The Talisman

and Morgan. Old Bloat.
    The troubles, Anders said, had come to the Outposts, and now the Wolf tribe was partly rotten – just how rotten none could say, but the liveryman told Jack he was afraid that the rot would be the end of them if it didn’t stop soon. The upheavals had come here, and now they had even reached the east, where, he had heard, the Queen lay ill and near death.
    ‘That’s not true, is it, my Lord?’ Anders asked . . . almost begged.
    Jack looked at him. ‘Should I know how to answer that?’ he asked.
    ‘Of course,’ Anders said. ‘Are ye not her son?’
    For a moment, the entire world seemed to Jack to become very quiet. The sweet hum of the bugs outside stilled. Richard seemed to pause between heavy, sluggish breaths.
    Even his own heart seemed to pause . . . perhaps that most of all.
    Then, his voice perfectly even, he said, ‘Yes . . . I am her son. And it’s true . . . she’s very ill.’
    ‘But dying?’ Anders persisted, his eyes nakedly pleading now. ‘Is she dying, my Lord?’
    Jack smiled a little and said: ‘That remains to be seen.’
    8
    Anders said that until the troubles began, Morgan of Orris had been a little-known frontier lord and no more; he had inherited his comic-opera title from a father who had been a greasy, evil-smelling buffoon. Morgan’s father had been something of a laughing-stock while alive, Anders went on, and had even been a laughing-stock in his manner of dying.
    ‘He was taken with the squitters after a day of drinking peach-fruit wine and died while on the trots.’
    People had been prepared to make the old man’s son a laughing-stock as well, but the laughing had stopped soon after the hangings in Orris began. And when the troubles began in the years after the death of the old King, Morgan had risen in importance as a star of evil omen rises in the sky.
    All of this meant little this far out in the Outposts – these great empty spaces, Anders said, made politics seem unimportant. Only the deadly change in the Wolf tribe made a practical difference to them, and since most of the bad Wolfs went to the Other Place, even that didn’t make much difference to them (‘It fashes us little, my Lord’ was what Jack’s ears insisted they had heard).
    Then, not long after the news of the Queen’s illness had reached this far west, Morgan had sent out a crew of grotesque, twisted slaves from the ore-pits back east; these slaves were tended by stolen Wolfs and other, stranger creatures. Their foreman was a terrible man who carried a whip; he had been here almost constantly when the work began, but then he had disappeared. Anders, who had spent most of those terrible weeks and months cowering in his house, which was some five miles south of here, had been delighted to see him go. He had heard rumors that Morgan had called the man with the whip back east, where affairs were reaching some great point of climax; Anders didn’t know if this was true or not, and didn’t care. He was simply glad that the man, who was sometimes accompanied by a scrawny, somehow gruesome-looking little boy, was gone.
    ‘His name,’ Jack demanded. ‘What was his name?’
    ‘My Lord, I don’t know. The Wolfs called him He of the Lashes. The slaves just called him the devil. I’d say they were both right.’
    ‘Did he dress like a dandy? Velvet coats? Shoes with buckles on the tops, maybe?’
    Anders was nodding.
    ‘Did he wear a lot of strong perfume?’
    ‘Aye! Aye, he did!’
    ‘And the whip had little rawhide strings with metal caps on them.’
    ‘Aye, my Lord. An evil whip. And he was fearsome good with it, aye, he was.’
    It was Osmond. It was Sunlight Gardener. He was here, overseeing some project for Morgan . . . then the Queen got sick and Osmond was called back to the summer palace, where I first made his cheerful acquaintance.
    ‘His son,’ Jack said. ‘What did his son look like?’
    ‘Skinny,’ Anders said slowly. ‘One eye was afloat. That’s all I can remember. He . . . my Lord, the Whipman’s son was hard to see. The Wolfs seemed more afraid of him than of his father, although the son carried no whip. They said he was dim .’
    ‘Dim,’ Jack mused.
    ‘Yes. It is their word for one who is hard to see, no matter how hard ye look for that one. Invisibility is impossible – so the Wolfs say – but one can make himself dim if only he knows the trick of it. Most Wolfs do, and this little whoreson knew it, too. So all I remember is how thin he