XII: Counsels
“Highness?” The voice of the chamberlain echoed softly but insistently in the dim room. “The sun stands at the noon, my lord. The council convenes.” He paused, scarcely breathing, listening for the long-drawn breath of his master surfacing from magical trance. There, yes; and the slight cough to waken a voice gone to sleep.
“I come, Huw.”
Lord Huw bowed, full knowing that Prince Treskiel had not yet opened his eyes, could not see the gesture, and withdrew silently. Treskiel, drawing another, deeper breath, smiled, knowing Huw bowed. Barely forty, the lord chamberlain was as fixed in propriety as a man of eighty. A good trait, he thought, in one so close to a prince’s coronet: betrayal was in such poor taste.
Treskiel’s eyes opened at last with his third breath. The chamberlain knew Treskiel’s rhythms, how he most liked to return from trance, and would have timed his call to a nicety, that the prince should appear in council in proper time. And Treskiel troubled himself never to offend Huw’s stern taste; far from it, he showed himself keen to exemplify it. If only all allies required so little for maintenance.
Sight of shadowed stone; smell of roses, and dust, and expensive soaps; sound of the small fountain trickling in its niche; sense of the weight of his body pressing the deep cushions of his chair: he embraced the Outerworld again slowly. He could hasten this, he could make the transition instantly if he chose—but why? Why shock the psyche, when one might seduce it instead? He filled his lungs once again, savoring the expansion, the intrusion of the sweet, priceless, precious air into the depths of his body, and held it trapped for a long moment to suck like juice every drop of its vital force before luxuriously releasing it, spent.
He flexed his hands where they rested on the stick across his lap, then closed them about it and drew them over its length. Irregular, scarred with deep cracks in the wood’s crude grain, it was nonetheless as smooth as polished, as polished it had become in the ages of its use. Treskiel took it up and turned it in his long fingers. It was an ugly thing, like nothing else in his apartments. But then, his had not been the choosing of it. Twisted and grotesque as the hour it had been cut from the tree, perhaps it was as well: certainly it was no thing to inspire greed—not in any soul that could not perceive the balefire glow of the power simmering within.
The talisman of Cathforrow. How long it had served them—a millennium, now? And some part of the magic of each one of its inheritors poured into it, to keep the family strong. Clan legend held that the first Cathforrow, Lonan na Valle, who had ripped it from the lightning-riven thorn, gave up his life to his descendants by emptying the whole of his power into it.
Treskiel lifted a thin eyebrow. In his darker moments, he could understand such an act as no sacrifice at all, but an escape. He fingered the opal pendant on his breast, a thoughtless habit when he was thoughtful: his own, personal talisman of magic. What a queer thing the dragon-magic was, at once as familiar as the sound of one’s own thought and yet also alien, and other. Treskiel felt it within like some wild animal shut up in a house, and nosing querulously into all the corners. The more he engaged it in use, the stronger he made it; it, and his uneasy fancy that it was only a matter of time before it destroyed the house to break free. Thus, from time to time he drained it off; all sorcerors did or went mad, pouring their power into some other vessel to keep it at hand, in case of need, yet still safely, sanely, apart. His was the opal. The staff, too, he filled from that dark spring, and the great ruby Orb of Ristover as well.
His eyes narrowed at the thought of the Orb. Maybe it was arrogance to imagine that he filled it. The thing seemed less an object than an intelligence, and to drink what power it pleased, and when. Its springs welled in every Ristovrein mind, even those not gifted—or cursed—with Marennin’s power: sheer reverence had unexpected potencies. Still, it permitted his use of it, and the more deeply, he suspected, precisely because he regarded it as an ally rather than a possession. Like Huw.
Oh, the Council in Andrastir, yes. He sighed once more, once more savoring the depths of respiration, touched the stick’s silver foot to the floor and stood up smoothly. His hand gripped its gnarled head just level with the head of his own femur. How droll, to have an amulet of magic that upheld an aging chieftain as well as it supported his chieftainship! Treskiel looked forward with no pleasure to aging into such a need; still—he pulled it lightly into the air to snatch it by its middle, and smiled coolly—surely that was a better prospect than the alternative of not having the chance to age at all. He strode, almost glided, from the room.
