for Edward Exeter, reality ended altogether.

    After that there were just a few confused frozen images, like blurred photographs in newspapers, or line drawings in the Illustrated London News. There was a girl screaming, her screams reverberating in that cavernous stone scullery. She had wild eyes and hair that hung down in long ringlets. There was a knife. There was blood—a porcelain sink with blood pouring into it. He retained a very foggy memory of people beating on the door, trying to get in, and of himself fending off the knife-wielding maniac with the aid of a wooden chair. There was a terrible pain in his leg.

    Then darkness and nightmare.

    3

    IT WAS THE HOUR BEFORE DAWN. A GALE LEFT OVER FROM winter rolled clouds through the sky, continually veiling or unveiling the moons, so that sometimes the narrow streets were inky as coal cellars, and at others a man could read the storekeepers’ signs creaking to and fro in the wind. Over the slate rooftops, far behind the chimneys, the ice-capped peaks of Narshwall glimmered like teeth with black tongues of cloudshadow lolling over them.

    Dragon claws scratching on cobblestones betrayed the progress of a watchman, riding slowly along Straight Way, making his rounds. It was a living, if not a very lucrative one, nor especially prestigious. It was a cursed cold living on a night like this, and his thoughts were mainly of the snug, wife-warmed bed awaiting him at sunrise. He wore a metal-and-leather helmet and a steel breastplate over a layer of fur and two of wool. He switched his lantern from one hand to the other, feeling its warmth even through his gloves. He was in more danger of freezing his fingers than of meeting with trouble at night in Narsh.

    Narsh was a peaceable place, but long ago the city fathers had decreed a curfew, so someone must uphold it. Illicit love affairs were the main cause of curfew-breaking, but most nights the watchman met not a single soul. Any evildoers that might be skulking around heard his dragon approach or saw his light and took cover until he had gone. The ban applied only to persons on foot, of course. It excluded dragon riders and coaches, and thus it did not restrict the city fathers or their friends.

    Scritch, Scritch, went the dragon’s claws. The wind rattled shutters and moaned in high eaves. Total blackness enveloped Straight Way, except where the watchman’s lantern cast an uncertain beam on doors and the gaping mouths of alleys. Through a momentary gap in the clouds he caught a glimpse of the fourth moon, Eltiana, a gory red star in the east. He thought a silent prayer—his usual prayer to the Lady, emphasizing the undesirability of her sending further progeny to swell the household he must feed on his meager pay.

    Then great green Trumb soared into view, as if springing out from ambush, his mighty half disk illuminating the town, highlighting the spires of the Lady’s temple…and revealing a double line of people shuffling along the street just ahead of the watchman. For a moment he was struck speechless. Then he barked a command to speed his mount: "Varch!"

    The dragon was perhaps also surprised, for it was accustomed to amble the night streets at a comfortable Zaib and had probably not been required to go faster in many years. After a brief pause, as if it were trying to recall the training of its youth, it increased its pace obediently, and the night watch of Narsh bore down upon the lawbreakers.

    There were about a dozen of them, arranged roughly by height, from a tall couple up front to a child trailing at the rear. They all bore bulky packs. The watchman rode past them, shining his lantern on them, heading for the leaders. They were not residents, he concluded, for few of them were clad in the all-enveloping Narshian furs. Most of them were hunched and shivering. Strangers! Curfew breakers!

    He drew ahead, spoke orders to his dragon, and came to a halt, barring their way. They stopped. Many of them lowered their burdens to the ground with evident relief. They peered up at him. He peered back down at them with all the majesty of the law.

    The law’s majesty was not as awe-inspiring as he would have liked. The dragon was not much of a dragon. Its scales were so worn and scuffed where the stirrups had rubbed at them over the years that it had been double-docked—the pommel plate removed so that the saddle could be placed farther forward than was normal, or truly comfortable. Its rider was thus seated on a slight slope and could not lean back in comfort against the baggage plate.

    The dragon studied the malefactors with as much interest as the watchman, while puffing pearly clouds for the wind to disperse. Its eyes glowed pale green. Ferocious as dragons seemed, they were the gentlest of beasts, and most people knew that. The watchman was not quite certain what he was supposed to do when faced with a dozen lawbreakers at once, and half of them women.

    He said, Ho! Then he added, Identify yourselves!

