Hawk by Steven Brust

Author:Steven Brust
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429944823
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

10

MAKING TROUBLE OR MAKING PROGRESS

Teleportation was the obvious choice, and only required doing what I’d been doing an awful lot lately—removing the amulet that kept me invisible to any Jhereg looking for me, and immune to anyone trying to cast a spell on me. Now, admittedly, I also had Lady Teldra to protect me from random spells meant to kill me from a distance. Still, if I kept taking the amulet off, someone was going to come up with a way to sneak past her. Which meant I needed to be wearing that amulet. And I was beginning to get irritated about the whole thing. I very much wanted this plan to work, if for no other reason than I could get rid of that bloody damned amulet. Even having it hanging around my neck was starting to annoy me.

I came up with several ways to reach Dzur Mountain without removing the amulet; unfortunately, they required between three days and three weeks to work. Deragar said he hadn’t made much progress on finding how to take a shot at Terion, but had left some messages and hoped to be getting word. I grunted and continued trying to figure a safe and fast way to get to Dzur Mountain, which was tricky because there was no such thing.

Oh. Unless—

I smiled. Why not?

“Deragar,” I said. “Feel like teleporting to Castle Black?”

“Not really,” he said. “I prefer my skin whole.”

I removed a ring from my pouch—no, not the ring I’d just acquired, the other ring: the one with my seal as an Imperial nobleman—and handed it to him. “Show them this. It’s proof you came from me.”

“And that will matter to them—why?”

“Trust me.”

“All right. Then what?”

“Then get a message to Lord Morrolan.”

He listened; I told him the message. He looked confused, but repeated it to make sure he had it right. “Anything else?” he said.

“When you’re done, ask him to teleport you back here. It’ll be less traumatic that way.”

“I can trust him to bring me here, and not to somewhere a mile deep in the ocean-sea?”

“Yes,” I said. “Probably. Almost certainly. Yeah.”

He looked doubtful, but nodded and headed out. I settled in to wait.

“Okay, Boss. Not bad.”

“Glad to hear it.”

You see, the Lord Morrolan e’Drien, who is such an arrogant little shit that he calls his home Castle Black, has a tower full of windows, and each window can be a doorway to wherever he wants, including to some places that don’t exist in the same reality as the rest of us—and don’t ask me what I mean by that; I’m quoting the Necromancer. The point is, it isn’t teleportation, it isn’t even sorcery. It’s something else. I’d used those windows before. And Morrolan, for whatever reason, was usually inclined to help me out when I needed it.

It was less than half an hour after Deragar had left that the air in front of me started shimmering. In a few seconds, there was a man-sized ring of golden sparks in front of me.

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