The Great Hall at Carastloel drowsed in cool shadow. Fat Captain Garragan drowsed against a stone pillar; his prince sent a ripple of magic like a fistful of spiders down the man’s neck and chuckled darkly as the man leaped awake, armor slapping.
Only the handful of lords councillor resident at Cannisfell Castle stood in attendance below the throne. Andrastir had called the Grand Council too proximately to summon all of Ristover’s council, or that of most other Houses for that matter. This annoyed Treskiel. Though he had every right to attend on Andrastir alone, if he pleased, councillors expected to be consulted, and they were kept happier—and quieter—when they thought they had a voice. Aristande had no need for such abruptness, but at least his own very real indignation with her should help smooth his courtiers’ affronted feathers of pride.
Before so small a gathering, he did not restrain himself from leaping up the steps of the dais three at a bound. The youngest of them was ten years his elder, and they ought to be reminded occasionally that he should outlive them handily. He spun adroitly about, stilled himself, and moved only his eyes to meet each of theirs in silent turn. Then he seated himself gracefully, laid the black staff of Cathforrow across the arms of the throne of Ristover, and made them a slight nod. “Advise me, my lords,” he murmured, smiling thinly, and nodded to Huw.
The sending of an eidolon demanded skill, and power; to send one that could see and hear as well, doubly or trebly so. Though every prince and princess in Peria possessed magic, not all of them cultivated it to the same extent—old Vannin of Tregaron, now, could barely raise a magelight, or so it was said—and for something like this sending, most relied on a retainer devoted to the craft, to raise the necessary energies and weave them so subtly. Treskiel shaped his own. Only Clar Meyl of Rhyllandon did likewise, and she was fully three times his age.
For this, then, had he spent the last hour entranced, and now the roused power roiled within him, the wild beast paced and bayed for release. Ordinarily the recitation of all his titles, at the invocation of council, gave him a secret, childish thrill, but just now the beast yearned to open strange jaws and bite Huw’s head from his body and get on with it. Peripherally he noted how his lords stirred uneasily, beholding the feral stare their prince turned upon the side of the chamberlain’s head. Oh, for a mirror! though in some ways their faces shone truer . . . .
Gods. Now Huw called upon the gods. Treskiel almost did bite him. Since he had spat in Their high holy collective faces five years ago the earth had not swallowed him, nor cloud of flaming ash engulfed him, nor flood flushed him and his from the land though he scorned Teodhan most bitterly of all. For five years he had uttered not a single holy Name save in savage blasphemy—though only in private, alone. He glanced at his councillors, solemnly following Huw’s sombre prayer. The hearts of his people were given to the gods; however betrayed by Heaven, Treskiel would not threaten his own rule by threatening that devotion.
Thus he endured the solemnities. A psychic hour for every minute of Huw’s summoning, and at last the chamberlain turned, began to turn, imagined beginning to turn toward the prince of Ristover and the spell broke the floodgates of Treskiel’s soul. Did he raise his staff and his fist, or were they forced by the power raging to complete itself? Still, he directed it, channeled it through his will into the pattern he chose for it, made it make for him a semblance of himself, and a bridge to Andrastir.
And the power at Andrastir answered. The flood of Treskiel’s magic met the sea long prepared for it, and the Prince of Ristover, in his seat at Carastloel, turned his proud head and saw not the red granite of Cannisfell but the black stone of Andrastir’s Sky Hall, fifty miles away.
Smoke become ice: the polished black marble of the Sky Hall chilled the sight as well as the touch, from the floor to the light-starred vault of the great dome above. Rothesay felt devoutly grateful for the coolth. The black silk of Runedaur formal dress had many fine properties, not all of them evident to the careless, but it was beastly hot in this unseasonable simmer. Beside her, Lacie lifted her golden hair gracelessly from her neck and flapped a fan with dangerous vigor for its delicate construction: the silvery silk was no cooler.
