Limits Larry Niven (audio ebook reader TXT) 📖

knock that lovely patch right off his face. Then I informed him that if he’s interested in marriage he should be talking to my father, and in any case there are problems he should be aware of…” Her eyes were dancing. “I must say he took it well. He asked about my dowry! I hinted at undersea treasures. When I said we’d have to live here, he said at least he’d never have to worry about the cooking, but his religion permitted him only one wife, and I said what a pity—”

“The jewel,” Rordray reminded her.

“Oh, it’s beautiful! Deep green, with a blazing vertical line, just like a cat’s eye. He wears it in the socket of his right eye.”

Arilta considered. “If he thinks that’s a safe place to hide it, he should get a less flamboyant patch. Someone might steal that silver thing.”

“Whatever their secret, it’s unlikely to disturb us,” Rordray said. “And this is their old seat of royalty. Even the ghost…which reminds me. Jarper?”

The empty air he spoke to remained empty. He said, “I haven’t seen Jarper since lunch. Has anyone?”

Nobody answered. Rordray continued, “I noticed him hovering behind Karskon at lunch. Karskon must be carrying something magical. Maybe the jewel? Oh, never mind, Jarper can take care of himself. I was saying Jarper probably won’t bother our guests. He’s of old Minterl blood himself. If he had blood.”

They stuffed wool around the door and around the windows. They propped a chair under the doorknob. Karskon and Durily had no intention of being disturbed at this point. An innkeeper who found his guests marking patterns on the floor with powdered bone, and heating almost-fresh blood over a small flame, could rightly be expected to show annoyance.

Durily spoke in a language once common to the Sorcerer’s Guild, now common to nobody. The words seemed to hurt her throat, and no wonder, Karskon thought. He had doffed his silver eye patch. He tended the flame and the pot of blood, and stayed near Durily, as instructed.

He closed his good eye and saw green-tinged darkness. Something darker drifted past, slowly, something huge and rounded, that suddenly vanished with a flick of finny tail. Now a drifting current of luminescence…congealing, somehow, to a vaguely human shape…

The night he robbed the jewel merchant’s shop, this sight had almost killed him.

The Movement had wealth to buy the emerald, but Durily swore that the Torovan lords must not learn that the jewel existed. She hadn’t told him why. It wasn’t for the Movement that he had obeyed her. The Movement would destroy the Torovan invaders, would punish his father and his half-brothers for their arrogance, for the way they had treated him…for the loss of his eye. But he had obeyed her. He was her slave in those days, the slave of his lust for the Lady Durily, his father’s mistress.

He had guessed that it was glamour that held him: magic. It hadn’t seemed to matter. He had invaded the jeweler’s shop expecting to die, and it hadn’t mattered.

The merchant had heard some sound and come to investigate. Karskon had already scooped up everything he could find of value, to distract attention from the single missing stone. Waiting for discovery in the dark cellar, he had pushed the jewel into his empty eye socket.

Greenish darkness, drifting motion, a sudden flicker that might be a fish’s tail. Karskon was seeing with his missing eye.

The jeweler had found him while he was distracted, but Karskon had killed him after all. Afterward, knowing that much, he had forced Durily to tell the rest. She had lost a good deal of her power over him. He had outgrown his terror of that greenish-dark place. He had seen it every night while he waited for sleep, these past two years.

Karskon opened his good eye to find that they had company. The color of fading fog, it took the wavering form of a wiry old man garbed for war, with his helmet tucked under his arm.

“I want to speak to King Nihilil,” Durily said. “Fetch him.”

“Your pardon, Lady.” The voice was less than a whisper, clearer than a memory. “I c-can’t leave here.”

“Who were you?”

The fog-wisp straightened to attention. “Sergeant Jarper Sleen, serving Minterl and the King. I was on duty in the watchtower when the land th-th-thrashed like an island-fish submerging. The wall broke my arm and some ribs. After things got quiet again there were only these three floors left, and no food anywhere. I s-starved to death.”

Durily examined him with a critical eye. “You seem nicely solid after seventy-six years.”

The ghost smiled. “That’s Rordray’s doing. He lets me take the smells of his cooking as offerings. But I can’t leave where I d-died.”

“Was the King home that day?”

“Lady, I have to say that he was. The quake came fast. I don’t doubt he drowned in his throne room.”

“Drowned,” Durily said thoughtfully. “All right.” She poured a small flask of seawater into the blood, which was now bubbling. Something must have been added to keep it from clotting. She spoke high and fast in the Sorcerer’s Guild tongue.

The ghost of Jarper Sleen sank to its knees. Karskon saw the draperies wavering as if heated air was moving there; and when he realized what that meant, he knelt too.

An unimaginative man would have seen nothing. This ghost was more imagination than substance; in fact the foggy crown had more definition, more reality, than the head beneath. Its voice was very much like a memory surfacing from the past…not even Karskon’s past, but Durily’s.

“You have dared to waken Minterl’s king.”

Seventy-six years after the loss of Atlantis, and the almost incidental drowning of the seat of government of Minterl, the ghost of Minterl’s king seemed harmless enough. But Durily’s voice quavered. “You knew me. Durily. Lady Tinylla of Beesh was my mother.”

“Durily. You’ve grown,” said the ghost. “Well, what do you want of me?”

“The barbarians of Torov have invaded Minterl.”

“Have you ever been tired unto death, when the pain in an