Northlight

by Wheeler, Deborah

  Around me, people held on to each other, a few sobbing out loud, a few as pissed as if they’ve been accused of the killing themselves. Some of them chanted along with the gaea-priest, trying to pray life back into Pateros.

  The hospital team arrived in one of those solar-powered carts you see only in cities. They fussed over Pateros and hauled him away, not saying anything definite, as if they couldn’t tell death without their machines.

  What’s wrong with these people, don’t they know how much worse it is to hope?

  My body was bursting to hit or scream or run. I couldn’t stop thinking of the day Westifer died. When we made it back to camp in the hills above Brassaford, after a day and a half fighting straight through, I thought I was too tired to move. But every time I sat down I felt just like I did, here in the plaza. What I did then was to take the camp hand axe and start chopping the biggest tree I could find. Swearing all the time to keep from crying, me who never cries, because here in Laurea, everyone makes holy-holy over their thousands of trees and out on the steppe there were no trees. And there was no Westifer, not now, not ever again, no matter what those damned priests said. Fire or blood or cold or thirst, it gets you in the end and then it’s all for nothing.

  For nothing!

  I screamed it out until my throat was raw. My hands blistered and my shoulders went to fire and my back and legs cramped so I could hardly stand. I kept thinking I couldn’t go on, and as long as that was all I was thinking, I did.

  Captain Derron came out and yelled so loud I finally heard him. “You wolf-bitch! The rest of the squadron’s dead tired. They need rest even if you don’t. Who do you think you’re helping by cutting down half the forest? You think Westifer cares what you do now?”

  I stopped and stared at him, gulping night air so cold it turned my lungs to ice.

  It wasn’t Westifer who made me act like that and I knew it. I didn’t even like the man, but we’d shared each other’s ale, stitched up each other’s cuts, saved each other’s lives. Someone else would take his place, and we’d go right on putting our skins between Laurea and the north. Nothing changed because one man died.

  I couldn’t understand why I felt this way.

  “Sometimes I think I know you and then something happens and I realize how strange you are. I can’t understand you.”

  It was Aviyya in my memory now, whispering by the fading campfire when everyone else was asleep. I didn’t remember where or when, only the bitter-cold night and the stars edged with blue.

  I’d made myself lie still to hear what must come next. My heart beat once, twice, ripples spreading outward, stopping at my skin. I told myself, I am a Ranger. This is my life, my place when I have no other. If Westifer dies, if Avi turns away from me, what does it matter?

  Avi went on, her voice soft as a feather. “Maybe that’s why I love you, because understanding has so little to do with it. Understanding is what my mother’s so good at. You — you are for me, just for me.”

  After that, I was still a Ranger, but no longer only.

  Now, standing in the plaza in Laureal City, I held myself absolutely still, as hard a training as any knife-form. I tried to spot the man who’d drawn the City Guards off by shouting, but I couldn’t find him. No surprise, I could be looking right at him and not know his face. He could have slipped away after Pateros was stabbed. Nobody was watching him, that’s sure. Running wouldn’t prove he had anything to do with the man in blue. In his place I’d have run, too.

  Finally the City Guard Chief arrived, a short, dark-skinned woman in middle years. The scrapper type. If she were a man I’d say she had to be twice as tough and twice as stupid to make up for a few inches in height. She stepped aside with Montborne, and when they come back, she was the one who gave the orders.

  Mother-of-us-all, they’ll be hours questioning us. Days. What did I see, why am I here, why didn’t I wait for Montborne at his office? What am I doing in Laureal City? Why did I start yelling and running? How did I know what was going to happen? Why didn’t I warn someone sooner? What am I doing in Laureal City?

  A young Guard walked up to me. It hadn’t sunk in for him, he was still at the stage when doing something helped. “Come with me, Ranger. General Montborne wants to see you when we’ve finished.”

