Sword Play Read Online Free PDF

grotesques she collected, Candlemas thought. A particularly ugly one, like the world’s biggest bruise.
    “What do you want?” he snapped.
    “My, we’re touchy. Solve your problem with rye blisters yet?”
    “It’s wheat blight. And no, I’m not even—”
    “Too bad.” She didn’t listen, but sashayed around his workshop, touching a silver statue, an inlaid box, a glazed porcelain plate, a wreath of silver-gilt holly leaves.
    “Don’t touch my things!” Candlemas was touchy, not so much from loss of sleep as from frustration. A hurried query to his various substewards had confirmed his fears: wheat rust was everywhere throughout Lady Polaris’s lands. There simply was no crop to speak of. “The last time, you threw one of my favorite pieces out the window—”
    “And might again, if any of these trashy trinkets suit.” Sysquemalyn stood with forefingers at the corners of her mouth, pouting prettily, but the spectacle was spoiled by the purple horror, which wriggled up her flesh and curled a tentacle around her breast. Idly, she scratched. “I’ve decided to up the stakes. Your mud man is too canny to stumble over the orcs.”
    “Those orcs bother me too.” Candlemas arched his back, found it hurt, and stepped to a small, low table laden with jars and potions. He began to mix a soporific. “Those orcs are remarkably organized, for orcs. They wear uniforms, and all have that red hand painted on the front. I’ve never heard of—”
    “Mud men, all of them.” Sysquemalyn waggled purple fingernails in dismissal. “The antics of ants would concern me more, for they might get into the honey in the larder. Ah!”
    From a table she plucked up a spun-glass ornament that resembled a crystalline praying mantis. “Since it’s your mud man who must fight this, you won’t mind sacrificing it.”
    “I do mind!” Candlemas took a slug of painkiller, grimaced at the taste, and added more blackberry brandy. “I don’t come down to your kitchens and paw through your shelves!”
    “No, you paw the scullery maids. There was one you stripped and smeared with raspberry vinegar, I’m told. Didn’t that make your mouth pucker?” She stroked designs on the black palantir until she had a picture of Sunbright plodding through an icy mountain pass. The barbarian was bent double against an immense head wind. “Perfect!”
    Stepping to a window on the western side, Sysquemalyn balanced the crystal on both palms, pushed past the mild shield on the windows, and puffed the glass creature into space. It zipped away from her hands as if launched by a crossbow.
    Candlemas stood over the palantir. Ahead of Sunbright by perhaps a quarter mile, the glass object bounced off a wall and hit the icy ground. “Good shot. And it was raspberry jam, not vinegar. But your girls talk too much.”
    “Shall I have her rip out her own tongue?” Sysquemalyn asked sweetly as she dusted off her hands. “And smoke it for sandwich meat?”
    Candlemas looked at her with a mix of disgust and pity. “You can’t defame humans enough, can you? You think you’re ready to move on to the next plane.”
    “Let’s hope.” A bright smile, a poke at the purple slime moving down over her flat stomach. “If I advance quickly enough, I plan to make Lady Polaris my personal chambermaid. She’ll shine shoes and empty chamber pots, and no man will lust for her, for I’ll slit her nose and slice off her eyelids. I’ll make her feel like a lowly groundling.”
    Candlemas shook his head and tapped the palantir, making the snow scene within jiggle. “Care to watch? This lowly barbarian might surprise you.”
    “No, he won’t. He’ll die.” Sysquemalyn stepped up beside him. The purple slime plucked a tentacle from her navel and tried to wrap itself around the man’s wrist. He moved out of reach. “And I’ll laugh, and then collect on the debt. Won’t the maids be disappointed to hear of that tragedy?”
    “You talk too much, too,” Candlemas