In compatriot heart, she turned the fan on Rothesay. “Do you know,” she whispered, “there are spells for keeping you warm in the cold, so why has no one worked out one for keeping cool?”
Rothesay shrugged. “So when will you?” she whispered back with evil cheer, and received a sharp whack with the folded fan, for this was another obnoxious student ploy: never suffer anyone to utter any complaint about anything whatsoever without charging him, or her, with its correction. The Kingscroft Loremistress claimed it was a corruption, in style if not in intent, of an ancient Móriad prayer, “and from ages of such teaching are we become steel-masters, look you,” she had said, rather smugly, being Móriad-born herself.
“And the sooner the better,” Rothesay added now to Lacie, and pressed her back into the cold stone. Below, thirty feet below the gallery in which the Runedaur students gathered, the great chamber filled slowly. Three days before the Solstice, the heads of the remaining Sferan Houses sought counsel together, groping for recourse against the rising barbarian power, though two centuries of such councils had yielded no answers.
The walled octagon of the palace complex, imaginatively called the Ardassiann, the Octagon, measured a full mile on the diagonal. The palace itself centered in the north part, surrounded by the capital Residences of Andras, Carastwyth, Lostforth and Listas; the Sky Hall commanded the south.
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Architectural extravagance hallowed the approach to the Hall. The citizen great or lowly entered by the Gate of Heroes at the southernmost angle, then passed along a wide marble-paved colonnade between colored pillars, still more fabulous gardens, and the Residence of Tregaron on the east, and on the west a small swan-filled lake for House Celtannan. Then wide, shallow steps lifted one up to three wide, double-pillared archways, thirty feet tall, into a tiled loggia enclosing a courtyard and a fountain; on the north of this, forty-foot arches billowed, topped by acorn-capped domes of many-colored stone. The quartz-white courtyard dazzled, a snowfield out of which bloomed mosaic flowers of rose, lilac, Rhostial-blue and shamrock green, and gold, real gold, like captive sunlight limning every leaf and petal. Four towers, their cupolas upheld on corbels of roaring lions’ heads, swept skyward at the corners.
Floating above the domes of the north loggia like an uncanny cloud, the Great Dome rose like indrawn breath. The awed gaze danced upon the fluted lip just above a ring of jewellike windows, then rolled up and over the ribbed immensity, and back, till the swellling mound at last hid the summit from sight. But the uttermost spire, a sun-gold spear, thrust its famous diamond-cluster finial back into the courtyard’s view. The fire of Calion’s Phial could be seen across Andrastir from the Gulf to the White Wall.
Under the north gallery, six thirty-foot-tall swordsmen, hammered in relief on three ponderous bronze-and-gold doors, warded the way into an airy anteroom, from whose sky-blue walls a mosaic crowd of somber-faced, gaily-jewelled kings and queens of stronger days glared down upon their diminished descendants. And then three more doors, made of black bronze and set with twelve constellations of diamonds, opened into a cavern.
Walls, pillars like ancient trees, bays, quarter- and half-domes, and the Great Dome, nearly a hundred feet broad and its zenith a hundred and half a hundred feet above like a sky itself: all were hewn and polished from the same black marble. Windows pierced the walls at every level, round or star-shaped ones spaced rhythmically with slender shafts, smaller and smaller at each higher tier. Even the Dome was pierced, fist-sized apertures lined with mirrored tin and filled with the whitest glass art and magic together could devise.
The effect was of a cathedral of night, a night filled with stars, a hundred moons, hundreds of radiant comets. The Hall itself was hard to see for the brilliance of the lights it admitted.
Rothesay had not yet come this magnificent way.
No, they came through the Gardens, over the Ardassiann Wall (no more than twenty feet high anywhere), ducked and dodged the territorial hostility of the staffs of the various Residences, and emerged into the Sky Hall by the odd doors and passages for the invisible people who scrubbed and polished, kept the incense stocked and the sacrificial goats fed. Or, twice she had come by way of a tunnel, one of “several” according to the Kingscrofters, from the deep Runedaur cellars into the cisterns under the Palace, and then they had a maze of a time getting out of the Palace and its grounds and into the Sky Hall—through the back, of course.
