5
THE NEAR WORLD
IT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE to add insult to injury that night, but somehow the fates declared that it must be so.
Lionheart was just picking himself up from the street when a sharp voice at the gate demanded his attention. He brushed himself off and turned, with as much dignity as he could muster, to see a finely dressed man, a minister of some sort or perhaps merely a high-end servant, standing at the gate with, of all things, a peacock under his arm. He was saying something very fast, and Lionheart could catch only a word now and then. He stepped back up to the gate and tried to convey to the man that he didn’t understand, and could he please speak more slowly?
“For you,” said the man as though speaking to an idiot. “From the Imperial Glory, Khemkhaeng-Niran Klahan. For your performance.”
Much to Lionheart’s surprise, the peacock was plopped in his arms.
“I say!” he cried. The bird hissed at him, showing a gray tongue, and he nearly dropped it. “I really don’t want this!”
“Your humble gratitude will be conveyed to the Imperial Glory.”
“But . . . but what am I supposed to do with a dragon-eaten peacock?”
“And your wishes for his prosperous and eternal reign. Good night!”
The gate slammed.
Lionheart looked at the peacock. The peacock looked at Lionheart.
“If you’re not a stew by the end of the week, it won’t be my fault,” Lionheart said and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Why me?”
There was nothing for it, though. With the heavy bird under his arm, trailing its ridiculous tail behind, he set off down the hillside and into the lower streets of Lunthea Maly. He’d gone no more than a few yards before the peacock suddenly struggled wildly. Lionheart lost his hold, and it darted off down the road, screaming as it went in an all-too-human voice: “HELP! HEEEEELP! HEEEEEELP!”
If that didn’t attract every thief and vagrant in the whole dragon-fired city, nothing would.
The following morning found jester and peacock sequestered away at the end of an alley in the room that Lionheart rented at exorbitant rates. The bird had decided to take his rickety bed, so he’d spent the night on the floor, staring at the ceiling.
What was he supposed to do now? The sylph had been very specific all those years ago. Find the oracle in Ay-Ibunda. “She will tell you what you wish to know.”
But honestly, he reasoned with himself, what did a captive Faerie creature know?
Nevertheless, it was the only clue that had presented itself in the last several years of Lionheart’s travels. During the voyage with Captain Sunan, he had visited port cities in the kingdoms of Aja and Dong Min and dozens more where the Noorhitam Empire began. In each city he had practiced his juggling and clownery for peasant crowds and done what he could to seek out the fortune-tellers and mystics, those who lived closer to the Far World than everyday folk. He found few. Those he did find could tell him nothing of how the Dragon might be destroyed . . . and some refused to answer at all but ordered him from their premises at once.
So he’d doggedly proceeded to Lunthea Maly as the sylph had said, there laboring to make ends meet and to find some word of the Hidden Temple. There were hundreds of temples in Lunthea Maly. He could have taken his pick! So why, of all the temples and oracles to be found in all the East, must he require Ay-Ibunda? Ay-Ibunda, which could be found only by the emperor.
The emperor, who had refused to aid Lionheart.
There was something sickening, after a long night of fretful turning on the hard floor, about waking up to the peacock’s beady eyes glaring down at him from his own bed. “Help,” the bird said, more out of principle than with any real feeling.
“I wonder how much your feathers are worth?” Lionheart growled as he sat up. Every muscle in his neck and shoulders screamed ill usage. “I could sell them after I pluck you for stew.”
The peacock hissed at him.
At that moment, there was a knock at the door. Lionheart never received visitors. He had made no friends in Lunthea Maly, since most people assumed he must be mad—and he felt inclined to agree with them more often than not. The only person who ever came knocking was his landlord, who showed up like clockwork once a week. But he never came at such an unholy hour of the morning. . . .
Lionheart slugged himself to the door and opened it, blinking like the undead in the face of the rising sun. A man in beautiful red and green garments stood there. How did anyone manage to look that fine when the day had scarcely begun? Lionheart, who was still wearing his jester’s clothes from the night before, tugged at his shirt self-consciously. “Can I help you?” he asked in halting Noorhitamin.
“Leonard of the Tongue of Lightning?”