    The leader was a tall man in a flowing robe that swirled continuously in the wind. So did his white patriarchal beard. When he doffed his hat and bowed, he revealed a bald pate surrounded by a mane of long white locks, and the wind began playing with them also. Nonetheless, he was a striking figure under the green moonlight, and his voice rang out with the sonority of a peal of bells.

    I am Trong Impresario and these are my associates in the troupe that bears my name—singers, musicians, actors, wandering players, seeking only to serve the Lord of Art.

    Wandering beggars, more like, but the watchman recalled that he had seen a playbill outside the Shearing Shed a couple of days ago.

    You are abroad before first light, and such is forbidden!

    The Trong man swung around to regard the east. With dramatic suddenness, he threw out a long arm. Behold, sir! Already the dewy dawn blushes to look upon the deeds of night! He spoke with a Joalian accent, but that did not mean he could see the horizon through a two-story building.

    Forgive us if we have offended! proclaimed his companion. She was almost as tall as he, and her voice seemed even more resonant, carrying a hint of clashing steel. It was not as readily identifiable, but certainly not homely Narshian. ‘First light’ is not a precise term. We are strangers and may have misconstrued your local usage.

    The watchman could not imagine why anyone would waste good money going to hear this rabble of outlanders recite poetry or even sing, if that was what they did. It seemed very un-Narshian behavior, but if anyone attended those performances, they would be the wealthier citizens—and their wives, of course. To make trouble for this band of tattered beggars might possibly land him in disfavor with important persons.

    State your business! he demanded, to give himself time to think.

    We proceed, Trong declaimed, to the temple to make sacrifice. Our wandering feet lead us onward to the Festival of Holy Tion in Suss, and we would seek the favor of Ois before hazarding fearsome Rilepass.

    Ah! In his youth, the watchman had attended the Festival of Tion a few times. He had competed in the boxing contests until his face became so battered that he had been refused admittance. Of course a troupe of actors would be heading that way at this time of year, and no one in his right mind would venture a mammoth ride over Rilepass without making an offering at the temple. As goddess of passes, Ois was liable to drop avalanches on travelers who displeased her.

    He cast another quick look at the sky and again saw the red moon peering through a narrow gap in the clouds. Ois was an avatar of the Lady, Eltiana, who was not only one of the Five, but also specifically identified with the red moon. She was watching him to see what he was going to do. She might disapprove of him harassing pilgrims on their way to worship one of her manifestations. He had best let these vagabonds proceed about their business.

    You should have waited until daybreak!

    The woman spoke up quickly. But our need to reach Suss is urgent. You must know that this is the seven hundredth festival, and very special. There are many like us, seeking passage, and the lines are long this year. Our impatience was inspired by our piety, Watchman.

    It was true that Narsh had seen an unusual number of festival-goers passing through in the last fortnight, although the watchman’s wife had told him that the normal contingent of artists, athletes, and cripples was much the same. Surplus priests and priestesses were to blame.

    Go in peace, he proclaimed, moving his dragon out of the way. But next time observe the law more strictly.

    They heaved their packs higher on their shoulders and tramped off in unhappy silence.

    Trumb dipped into cloud again and the street darkened. The last the watchman saw of the actors as they faded out was the child at the rear. Stooped under her bulky pack, she walked with a marked limp. He could guess why that one was going to the Tion Festival.

    Act I

    Tragedy

    4

    MURDER! IT NEVER BLEEDING RAINED BUT IT BLOODY poured.

    Carruthers had taken his family to Harrogate, Robinson was hiking in Scotland, Hardy had broken his pelvis, and Newlands was in bed with acute appendicitis. Meaning Mister Muggins Leatherdale was left running the whole shop. Meaning simple Inspector Leatherdale, just six months short of retirement, poor sod, was now expected to do the work of a superintendent, a deputy superintendent, a squad of detective inspectors, and earn not a ha’penny more for it.

    On top of all that there had been threats of civil war in Ireland last week and real war breaking out all over Europe now—the Boche and the Russkis at each other’s throats already and the Frogs mobilizing—with resultant official warnings to look out for all sorts of un-English activities, like riots and marches. Half the force was away on holiday.

    And now a murder, the first in the county in twenty years. Not just your drunken brawl in a pub, charge reduced to manslaughter. Not just some sordid back-street quarrel over a woman, oh no! Nothing so simple for poor Muggins Leatherdale. No, the chief constable’s own son murdered in the chief constable’s own house and the Old Man himself two-thirds off his rocker with grief and shock.

    Howzat for pouring?

    Bloody Noah’s Flood!

