A Victory for Kregen Read Online Free PDF Page B

father’s retinue, that I was of Hamal. Other priorities had supervened in my description of my place of origin, and I felt it high time I sorted out the tangle.
    Looking about as the suns smote down, shedding their streaming mingled lights, I sighed. How we practice to deceive and then come a cropper in the nets of our own weaving!
    “Well, Jak?” Tyfar, your proper prince, was a trifle tart. “Are you from Djanduin? Or Hyrklana?”
    “Would it make any difference, Tyfar?”
    He waved a hand. “No. I think we have been through enough together by now — I think I know you —
    I thought I knew you. But Hyrklana. You know what they think of the Hamalese there.”
    “I do. I have visited Hyrklana and I have unfinished business there.”
     
    “But,” interposed Quienyin. “You are not Hyrklanian?”
    “No.”
    “So you are from Djanduin?”
    I could have left it there. Djan knew, I was well enough cognizant of all Djanduin to claim it completely as my country. As long I had fought for that beautiful land against her enemies and won.
    “I have land in Djanduin,” I said. “I love the place — it is unspoiled so far.”
    “So you are a notor of Djanduin, as we believe?”
    “Yes.”
    Tyfar was continuing to stare at me. “You know that because of the war waged by the Empress Thyllis, Hamal is not much cared for in many lands of Havilfar. This is simple knowledge. Perhaps you are from a land that has been invaded by Hamal. Perhaps, Jak my friend, you conceive yourself as an enemy to me?”
    I had waited on his last words in some trepidation. But I was able to relax. He had said, “enemy to me.”
    Had he said, “enemy to my country” my reply must, in all honor, have been different.
    The trouble was, Tyfar was quite right. Mad Empress Thyllis had alienated just about every country within reach of her iron legions.
    And, also, I had the feeling, substantiated only by intuition and a few scraps of idle converse, that Tyfar’s father, Prince Nedfar, was both not happy with Thyllis and not in her good books. And I had suggested to Lobur the Dagger that I worked secretly for Empress Thyllis. I squared my shoulders.
    “I cannot tell you, Tyfar, all that I would wish to tell you. Suffice it to say that I know the Sacred Quarter, I can walk it blindfolded, I have ruffled many a night away as a bladesman. I have wide estates in the country — well, not so much wide as passing fair and rich — and I work for the good of the country.”
    That was true.
    He was surprised.
    “You are Hamalese?”
    I have estates in Hamal. I am called there Hamun ham Farthytu, the Amak of Paline Valley. But I was not Hamalese. If anything, I was Vallian, not being born on Kregen.
    These things I could not tell Tyfar — or Quienyin.
    “I work for the good of Hamal,” I said. Again, I spoke the truth, even though, perhaps, Vallia would have to put down the worst excrescences of Hamal, chief of whom was the Empress Thyllis. “I deplore what the empire is doing to neutral countries—”
    “So do I, by Krun!”
     
    That declaration, by a prince whose father was second cousin to the empress, really was nailing his colors to the mast.
    I managed a smile.
    “Then we see eye to eye in that, Tyfar. Do not press me further. Only remember: what I do I do for the good of Hamal and for all of Paz. For the eventual good.”
    “And you will not confide in me?”
    “Not will not.”
    He frowned and then banished the scowl and replaced it with a smile, uncertain, but a smile nonetheless.
    “I — see.”
    And Deb-Lu-Quienyin, that puissant Wizard of Loh, sat looking at me, and he had stopped gnawing on his bone.
    “Hyrklana, Djanduin, or Hamal,” he said briskly, waving the bone, “it does not matter, not to me. I have gone through so much with Notor Jak that if he came from some hellhole in Queltar — where no man should have to exist — by the Seven Arcades, he is a man and a friend—”
    “Well said, San.” Tyfar stood up. Now he