Summer’s power grew to His peak. Though Areolin had begun to ride down the southern sky, the heat rose, and the land sweltered. Standing a watch on the Sunrise Tower, determined to stand strong, Rothesay grimly ignored her sweaty misery, grimly ignored her sweatless misery, her buzzing head and dizziness, and then ignored everything, would she or would she not, till she woke with a thundering headache—but in blessed coolth and dimness in one of the infirmary cottages. Rory came and visited her there, a welcome end to an embarrassing succession of lecturers on sun-poisoning, including Dav personally. All Rory said was, “Serves you right for being stupid. Eat these blueberries.”
He himself seemed to be feeling better. “Yeah. Sorry I haven’t seen you much this last week; Master Lee and I, we, uh, had a lot to work out.”
“What did he say?”
“About being a puppetmaster?”
Rory sprawled along the low stone parapet that walled the cliff side of the cottage porch. For heat’s sake, he wore only a kind of twisted breechcloth that left his cheeks as bare and browned as the rest of him, and the setting Sun jeweled him down with copper sparkles from all his fine red hairs. Rothesay, deep-shadowed by the low roof, privately grinned at the effect. Now he stared down for several silent minutes at the river so far below. Suddenly he lay flat, and stretched an arm down to pluck a stalk of mint from an imperfection in the cliff. “Well,” he said at last, biting the stalk and sending the cool fragrance bursting about them, “he never did, not in words I could tell over to you. He couldn’t get over celebrating the fact that I had a proble—’scuse me, challenge!—with it in the first place. You’d have thought my being all plagued about it was the greatest joy of his personal life.”
“I don’t understand. What’s that mean?”
“Don’t look at me. When I know that one, I won’t be only a fullfledged Runedaur, I’ll be an almighty master myself.” He chuckled, but it was a wicked sound. “Master Lee and Master D—two master-talks in one summer. Hasn’t this been a master-ful season!”
Master Dav? Oh, right: that misunderstanding in the battle. “That must have been pretty hard on you, everyone thinking it was all about Kahan like that,” she said kindly.
He turned his face to her slowly, his gaze now black and remote. “Who thinks it wasn’t?”
“Er—er—once we realized that, that Harlan, you know. . . .”
“Harlan!” He spat the name. “Really tall, a’n’t he? —wasn’t he,” he amended bitterly. “No, sorry, Sugar: all I saw was the Hawk-man. And you can think whatever you like about that.”
He gazed away westward again. She struggled for composure, with no idea what to think except that she did not like it at all. Presently she found breath to say, very evenly, “I like Kahan.”
He glanced back, puzzled. “Well, yeah. Hawkman’s got a lot to like.”
And he meant it. “Er. You say that?”
“Whyn’t I say it? Am I stupid?”
“No! Nor are you very consistent, are you?”
Now he laughed. “Inconsistent, huh? I must be nearly a master already!” He rolled off the wall. “You feel up to walking about yet? Sun’s about down.”
They ambled out into the gardens, already shadowed by the heights west beyond Daorlas. Others had anticipated them, singly, paired, or in quiet conversational threes, and idly weeding or mulching as they talked. In the melting air, some like Rory wore as much as a breechcloth; many, like Master Caltern even in winter, went naked. Across the garden, among the beans, a woman of Sothia’s generation wore a broad straw hat to hold a linen veil across her back and shoulders, and a sack on a strap. Her naked old feet were quite clean: the Order permitted bare Runedaur but not bare earth, and the mat between the vegetables lay as much as a foot thick, not a crumb of soil showing. The Order eagerly, albeit cheaply, bought hay that untimely rain had ruined; farmers shook their baffled heads, but they took the money.
Rothesay walked and feared no Ghost attack: she herself was clothed, in a thin linen shift like a sheet with a head-hole, reserved for invalids. Perhaps she did not need such aegis, though.
Padriag used the Sferan calendar, and so she knew it well enough, though every year had brought fresh confusion in trying to relate his temporal wishes to those of Harrowater. Dannin was one of the four ‘long’ months, with an extra week, the celestial week, in addition to the usual four. The celestial week had something of extra holiness about it, most commonly observed by semi-idleness. Even the Runedaur seemed inclined to participate. The mood all week so far had been unusually mellow. Perhaps it was only the weather. Best to be safe, and wear the invalid’s linen. Runedaur did sometimes train in heavy heat, just for practice.
To one side, a verbal bout picked up a little energy: “And we’re right back to my original question! Is a god to a normal man, as that man is to a halfwit?”
