The Complete Tamuli Trilogy: Domes of Fire, The Shining Ones, The Hidden City

‘I’m not supposed to do that.’

‘You never pay any attention to any of the other rules.’

‘This is different, father. We’re absolutely not supposed to talk about the future. If you think about it for a moment, I’m sure you’ll see why. Ouch!’ Mmrr had bitten her finger. Danae spoke sharply with the kitten – a series of little growls, a meow or two and concluding with a forgiving purr. The kitten managed to look slightly ashamed of itself and proceeded to lick the injured finger.

‘Please don’t talk in cat, Danae,’ Sparhawk said in a pained tone. ‘If some chambermaid hears you, it’ll take us both a month to explain.’

‘Nobody’s going to hear me, Sparhawk. You’ve got something else on your mind, haven’t you?’

‘I want to talk with Sephrenia. There are some things I don’t understand, and I need her help with them.’

‘I’ll help you, father.’

He shook his head. ‘Your explanations of things always leave me with more questions than I had when we started. Can you get in touch with Sephrenia for me?’

She looked around. ‘It probably wouldn’t be a good idea here in the palace, father,’ she told him. ‘It involves something that might be hard to explain if someone overheard us.’

‘You’re going to be in two places at the same time again?’

‘Well – sort of.’ She picked up her kitten. ‘Why don’t you find some excuse to take me out for a ride tomorrow morning? We’ll go out of the city and I can take care of things there. Tell mother that you want to give me a riding lesson.’

‘You don’t have a pony, Danae.’

She gave him an angelic smile. ‘My goodness,’ she said, ‘that sort of means that you’re going to have to give me one, doesn’t it?’

He gave her a long, steady look.

‘You were going to give me a pony eventually anyway, weren’t you, father?’ She gave it a moment’s thought. ‘A white one, Sparhawk,’ she added. ‘I definitely want a white one.’ Then she snuggled her kitten against her cheek, and they both started to purr.

Sparhawk and his daughter rode out of Cimmura not long after breakfast the following morning. The weather was blustery, and Mirtai had objected rather vociferously until Princess Danae told her not to be so fussy. For some reason, the word ‘fussy’ absolutely enraged the Tamul giantess. She stormed away, swearing in her own language.

It had taken Sparhawk hours to find a white pony for his daughter, and he was quite convinced after he had that it was the only white one in the whole town. When Danae greeted the stubby little creature like an old friend, he began to have a number of suspicions. Over the past couple of years, he and his daughter had painfully hammered out a list of the things she wasn’t supposed to do. The process had begun rather abruptly in the palace garden one summer afternoon when he had come around a box hedge to find a small swarm of fairies pollinating flowers under Danae’s supervision. Although she had probably been right when she had asserted that fairies were really much better at it than bees, he had firmly put his foot down. After a bit of thought this time, however, he decided not to make an issue of his daughter’s obvious connivance in obtaining a specific pony. He needed her help right now, and she might point out with a certain amount of justification that to forbid one form of what they had come to call ‘tampering’ while encouraging another was inconsistent.

‘Is this going to involve anything spectacular?’ he asked her when they were several miles out of town.

‘How do you mean, spectacular?’

‘You don’t have to fly or anything, do you?’

‘It’s awkward that way, but I can if you’d like.’

‘No, that’s all right, Danae. What I’m getting at is would you be doing anything that would startle travellers if we went out into this meadow a ways and you did whatever it is there?’

‘They won’t see a thing, father,’ she assured him. ‘I’ll race you to that tree out there.’ She didn’t even make a pretence of nudging her pony’s flanks, and despite Faran’s best efforts, the pony beat him to the tree by a good twenty yards. The big roan warhorse glowered suspiciously at the short-legged pony when Sparhawk reined him in.

‘You cheated,’ Sparhawk accused his daughter.

‘Only a little.’ She slid down from her pony and sat cross-legged under the tree. She lifted her small face and sang in a trilling, flute-like voice. Her song broke off, and for several moments she sat blank-faced and absolutely immobile. She did not even appear to be breathing, and Sparhawk had the chilling feeling that he was absolutely alone, although she clearly sat not two yards away from him.

‘What is it, Sparhawk?’ Danae’s lips moved, but it was Sephrenia’s voice that asked the question, and when Danae opened her eyes, they had changed. Danae’s eyes were very dark; Sephrenia’s were deep blue, almost lavender.

‘We miss you, little mother,’ he told her kneeling and kissing the palms of his daughter’s hands.

‘You called me from half-way round the world to tell me that? I’m touched, but …’

‘It’s something a little more, Sephrenia. We’ve been seeing that shadow again – the cloud too.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘I sort of thought so myself, but we keep seeing them all the same. It’s different, though. It feels different for one thing, and this time it’s not just Ehlana and I who see it. Stragen and Ulath saw it too.’

‘You’d better tell me exactly what’s been happening, Sparhawk.’

He went into greater detail about the shadow and then briefly described the incident in the mountains near Cardos. ‘Whatever this thing is,’ he concluded, ‘it seems very intent on keeping us from finding out what’s going on in Lamorkand.’

‘Is there some kind of trouble there?’

‘Count Gerrich is raising a rebellion. He seems to think that the crown might fit him. He’s even going so far as to claim that Drychtnath’s returned. That’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’

Her eyes grew distant. ‘Is this shadow you’ve been seeing exactly the same as the one you and Ehlana saw before?’ she asked.

‘It feels different somehow.’

‘Do you get that same sense that it has more than one consciousness in it?’

‘That hasn’t changed. It’s a small group, but it’s a group all the same, and the cloud that tore the Earl of Belton to pieces was definitely the same. Did the Troll-Gods manage to escape from Bhelliom somehow?’

‘Let me think my way through it for a moment, Sparhawk,’ she replied. She considered it for a time. In a curious way she was impressing her own appearance on Danae’s face. ‘I think we may have a problem, dear one,’ she said finally.

‘I noticed that myself, little mother.’

‘Stop trying to be clever, Sparhawk. Do you remember the Dawn-men who came out of that cloud up in Pelosia?’

Sparhawk shuddered. ‘I’ve been making a special point of trying to forget that.’

‘Don’t discount the possibility that the wild stories about Drychtnath may have some basis in fact. The Troll-Gods can reach back in time and bring creatures and people forward to where we are now. Drychtnath may very well indeed have returned.’

Sparhawk groaned. ‘Then the Troll-Gods have managed to escape, haven’t they?’

‘I didn’t say that, Sparhawk. Just because the Troll-Gods did this once doesn’t mean that they’re the only ones who know how. For all I know, Aphrael could do it herself.’ She paused. ‘You could have asked her these questions, you know.’

‘Possibly, but I don’t think I could have asked her this one, because I don’t think she’d know the answer. She doesn’t seem to be able to grasp the concept of limitations for some reason.’

‘You’ve noticed,’ she said dryly.

‘Be nice. She’s my daughter, after all.’

‘She was my sister first, so I have a certain amount of seniority in the matter. What is it that she wouldn’t be able to answer?’