    The bells of St. George’s were pealing as the big car purred through Bishops Wallop. Leaning back on the leather cushions with his bowler on his lap, Leatherdale heard them with a strange sense of unreality. He’d been routed out of bed at midnight and his eyelids felt thick as muffins. Shameful. He was getting too old to be a real copper.

    The sun was baking hot already, a perfect Bank Holiday weekend in a perfect summer. War and murder and insanity, and yet the bells of Bishops Wallop pealed as they always had. They had rung like that when Leatherdale was a boy, spending holidays with his grandparents in a cottage whose thatched roof and ceilings had seemed uncomfortably low even then. The tenor bell had sounded a tiny fraction flat in those days, and it did now. It had probably seemed that way to Richard the Lion-heart.

    Church bells were still ringing as he was whisked through Sternbridge, and he wondered what his grandfather would have said to that miracle. Or his father, for that matter. Toffed out in their Sunday best, the worthy folk ambled along the street to worship, very much as their forebears had done for centuries. Dogs barked to repel the intruder and probably thought their efforts successful, for the motor accelerated as it left the village and raced up the hill beyond. It must have been doing forty when it reached the long avenue of beeches and chestnuts.

    He watched the great canopy of summer foliage rushing overhead as the vehicle traversed the green tunnel. All his life he had gone to work on his bike, in uniform. On his bike he would be able to hear the thrushes and the woodpeckers and see butterflies working the hedgerows, but he had asked the chauffeur to lower the black leather hood so he could enjoy the breeze, scented with thyme and clover. England in August! The hay-fields were deserted today, their crop half cut. Down in the bottoms horses swished their tails at flies. Everywhere he looked, the hazy skyline was ornamented with church spires and towers rising over the trees. Once he could have named them all and probably still could if he had a moment to think—St. Peter’s in Button Bent, St. Alban’s in Cranley…Norman, High Gothic, Perpendicular. For a thousand years, every Englishman had dwelt within walking distance of a church.

    He had pulled out his watch before he realized that the bells had just told him the time. Elsie would be pulling out the stops in St. Wilfred’s about now. He was going to be early for his appointment.

    This jaunt was all a waste of time anyway. Leatherdale had a corpse and a killer and an open-and-shut case. The motive might not be obvious to nice-thinking folks, but a copper knew about the seamy side of life. Such things could happen even in drowsy little Greyfriars, where a runaway horse was a month’s excitement. They happened; they just weren’t talked about. This jaunt to Fallow had been Mrs. Bodgley’s idea and the Old Man had been ready to agree to anything. So Leatherdale got a ride in a Rolls Royce. He yawned.

    Fallow? He had passed the gates a few times, never been inside. It was outside his manor. Outside his ken, too—educational establishment for young gentlemen. Snob factory. Fallow boys would show up around Greyfriars sometimes, on day outings with their parents, like tailors’ dummies in their school uniform, top hat and tails, each one like every other one. All speaking alike with the proper accent and polite as Chinese mandarins, all of ’em.

    He’d thought to quiz the police doctor about Fallow, but the answer had been very much what he’d expected. A highly respected public school, Watkins had said. Not Eton or Harrow, of course. Second eleven, but probably about the best in the second eleven. Has a very solid relationship with the Colonial Office. Turns out the men who run the Empire—something of a specialty of the house, you might say. A chap’ll bump into Old Fallovians all over the globe, in just about every Crown Colony everywhere. Running them, of course. White Man’s Burden, palm and pine, and all that.

    Dear Mrs. Bodgley could not imagine anything on God’s green earth that would turn a tailor’s dummy, right-spoken, frightfully polite Fallow boy into a savage killer. Or her equally well-mannered son into a victim.

    But Leatherdale could. Not nice. Not nice at all!

    5

    THE SKY WAS GROWING LIGHTER AS THE TRONG TROUPE approached the temple. They were still arrayed in approximate order of size, although that was not a conscious arrangement. Trong Impresario led the way, like some peripatetic monument, with the statuesque Ambria at his side. Last of all came little Eleal Singer. The wind was still just as bitter and boisterous, whirling scattered snowflakes along the canyon of the street.

    Hobbling under the weight of her pack, Eleal was immediately behind Klip and Olimmiar. She hated Narshvale. It was her least favorite of all the lands the troupe visited each year. Narshvale was cold, with leaden skies always seeming just about to spill snow. In Narsh itself the streets stank, because of the coal the Narshians burned to warm their ugly stone houses—grimy stone with roofs of black slate. The people stank, too, probably because they didn’t wash their clothes. You couldn’t wash Ilama fleece, it wouldn’t dry before next winter.