“But you’re still assuming gods! What about other explanations for the girl’s power?”
“I didn’t think much of the last one; got a better?”
The Moot, in the coolth of the Vasty Hall, had neither abated nor settled on any one line of inquiry. Rothesay wondered how they ever would.
Some wag had planted the sunflowers in maze-form, and they were already tall; giving the maze a pass, she and Rory ducked through the grape arbors and came out behind another strolling couple. A young man in a student’s summer black and his right arm in a sling walked with a woman half-silver of hair and all silver of dress. The youth waved his good arm in some expostulation.
Rothesay dropped back. Rory, stopping with her, scowled thoughtfully. “Who’s he? One of ours?”
“Yes. No. Er. Not as a student. I think. Sort of a, er, guest.” Brusquely, Rothesay explained about the loathsome Geillath she had helped kidnap. “They’ve had him before the Moot, at least twice that I know of. I don’t know why we let him go about like this. He’s dangerous!”
Rory grinned. “So are we! Hey, Mistress Frele, there, she’s the Rose House Healer and I’ll wager a week of chores she broke his arm herself. But what’s his story: demon-dazed? possessed?”
“I—er, I don’t know. I—” She broke off, gritted her teeth, kicked herself soundly and confessed, “Well, I’ve never thought to ask, actually.”
Rory searched her scarlet face, then squeezed her shoulders in a one-armed hug. “Hard to do, when you’re in the thick of it, Sugar. Hardest time of all.” Then he scrunched his eyes shut, making his drooping red moustache square out, to read from some inner scroll, “The warrior keeps his soul remote though his body engages.”
“Right. If I weren’t so tired, I’d make you eat yonder moss.” She draped herself upon the benchlike lip of a fountain, dangled one leg in the tepid water, and stared up at the fading sky.
“You want to go back?”
“Not yet.”
Rory continued to stare after Mistress Frele and her escort. “That’s ‘the other one,’” he murmured.
She rolled her eyes but not her head at him. “What ‘other one’?” He glanced back at her sharply; she thought he wanted to dodge the question, but his gaze flickered towards the main keep and suddenly she remembered the small company coming up from under the King’s Hall, and Merrithorander’s odd comment. “And what’re ‘Cuernaio’s Locks’?”
He scowled, thinking deeply. “Oh, them,” he said at length. “Probably it was ‘Kornayos’ or something originally; it’s a Callemórine thing. A lot of our stuff is. And the Locks, well—”
He slapped both arms across her, pinning her to the fountain-kerb, and blew a loud raspberry into her stomach. She shoved him off, laughing, almost shoving herself into the water. “Hey!”
“Made you laugh,” he taunted.
“Yeah, so?”
He rubbed his moustache. “If it was important that you didn’t, for some reason: could you hold it in?”
“I guess so. Sometimes. I guess it’d depend on—”
“—on why it was so important. Yeah. Like if you’re being a spy or something. Like that. That’s some of our training. But it’s not just how to hide what you’re feeling, it’s how to even feel something completely different, or nothing at all, if you need to.”
“Oh, joke away!”
“No joke, once you know how. But the Locks—see, you can do it so, so powerfully—and especially if you don’t know how you did it—that sounds stupid but I mean, some people just kind of stumble onto it, and if you don’t know how you did something, you don’t know how to undo it, see? Some people’ve Locked themselves up. Can’t feel anything. Don’t feel anything. Like living dead, or something.”
Rothesay tried to imagine this. “If you can teach people how not to feel,” she said slowly, “then you can teach them how to feel. Er?”
“Why’d they want to learn?” When she peered up for explication, he said, “Can’t do anything you don’t want to do. You’re Locked, you can’t even want to get unLocked.”
She shivered. “Ugh. But, that doesn’t seem to be his problem; he seems to feel things. Anger, anyway.”
“Fear, too, then. Anger’s just fear in a mask.”
Rory stared after the troubled Geillath, and Rothesay remembered that they had not been talking about him. “What ‘other one’?” she repeated.
He gazed down at her as if from some vast height. When he finally spoke, it was to tell about some old Dun Brean kinsman who had died of the sun poisoning.
She made some inane reply, by way of swallowing her surprise, and her pique. Clearly he regretted having let something slip; she needed no special Runedaur mind-seeing for so pointed a change of subject. She had snared a bit of initial training in that peculiar art, from Ragalda and also Istander: something about causing one’s own body to match the target’s body in all its patterns of slack and tension and pose, and trying to see what thoughts arose out of it. She rolled off the fountain-side to her feet, to stand and try the technique now, to see what it was he would not say. Rory’s remote scowl burst into a coruscation of laughter, and he tumbled her into the pool for her audacity. But she managed a secure grip and took him in with her, and he cracked his skull on the stone feet of the marble water-nymph, and they retired together to the healing-houses to get him stitched closed again.