  I followed him across the plaza and down a short, wide street to the Guard Headquarters. It was going to hit real soon, like a twister on the steppe, when these people felt in their bones what they’d lost.

  o0o

  I’ve never been a judge of buildings, but the City Guard Headquarters was anything but a joy to look at, a lump of lichen-gray stone so ugly I couldn’t believe anyone built it that way on purpose. Up the shallow steps, through a foyer, I handed over my long-knife, boot-knife, and the folding knife from my vest pocket. That was all. I wasn’t fool enough to go into this place unarmed.

  We went down a corridor and into a large room. Bookshelves, mostly empty, and in the center, a table of gray wood, polished very shiny. I sat down and the young Guard asked if I wanted anything to drink — herbal tisane, water, juice?

  Rotgut, more like.

  I settled for water. After all, there was a time in my life when it had been more precious than steel.

  He watched me sip it, dying to find out what had happened out there in the plaza, what really happened. Mother knows what he’d heard and how much of that was truth, but it wasn’t his job to ask, only to wait.

  To hell with him.

  I didn’t have long to wait, just halfway down the second water glass, and we moved to another room with recording machinery and an officer taking hand notes. The City Guard Chief shook my hand and told me her name, Orelia. That was something anyone in Laureal City would know, and now I did, too. Other than that courtesy, I wouldn’t have picked her as a drinking partner. She was drowning like the rest of us, pretending harder, holding to her work as if no part of her had died with Pateros. Maybe it hadn’t.

  I showed her the passes and packet from Captain Derron. “Stationed on Kratera Ridge,” she repeated. “Years in service?”

  “Seven. And yes, I fought at Brassaford.”

  She didn’t blink when I said the man in blue was trouble, I didn’t know how. After all, I was a Ranger from the Ridge. She couldn’t decide if I had powers beyond the lot of ordinary humans or was just a lunatic to be humored and posted back to the wilderness as soon as possible. The officers took it all down, as well as where I was staying.

  We went through the questions again and a third time. Orelia liked to look tough, but all I had to give her was a Ranger’s hunch.

  A tap on the door. The nearest officer cracked it open and took the slip of paper passed through. Orelia opened it. Her eyes flickered but her face didn’t change.

  “From Chief Medician Cherida. Pateros has been taken off resuscitation. This is now a...an assassination investigation.”

  o0o

  Montborne’s aide, a junior officer, offered me more to drink. It was now past noon and I wasn’t one to grumble about missing a meal or three, but I was tired of answering questions, tired of staring at uniforms, and most of all, tired of sitting still.

  The room, at least, was an improvement over Orelia’s. It was on the second story, and windows ran along one side like a greenhouse, bright and warm. They looked west, over roofs of blue and gray ceramic tile and treetops rippling in the breeze. A big desk, barkwood I thought, sat at one end of the room and a patch-stone fireplace with a real fire at the other. The aide offered me a padded armchair.

  The door opened and a heavy-shouldered, slab-faced man wearing a senior officer’s uniform stepped in and gave me a look that said I’d be dead if I so much as twitched the wrong way. From the way he moved as he stood aside for Montborne to enter, his fingertips just grazing the hilt of his knife, he could do it, too. The aide disappeared and came back a few moments later with a portable table heaped with covered platters. The bodyguard closed the door behind him and stood where he could see the en
tire room. I decided to keep my hands in plain sight.

  I got to my feet, holding out Derron’s packet. Montborne waved it aside, saying he’d read it later. He sat down and proceeded to lift the dish lids one by one.

  “I assume you’ve had your fill of beans.” He pushed a platter toward me.

  My mouth watered and my muscles melted like candle wax. It was sliced lamb, rare and steaming hot, swimming in its own bloody juices.

  Montborne uncovered a basket of bread and a dish of sweetroots washed in butter, indicating I should take what I liked. He loaded up his own plate. “Wine or barley-ale?”

  “Water.”

  Weakly I reached for a fork. The meat was rich and tender. I was still working my way through the roots and more meat when Montborne put his plate on the tray and leaned back.