The Hall itself might be hard to see but it illuminated its contents. Today it was full of people, every last one of whom looked, by dress, wealthy enough to buy Harrowater and everything and everyone in it. Priests and priestesses of the greater gods clustered there, as well as the retinues of lesser deities. An entire company, looking to Rothesay like bards in their deep blue robes, proved to be astronomers. Rich magistrates and civic officers brought camp stools for comfort. The College of Magic at Andrastir, Rhylliauveth, filled a large wedge of floor with green and gold gowns, while across from them a smaller wedge of apricot-and-gold marked the professors of the rival Feillantiri college, Marchoneveth. The Feillantiri faculty had long since fled that city for sanctuary in Andrastir; two centuries, Rothesay thought, two hundred long years, and it was still called New College here.
Some of the more important colleges of philosophy had also sent representatives; and a few independent teachers, whom Rothesay was assured were greatly famous, stood in attendance. And masters and mistresses of the Runedaur could be seen, here and there, milling through the throng not unlike sheepdogs.
Musicians had been relegated to the first gallery, along with all the students of the various schools. This included the Runedaur students, of course, though some of their number—Rory was one, as well as Sorchone—had climbed the walls to the purely decorative second balcony sixty feet above the floor.
And all that number made scarcely half the assembly. Nobles of every House, by rank entitled to speak and vote in Council, filled the cushioned benches crowded between the massed notables and the great circle of circles at the center of the Hall, to serve their respective princes with their counsel.
Twelve magnificent thrones faced one another across the inlaid floor of the Wheel of Council, each one centered on mosaic discs laid in the colors and emblems of each House: magic circles, like the one in Padriag’s villa, and charged to earth the energies of the eidolon-spells. Some of the princes attended in person: Princess Aristande, already in her place in a cascade of purple silks, was one, as was Prince Mathspen of Carastwyth, who looked to be all of ten years old and kept having to be told not to swing his legs. Nor drum his feet. Nor slouch so—ah, but wait: the courtier at his side gestured curtly to their blue-and-copper entourage clustered behind, a page went scurrying, and presently a fat cushion was stuffed behind the boy’s back.
The Houses of Peria being supposed the descendants of each of Uralia’s twelve children, the order of precedence of their rulers followed that order of birth. Had the high king himself hailed from Listas, he would have had to be content to be named last in such an assemblage. But there was an exception.
Thirteen circles defined the Wheel. The odd one, centered on the north, contained not a throne but a statue, looming twelve feet tall, carved of jet and set with one amethyst eye and one silver: Marennin. Rothesay tried to keep out of its sight, certain that, whatever its sculptor had intended, or believed, the great dragon was quite capable of using it as she pleased.
The Imperial Herald—a post doggedly manned by its heirs through two centuries bereft of an empire—standing in the center of the great Wheel faced the rearing statue and shook a silver sistrum. The vast hall fell silent. A bird piped without.
“Foundling of Uralia!” His voice rang out as clear as a bardic bell. “Last to look upon the stars but first of all of us, the people you made your own, Mother of Magic, Under-Queen of the Land of Peria, Warden of the Myrinine and Keeper of the Fire of Errodar—Marennin na Sfere! Welcome, Majesty; honor us with your counsel!” Again he shook the sistrum, and four horns at the Quarters trumpeted a complicated fanfare.
And wouldn’t they be surprised if you did? Rothesay asked in the privacy of her imagination.
“What’s so funny?” Lacie whispered.
Rothesay started, unaware that she had given any outward sign of her inner entertainment; indeed, aware that she had not. “Stop that!” she hissed back.