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There he left her, to pass the night in invalid’s peace (“Why don’t you attack me while I’m sick, so I learn what real endurance is?” “I might. Maybe when you’ve been with us longer.”) But she would not be left in peace. Despite a desperate weariness, at full dark she slipped from the house and crept like a cat back across the grounds to the King’s Hall and the cellar-ward stairs.
The young moon had long set; Summer’s stars were thick. Darkness breathed through Colderwild’s stone promenades and mantled her about. The narrow threshold glimmered, an arched slot of dim grey in the blackness of the wall, from a torch or magelight far below.
A small group of visiting Runedaur ambled up the stony path. They paused at the stair door, clustered shadows among shadows. Rothesay could make out no words, but a voice queried, another declined, and the shadow-cluster moved on, slightly smaller, as one lean part of it split off, filled the doorway, and descended under the Hall.
So this was no secret to anyone else. No reason for her to be hiding and skulking, then. Yet still she waited, waited until the nearby courtyards and passages seemed empty enough, and crept down the stairs. At the bottom, the lonely torch sent its glow also down a long barrel-arched corridor. Doors, some closed, some gaping, lined both sides. Halfway to the farther darkness, two hounds slept outside one from which yellow light flowed, and a mumbling sound.
One dog lay flat on his side, paws a-twitch; the other, his head on his forelegs, opened his eyes to blink at her. Between them, the door stood open inward upon a small stoop or landing; from it a half-flight of stone steps spilled down into a vaulted room filled with light and men.
The device hanging above them from the peak of the vaulted ceiling looked like a drum, a yard deep and two across, a drum of a score or more of narrow plates. Inside the drum must be a big chandelier: light from what seemed a hundred candles blazed out of the bottom of the drum, and out of the top as well to be bounced back down from the whitewashed ceiling. Candles veiled by white silk screens lit worktables about the room, though they were currently ignored. All the two dozen or so men stood, quiet as statues, about the narrow table directly under the light-drum.
A naked man lay there; naked, except for some odd patterned red garment close about his torso. He was the source of the mumbling: his head lolled back and forth upon his pillow, and he talked, randomly and drunken. At his one side, the Loremaster and a Raven’s Trace student bent over a well-lit writing-table; at his other side stood Dav.
Dav’s hand moved with a bronze glitter to point at something on the strange garment; Merry looked, nodded, turned back to the desk and wrote or sketched something with brisk, sure strokes.
Rothesay reeled. Not a garment. Not a garment. The material draped along his sides was no fabric but his own flesh, cut and folded away to reveal the secret inner parts of him, that glistened and pulsed for the edification of the gathered Runedaur. The Loremaster was, presumably, mapping their progress.
What was this? He could not live; from such a wound there could be no recovery. Would a dying Runedaur consent to his own vivisection, at the hands of his no less ghoulish cronies? He seemed in no pain. And now she saw Dav turn, bend close to the subject’s face and lay a hand lightly on his brow. Then he looked up, and nodded, and Rory—she had not marked him before—unstoppered a crystal flask and poured the clear contents slowly over the naked organs. The mumbling slowed and softened.
Suddenly he spoke up quite clearly, a demanding, and Darian, snarl: “Aye, Lord: gone for Runedaur she has, and I for double fee!” His head rolled again, and he seemed to see Dav. “Ale, boy!” But he wandered back into delirium without waiting for answer. Dav frowned in deep thought.
Rothesay backed away. The sweet taint of blood filled her nostrils but she did not bolt; too weary and twice too sick to run, she fled at an ambitious shuffle for the stairs.
A shadow in the stairwell seized her arm with a twist that brought her up short, and Ragalda pinned her with her eyes.
Think!
Rothesay wrenched her arm free but stood there, eye to eye with Ragalda. No clear thought came to her, but loathing twisted like a worm within her, in her own entrails, loathing for Colderwild and everyone in it. And if Ragalda was trying to “tell” her something in the way of the Silents, Rothesay was deliberately refusing to “hear.” Something froze, deep in her soul. She turned her shoulder to slip past. Ragalda did not stop her.
