Octobers Baby by Glen Cook

uncommunicative the rest of the day.
     
     

FIVE: Their Wickedness Spans the Earth
     
    I) But the evil know no joy
    At last. The end of a long and tiring journey. Burla glanced back to see if he had been overtaken at the penultimate moment, sighed, slipped into the cave. His friend Shoptaw, the winged man, greeted him with anxious questions. “Fine, now,” Burla replied with a wide, fangy grin. “But tired. Master?”
    “Come,” the winged man said.
    The old man was solicitous and apologetic. “I’m sorry you had to go through this. But Burla, you did me proud. Proud. How’s the child?”
    Swelling in the Master’s praise, Burla replied, “Good, Master. But hungry. Sad.”
    “Yes, so. You weren’t prepared to bring him so far. I feared...”
    Burla laid the baby before the Master. The old man opened its wrappings.
    “What’s this? A girl?” Thunderheads rumbled across his brow. “Burla...”
    “Master?” Had he done wrong without knowing?
    The old man held his temper. Whatever had happened, it had not been Burla’s fault. The dwarf didn’t have thebrains. “But how?...” he asked aloud, wondering how a counterswitch had been made. Then he looked closer. The hereditary mark was there.
    The King had lied. To support his shaky throne he had announced the birth of a son when a daughter had been born. The fool! There was no way he could have pulled it off...
    Realization. His own schemes had been dealt a savage blow. A wildcat was growling in his embrace. Willy-nilly, he had inherited the Krief’s plot. “Oh, damn, damn...”
    Two days passed before he trusted his temper enough to confront his shadowy ally. The failure was the easterner’s fault. He should have used spells to assure the sex of the child. The old man would have done it himself had he suspected the other’s sloppiness.
    But no one accused the Demon Prince of incompe-tence. No sorcerer was more powerful or touchy than Yo Hsi, nor had any had more time to perfect his wickedness. He was an evil spanning unknown centuries. Only one man dared openly challenge the Demon Prince, his co-ruler and arch-enemy in Shinsan, the Dragon Prince, Nu Li Hsi. And, perhaps, the Star Rider, the old man thought, but he was irrelevant to the equation.
    The old man, who had taken great pains to remain anonymous, was a noble of Kavelin, the Captal of Savernake, hereditary guardian of the Savernake Gap. His castle, Maisak, in the highest and narrowest part of the pass, had seen countless battles fought beneath its walls. Only once had it been threatened, when El Murid’s hordes, by sheer numbers, had almost swamped it. The Wesson, Eanred Tarlson, had prevented that. That near-defeat had led the Captal to reinforce his defenses with sorcery.
    A greater sorcery was in the Savernake Gap now. That of Shinsan. The Demon Prince’s interlocutors had come to the Captal and found a bitter, ambitious man, Ravelin’s only non-Nordmen noble gone sour over the treatment he received in Vorgreberg. The emissaries had tempted him with the Crown of Kavelin in exchange for service to Yo Hsi and eventual passage west for Shinsan’s legions. Yo Hsi was ready to settle his ancient strugglewith the Dragon Prince. A united Shinsan would move swiftly to fulfill its age-old goal of world dominion.
    The Captal, from his lonely aerie, had seen little of the world but that contained in the caravans flowing past Maisak. Since the fall of Ilkazar, the west had been weak and divided. The major powers, Itaskia and El Murid’s religious state, were deadly enemies evenly matched. Neither showed much interest in using sorcery for military purposes.
    Shinsan hinged its strategies on sorcery. Physical combat was a followup, to occupy, to achieve tactical goals. Rumor whispered dreadful things of the powers pent there, awaiting unity to release them.
    The Captal had chosen what he thought would be the winning side. Western sorcery and soldiery had no hope against the Dread Empire.
    Yo Hsi had