  I’d thought he was handsome when I saw him on the plaza, and before that at Brassaford when he turned the northers. No, not handsome, arresting. Hair like bronzewood, lying close against his head. Skin so clear and fine it was hard to believe he’d ever been in the field. Eyes brown like the steppe sky before a twister. He smelled of soap and leather.

  He looked back at me. “All right, let’s see that packet.”

  I handed it to him, watching while he slit the seal, unfolded the papers, read them. His eyes moved in jerks across the pages. Once or twice he glanced up at me.

  “You know what’s in here?”

  I shook my head. Between the fireplace and the sun pouring through the windows, it was too hot in here.

  Montborne folded the papers along their crease lines. “You fought at Brassaford, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t think you’d remember me.”

  “I confess, not personally. But each of you Rangers was worth ten of my own men. It was a hard time we had of it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The muscles of his jaw rippled under the smooth, fine skin. “We could have followed on their heels, razed their villages and put them back a hundred years. We could have bought peace with a single stroke. But Pateros thought it better to let them scuttle back to their holes.”

  I looked down. We none of us understood why Pateros held us back, though many were grateful just to be coming home with their skins still in one piece.

  Montborne touched the folded papers. “One of my Rangers has disappeared. This Captain, Derron, he wants permission for an extended search. An extended search that would leave areas of the vital Ridge border unpatrolled. Tell me, what would you do in my place?”

  I didn’t know what he wanted — certainly not my advice, and it was dangerous to keep secrets from this man. “It’s not for me to decide. I gave my oath to Pateros.”

  “No.” He sat up, very straight. I felt the fire in him, the twister behind those dusty brown eyes. “You gave your oath to Laurea.”

  I thought, if only Pateros were sitting here instead of Montborne. Pateros took my oath, but he also gave me one in return, the same one he gave Aviyya. Policy or no, he would have found a way to honor it.

  I thought of Pateros lying on the gray pavement with the red blossom unfurling on his green robe. I thought of its heart, the hilt of carved bone.

  A shiver built deep in my muscles. In a moment I would be shaking. A little while ago, when everyone else was acting like a headless barnfowl, then I could still think straight. I knew what had happened, what I’d lost.

  Now I didn’t know any more — Aviyya, Pateros, the Rangers, the steppe — what was gone? What was left?

  Montborne watched me like a snake, his brown eyes unblinking, his skin white as milk, and suddenly I remembered that Pateros had died in his arms.

  He was testing me, testing his Ranger, the same way I’d test one of my own knives before a battle. He was a soldier, this man who’d stopped the northers at Brassaford. Avi — one single woman Ranger — was nothing to him. He cared only whether his tools would serve him or shatter in the heat. In his place, I’d toss away any weapon I had doubts about. My life might depend on it.

  Without Pateros, all Laurea might depend on Montborne’s choice.

  “I would keep my oath,” I said slowly. “I would do whatever I had to, to protect Laurea.” My words, forced through my parched throat, scoured me to the bone.

  He leaned back and his eyes darkened, the pupils huge. “Then be my witness, my Ranger,” he said, half-whispering. “Tell me all the things that happened out there today that an ordinary person wouldn’t see.”

  And, Mother help me, I did tell him. I kept the secret of why I’d really come to Laureal City, but that was all I kept. Every detail of the killing, every moment, every heartbeat, every flicker of my Ranger’s intuition, over and over again until he’d wrung me dry.

  When it was over, I sat looking down at my hands, the old scars, the calluses, the trail dirt that not even the long bath last night could soak off. I thought they might never have held a baby to my breast, never touched a flower, never wiped away a tear. I thought they were good only for killing.

  There was no help for me here, or anywhere. Avi was lost. I had come to Laureal City on my Captain’s orders.

  I was a Ranger, first again and only.