Rothesay dragged herself all the way back to the healing-houses. Two forces warred to be her foremost thought, one of fire and one of ice. She burned with fury at Ragalda—interfering smug know-it-all of a hellfiend—and entirely failed to connect it with the woman’s final lack of interference. Yet at the same time fear chilled her: not the panicky anxiety she knew so well and hated, but a strange wintry stillness, where every thought came hard and clear. Once, she had feared the Runedaur from a folly of ignorance. Now, she feared what she knew.
She had to get away.
Damn Ragalda anyway! Rothesay blinked back hot tears, sneaked to her cot—a light burned in the Mistress Healer’s window and she heard a soft unintelligible voice answered by a low laugh—curled up undiscovered on her pillow and almost cried again for success at her own stealth. I’m just still sick! she told herself angrily.
And well I should be, she thought, chilling again. The image of the Darian stranger’s guts swam before her, along with their macabre audience. Padriag could never have intended this. She would go back. As soon as she was strong enough to travel, she would slip out; she could pretend she was going to Kavinsrae, or even just out playing in the mountains; she could be days away before anyone began to wonder what had become of her. She would head for Andrastir, and Onions, and then just step ‘through’ to the old villa. And there she would be, as safe as anywhere could be, safe from these human-faced demons. She could almost smell the old apple-loft around her again.
And yet—why wait for Onions? Without knowing how, she knew, simply knew that there was a passage or portal, or whatever-it-was, a thin place between the worlds right here, here in the house on the edge of the cliff. She slipped from bed and ‘intended’ Padriag’s villa.
No light leaked from his windows; was he asleep? Had she ever actually known him to sleep? Half elated at her success, half worried, she cautiously opened the door.
Padriag was not asleep. He sat, smiling placidly, in his chair in his great hall. No fire burned in its pit—oh, yes, and she was to tell him what his hypocausts were for, not root cellars and passageways at all—and the great room was quite dark. She wondered what he was doing, sitting up in the gloom, but she rushed over, dropped into her seat, and poured out all her tale, one long swift sentence that doubled back over itself as she recalled left-out bits, till it became an intricate knot that only a rope-master could unravel. But at last she brought it down to the horrible vivisection under the King’s Hall.
“And it’s true, it’s all true that they are demons, you couldn’t know, they seem so—so human sometimes so I know you couldn’t have known or you wouldn’t have sent me there or is that what you sent me to find out? And I’ve found it out. How do we stop them, Master? They’ve been around for ages and they’re so powerful but we can’t just let it go on. Master, what do we do?”
Padriag sat with his hands folded over his round belly, beaming kindly at her as he did when waiting for her to see the obvious. She was too rattled to be annoyed.
“I suppose,” she ventured slowly, “I suppose we have to know exactly what they do and how they do it. You can’t stop someone doing something if you don’t know what the something is, or how he’s going about it.”
The wizard smiled.
“But—but that means—studying there . . . .”
His eyes twinkled.
“So—I—have to go back—?”
Padriag only smiled. And as he sat there, he slowly crumbled away, faded on the faint night breeze. He seemed quite content about it.
She woke with a cry. The herb-fragrance of Colderwild’s healing-houses was about her, the soft rush of Daorlas’s waters a thousand feet below floated up. A dream; it was only a dream, and there was no peerie-passage here. She stared out of her window at the stars above the black shapes of the western hills. The wizard was all right; it was only a dream.
Only a dream, and yet it had truth. The only way to fight the Runedaur was with their own tools, and those she would gain only here. War, she thought, means learning the enemy’s devices and beating him at his own arts.
In the darkness, she giggled, sleepy and giddy. I shall write a book: Rothesay’s Treatise on War. And for ages to come young gentlemen shall be forced to read it by tyrannical tutors, if they are to be thought educated men. And so shall my name pass down the centuries, a plague and a curse upon all students of destruction!
Still grinning, strangely comforted of her loneliness, she fell at last into a heavy sleep without dreams.
Asilay el-Seremay hurried through the labyrinth towards the top of the Lady’s Tower. The familiar passages twisted strangely, the very stone seemed softened, like corpse-flesh before the onset of rigor. But hurry she must: profane hands had gained her chamber of magic, inhuman hands that even now probed among her arcane tools and devices, selecting one, raising it to the inspection of some deadly intellect, replacing it as if unchanged and yet some powerful essential quality, disturbed by this unsanctified touch, vanished, as a figure in smoke vanishes before the faintest breath.
The magic was dying. The next corner must be the last before the door! The magic was dying. Whence came these stairs? Who, who dared intrude?
The magic died. Power ebbed like warmth from a corpse. Trying to scream, the sorceress woke.