The Herald turned to the first throne sunwise of the statue. Its black wood was set with amethysts, and the mosaic beneath it made an intricate play of hundreds of shades of purple. Aristande sat as still as a statue herself, but her eyes glittered with life, and one finger tapped slowly upon the shaft of a tall beribboned spear like a staff in her left hand. “First-born and First-son, Andras! Your people prosper under the lawful rule of Her Radiant Highness Aristande Andoni Aril na Eldorre, Priestess of the Dawn, Magister of Andrastir and of Oestry and Tallerod, Countess Maldan and Sindasa, Baroness Losttaine, Knight-of-honor of the Order of the North Star, Knight-of-honor of the Order of Ullan, bright light of Law unto all Peria! Welcome, Aristande Andoni, Andreissel; honor us with your counsel!” Again the sistrum shivered, and the pipers played a different flourish.
The Herald faced the next throne. The child-prince of Carastwyth stiffened and straightened and raised his chin high. His fiery red hair had been tightly braided, and the plaits glinted like the burnished copper of the Carastwyn standard.
“Second-born and First-daughter, Carastwyth! Your people prosper under the lawful rule of His Radiant Highness Mathspen Glassglian Kiondrogadh na Kavinel—”
Rothesay sighed with approval at the lavish names. She herself owned more than the one, she knew, and once she had been able to lisp them all, but only ‘Rothesay’ remained to her recollection now. Surely if she submitted to Carialla’s memory-magic, she could recover them; it might be worth it, for that alone.
Mathspen’s titles blurred past her, leaving her with only the impression of a little boy struggling as a porter under too many hefty packages. She glanced at the ten remaining thrones. If that herald goes through all this for each and every one, he won’t get through the roll call before it’s time to break for supper! —We are going to break for supper, aren’t we?
“—Welcome, Mathspen Glassglian, Carastwyndan; honor us with your counsel!”
The Herald turned to the third throne. Black and almost-black in the darkness of its green, laced with gold lightning, it stood empty: Rhyllandon held Sparca, the northeasternmost tip of Peria, and their ruler would attend the council through an eidolon. Rothesay craned to watch. If the House of Andras had a strong military reputation, that of Rhyllandon lay in sorcery.
The Herald shook the sistrum, then held it aside and with his left hand swept a kind of silver wand through a flourishing gesture. The mosaic emblem under Rhyllandon’s throne blossomed with a miniature aurora, its wavering curtains of white-green and white-blue rising from the tiled pattern to engulf the throne in thin, cold flame: Andrastir opened its end of the Passage. The rising chatter of the onlooking crowd fell once again almost to the silence granted to Marennin.
For a long moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then Rothesay, even from thirty feet above and forty away, caught the flicker of the Herald’s glance to Aristande. The voice of the crowd died utterly. The soundless aurora began to fade.
Swiftly the Herald repeated his magical call. He was an older man, gray-haired and dry-looking, and it seemed to Rothesay that he labored with effort. The glowing colors swirled about Rhyllandon’s throne more vividly than before. Every eye strained to force a human shape out of the inchoate energies.
The spell failed again. The hall roared. Aristande raised her spear and crack! its bronze butt smote the tiles. The clamor abated, most of it, and she turned to give some word to an attendant. The Imperial Herald turned to her in open dismay, and then anger when he saw who approached.
“That’s the Magister of the Rhylliauveth!” Lacie whispered, as something like a huge peony was borne on a green-and-gold litter into the center of the Circle. It took Rothesay a moment to make out the short but impressively fat woman amid the ruffling layers of rose and white silks; her age was unreadable on her pale face, the hue of her hair, or lack of hue, hidden beneath a long rose-colored koli. She was set down facing Rhyllandon’s seat, and her black-clad, black-masked bearers assembled at her back, as identical in size and form as quadruplets. The Herald glowered, without heed from her; her right hand lifted idly, the little pink fingers flicked and curled, and the aurora of Rhyllandon’s Gate in Andrastir blazed to burn the sight. Awe rippled the sea of murmurs.
And the fires went out. And the throne of Rhyllandon stood empty still.
The Magister bent her head towards Andras, and in the surprised quietness announced coldly, “Rhyllandon answers not.”