    She especially disliked the temple and Ois, its goddess, although of course no one would ever say such a thing out loud. Ambria probably felt the same way, because she always told Eleal to wait outside. If the old hussy thought Eleal did not know what went on in there, then she was sorely misinformed. In some of the villages the troupe played, they all had to share the same sleeping room. Eleal knew perfectly well what happened in the dark, under the covers. Uthiam and Golfren did it a lot, because they’d been married less than a year. K’linpor Actor and Halma did it too, and Dolm Actor and Yama, but not as often. Even Trong and Ambria did it sometimes. Everyone had to pretend not to hear, and nobody ever mentioned it, although when one couple started it, they often set off others.

    They were married and did it because they wanted to and must like it. What happened in the temple of Ois was different. It involved money, and was supposed to be a sacrifice to the goddess, but no other god or goddess that Eleal knew of demanded that. She often wondered how the priestesses felt about it. She’d even asked Uthiam once if that was what the men did on their annual visit. Uthiam had become indignant and said of course not, Trong Impresario would never allow them to, not even the bachelors.

    You mean it’s wrong? Eleal had asked, very sweetly.

    Certainly not! Uthiam had declared, one must not presume to judge what the gods decree. She had turned very pink and changed the subject.

    Up front, Trong and Ambria had rounded the corner. They would stop at the temple door for everyone else to catch up, and then Ambria would order Eleal to wait outside. Well, Eleal saw no reason why she should walk all that way and then back again with this heavy pack. She was not going to wait outside and freeze to death—she had other plans!

    Checking that Uthiam and Dolm were still talking and paying no attention to her, she ducked into a doorway and made herself as flat as paint.

    She felt breathless and her heart was thumping faster than usual. She had eaten no breakfast, yet there was a tight feeling in her insides. The annual mammoth ride over Rilepass always affected her like this. The summit was very scary, with huge masses of ice and snow liable to break off and crash down. Sometimes even a surefooted mammoth could slip and fall miles down, into a gorge. It was very exciting.

    Everyone sacrificed to Ois before crossing Rilepass. On the other hand, the goddess was not likely to worry very much about one twelve-year-old girl, and even the goddess couldn’t drop an avalanche on her without also dropping it on all the other people riding in the same howdah. Eleal was going to go and pray to Tion instead. She had some very special prayers to make.

    She risked a glance around the corner, but Dolm and Uthiam were still in sight, and a few of the others also. She pulled back into her hiding place, grateful to be out of the wind, puffing on the tip of her nose to warm it.

    Some big cities boasted several temples, but even towns like Narsh that had only one temple would also have at least one shrine to each member of the Pentatheon, either in person or to an aspect. Ois was an aspect of Eltiana, the Lady in her role as custodian of passes. Narsh also had a shrine to Kirb’l, the Joker, and the Joker was an aspect of Tion, the Youth.

    It was very curious that the dour Narshians should have chosen that particular Tion persona to be his local representative. Narshians had less humor than any people she knew. Whereas most people never left the land they were born in, Eleal was very well traveled. The troupe visited seven of the Vales on their annual circuit. This year they had spent half a fortnight in Narsh. They had staged the comedy three times and the tragedy four times, without taking in enough to pay for the groceries, so Ambria said. Mill owners and ranchers, she grumbled—the meanest people in the world. They certainly had no sense of humor, so why should they honor the Joker so?

    Piol Poet said that humor was the highest form of art, because it made people rejoice. He was joking when he said so.

    Another glance showed Eleal that the coast was now clear. She left the alcove and hurried back the way she had come, her mismatched boots going clip, clop, clip, clop. Some of the locals were emerging now, as dawn approached, all bundled up in their smelly fleeces and furs. Miserable troglodytes! Trong Impresario had been stupendous as Trastos, especially when he was dying, but Narsh had just sat on its hands.

    Piol had written speaking parts for Eleal into both plays this year, small ones. She played a gods’ messenger in the tragedy—she sang offstage, of course—and a young herald in the comedy, where she could use the staff to hide her limp. So she had played Narsh for the first time in her life, being received with wild indifference. Her curtain calls and standing ovations had totaled zero, exactly. In Lappin her acting had won applause one night; her singing in the masque always did. Tonight she would play in Sussland. Sussvale was a warmer, nicer place and did

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