  Chapter 4: Terricel sen’Laurea

  Earlier that morning, as Kardith made her way through the market square toward General Montborne’s headquarters with no premonition yet of the events that would shake her life, a group of dignitaries assembled on the steps of the Starhall. Each succeeding Guardian of Laurea had left his mark on the ancient structure, his own personal translation of its role — as shrine, museum, personal residence, governmental center. Over the centuries it had evolved into a patchwork of architectural styles, modern solar-collecting lenses set between antique ceramic roof tiles, the crumbling friezes of one era bordering the gables and columns of another.

  Pateros had drawn his advisors from a spectrum of institutions, from the University that was the heart of Laurean culture and technology, to the military, judiciary, and priesthood. This bright morning, Esmelda of Laurea, the University representative to the Inner Council, stood a little apart from the others. She was a short woman, so muffled in the traditional green silk robe that from a distance she seemed no more than an overdressed doll. The slanting light made her cropped hair gleam like unpolished steel and brought out the filigree of lines on her face. On her left hand, she wore a signet ring of age-patinated gold, incised with a dotted double circle. As she waited, she rubbed the ring and twisted it around her finger, tracing the design, around and around in an unending circle.

  At Esmelda’s side stood her son and adjutant, Terricel sen’Laurea. The “sen” in his place-name denoted his status as a University senior. Although he appeared slightly built, his bones were big enough for an athlete — a swimmer or a gymnast — but they were covered by soft flesh instead of muscle. His skin was as pale as any scholar’s, his hands uncalloused except for his right index finger. Below colorless eyes, his lips pressed together, whitening the skin around his mouth still further. Despite the chill of the morning, a bead of sweat trickled down the back of his neck, yet he gave no sign he’d felt it. Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on the Starhall, as if by will alone he could wrest some secret from it.

  Pateros, brimming with confidence and energy in the prime of his life, arrived. He greeted each of his advisors with a touch and a friendly word. He stopped for a moment to ask Terricel about the progress of his master’s thesis proposal.

  “Doing well,” Terricel answered. “My presentation’s scheduled for next week.”

  “History? Following in your mother’s footsteps?”

  “Not exactly, sir. Same field, but different subject. I’m trying something no one’s done before.”

  Pateros patted Terricel’s shoulder before going inside. “You’ll do us proud, I’m sure of it.”

  Terricel squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and followed his mother and the other Councillors through the heavy bronzewood doors, past the contemporary-styled offices and the
display cases containing the personal journals of Guardians from past dynasties. Above them swept the spectators’ balcony, where even now visitors stood and wondered at the bygone times when the entire Senate could gather in the hexagonal room below. Since the Senate Building had been completed, the Starhall was used primarily for the administration of traditional oaths to judges and Rangers, as well as meetings of the Guardian’s Inner Council.

  Although Terricel was prepared for it, the brilliant light of the central chamber made his eyes water. He remembered the discussion when, only a few years ago, Pateros had installed the banks of batteries and intensifying lenses in the roof. The traditionalists on the Council felt that a dimmer illumination would have been more flattering to the ancient walls, for the warped paneling was only partly covered by the tapestries hung by Pateros’s grandfather. Terricel liked the sense of age in the room, as well as the time-battered mosaic floors depicting the All-Mother planting a seedling.

  Old tales spoke of a treasure buried deep beneath those floors, beneath the Starhall’s very foundations, and Terricel had studied them all in his history classes. Some said it was all that remained of the starship that carried humankind to Harth more than a thousand years ago. Others said space travel was impossible, an offense to decently controlled science, and it was something else entirely, a device to travel through time perhaps, or across dimensions. Yet others claimed, completely illogically, that it was an altar to some blood-craving norther god, or else the sort of god the northers would pray to if they had any gods at all.

  Yet Terricel knew that more lay beneath the Starhall than legend. One day, he promised himself for the hundredth time, one day he’d find out what it was, this thing that only he could sense, find it and beat it back out of his nightmares.