No soft corridor, but her own bed; no fleshy walls, but bed-hangings, pulled open to admit the mild night. Her magical sanctuary remained inviolate, as potent as ever. But—
When her beating heart had eased somewhat, she rose silently. Pulling close a silken robe, she padded to a chest beneath the nearest window, drew out an ornate cedar box, opened it to the starlight. Nearly a dozen jewels glittered in separate velvet nests, glittered with more than the sheen of Summer’s stars alone, as though a wisp of candle flame flickered in the remote heart of each. All but one. She lifted it free.
It was the moonstone, a perfect milky oval the size of the end of her thumb, lightless now as any mere gem. Haukur was dead.
Asilay dashed the box to the floor, her rage engorged by the bang, the snapped hinges, the rattle of skittering stones. Then only her hard breath broke the dark silence. And her stupid slaves slept on.
She stooped herself to regather the luminous jewels, clutched them hard in her two hands before dropping them back in the ruined box. She would have traded every one, spent every spy she owned, in exchange for Haukur’s success. Dead. Dead in the south-land, the brat lost, and now what was she to do?
Asilay sank to the floor, and leaned against the chest. Some strength had returned to her since her misadventure this past spring, strength she had sent mostly into magical recovery, reserving little to her body: thin before, she was gaunt now, and wholly grey in what of her own hair she had left, and the three yards from here back to her bed might as well have been three miles. Yet she would not rest even if she made the crawl. Since spring, the boy-god Sleep had become the most hateful of flirts, beguiling but seldom surrendering, and then only briefly or, as tonight, bedight in horrid dreams, and she cursed Him even as she hungered for Him.
Why? she wondered dully. Why do we even bother? All our dreams come in the end to nothing but the dust of the grave; why bother with the farce of chasing them, as foolish as a child grasping for a treat dangled out of reach by a cruel cousin? She sighed. Next time, she should just empty all her soul into the raven, fly with it, become it in its simple mindless life till it too flew beyond the world.
At the far end of the room, on her blanket before the door, one of Asilay’s slaves stirred, moaned in her sleep, mumbled, and lay quiet again. The animal sound breathed on the coals and Asilay’s anger reignited.
Enough. If she must be denied Sleep, she would scorn Him in turn with Industry. Now, she thought, hobbling erect again, where was Nuassay? Oh, curse every wandering soul: the woman had gone to Daur-a-siger, another one of her innumerable sisters pupping yet again. Thoroughly vexed, Asilay muttered an idle curse against the hapless babe, a curse never completed.
Of course an aunt goes to attend! Something of her own soul blooms now in another. Nuassay had gone to pluck the blood-string of power. A child should love his aunt, honor her, and heed her, now, and later, when she might have need of him.
Yes, there was much power in blood. Such a damned waste that, with the brat lost, there was no one, nor nothing, now that that scrap of hair was spent, of blood close enough to Cherusay’s—no one in Asilay’s power, that is. There was old Arrowy, Cherusay’s own mother, of course, but Asilay would have as much chance gaining anything from Arrowy as from the Perian dragon Marennin. As for the king, Rumil, half-brother to Cherusay: Asilay chuckled darkly, swaying, silent in her silent bedchamber, idly imagining worming her way into the royal bed to get his child—Eirenseld and Orthunder, as Cherusay had been—in herself. Yet even if she had been able to picture herself the seductress, at her age and especially now in her ravaged state, she was quite barren: no living child had her belly ever delivered, not with all the healers’ aid. A laughable fancy. Now, if one of her own sisters, fecund as cows—and about as enticing, she added with a private, bitter laugh, except of course Sonaay, the youngest and as lovely as Asilay in her prime—
Oh. Oh, yes. Such a babe would serve admirably. The whole plan spooled swiftly out before her inner sight; Asilay groped blindly for the chest and sat, unaware that she moved. Sonaay at fifteen was ripe for court—Asilay had friends there—she would teach her all her old arts—and at last, who better to midwife than the babe’s devoted aunt—Asilay would feign a stillbirth, and then—oh, then! she would summon to her the bastard brat who alone held the key to Cherusay’s hidden treasure.
Asilay glared at her bed, distantly damned Haukur for getting killed and inconveniencing things so annoyingly, shuffled to her desk, lit a taper, opened an ink bottle.
Upon this thirty-second day of Dannin, do I, Asilay, eldest of Seremay, write fond greetings to you, Sonaay. Thrice-beloved sister are you! Come at once to a Geste, I beg you, dearest. . . .