Land of the Burning Sands

by Rachel Neumeier

  Gereint, still trembling with reaction, had to suppress a startling and extremely unwise desire to laugh or curse or weep, or perhaps all three. He had no right to demand, or even request, any answer or justification from his master. So he set his teeth hard against any question, bowing his head.

  “The geas compels obedience,” the Arobern’s mage murmured. “Dedicated skill, however, is more difficult to compel. As you know better than most, I imagine, Gereint Enseichen.” He paused, then said gently, “Look at me.”

  Gereint had no choice but to meet his eyes, though he looked up with trepidation. But this time the mage’s ice-pale eyes met his without effect. The mage’s expression, he found, was utterly unreadable. “If you give me such service, I am prepared to be generous,” he said.

  “Of course I will serve my lord to the best of my ability,” Gereint said smoothly, managing the smoothness only because he’d had years of practice keeping everything out of his voice.

  “If you do, I am prepared to free you.” The mage made a small gesture, indicating the rings that pierced Gereint’s ankles. “You seem to have found yourself unable to remove those. I could remove them easily. Legality is not a concern. The Arobern would grant me your freedom, if I asked.” He paused to study Gereint’s expression, and once more smiled his small, inscrutable smile at what he saw.

  Of everything the king’s mage might have said, this was perhaps the least expected. Gereint felt as though he had been struck through by a spear, save that there was no pain. But he felt, oddly, as though he was waiting for pain to strike suddenly outward from an unfelt wound.

  “Well?” Beguchren Teshrichten asked at last. “Is this a reward that would interest you?”

  “You know it is,” Gereint whispered. He did not know whether to believe the mage. But he knew he wanted to believe him. “For the hope of that reward… I will serve you, my lord, as well as I can.”

  The small, fine mouth quirked with unexpected humor. “Better than you served your previous master, I hope. Tell me… who removed the brand from your face? Or conspired to have it removed? One of your cousins? A friend? Tehre Amnachudran? That’s been suggested, though the proposed motive seems thin to me.”

  Caught by surprise, Gereint hesitated. Then he said with practiced conviction, “A man in Dachsichten. A surgeon who dislikes geas magic on principle and for whom I did a small service. I could give you the name he told me, but I doubt it was his right one.”

  There was a brief pause. Then the king’s mage said, “Gereint, you are lying to me. What surprises me is that you would believe you might do so successfully.”

  Gereint had not actually expected the mage to be deceived. But he had hoped a smooth, fairly plausible tale might serve—at least that the lord mage might not care to pursue the question. Seeing this hope fail, he bowed his head and said nothing.

  “Gereint?” Beguchren asked, with deliberate patience. “Do you not wish to earn your freedom? You will not do so with lies. Tell me the truth.”

  “I… it was…” Gereint took a breath. He began again, “My lord, the truth is, I cannot answer that question. I am willing to serve you, my lord, very willing, but I beg you will not ask me.”

  The king’s mage regarded him steadily. “But I do ask you, Gereint.”

  “My lord…” Gereint tried to catch his breath and balance against what seemed suddenly treacherous footing. “My lord, you ask for my loyalty. What would it be worth if I betrayed so easily the loyalty I owe elsewhere?”

  The mage crossed his arms across his chest, tilted his head to the side, and answered quietly, “But I will have your service. It is not acceptable to me that you should owe loyalty elsewhere. Did one of your cousins help you? Brachan? Gescheichan?”

  Gereint laughed bitterly at the suggestion, then realized if he’d only thought more quickly, he might have cast suspicion toward his cousins and away from Tehre and her father—then was at once disturbed that the idea of doing so even occurred to him. And twice disturbed to know he’d have done just that if he’d thought it might work.

  He found his hands closed into fists and forced them open. He tried to think. It occurred to him that the entire offer the king’s mage had made him might be false; that the offer of freedom might be merely a ploy to find out the answer to the question he had asked. This immediately seemed likely—and then, after another instant, extremely unlikely: Why should the king’s own mage stoop to trickery when he could open a man’s mind like a book and read the memories hidden there, never mind drawing upon the compulsion of the geas? But the next moment, the possibility again seemed very real. He could not decide.

  Gereint looked at his master’s face, found the calm impassivity completely impenetrable, and took a hard breath. “If you want my dedicated service, you will have to accept my silence on this one question,” he said at last. “Maybe you can take it from my mind; I don’t know. But I’ll try to prevent you. I will not answer willingly.”

  Their eyes met and held. Gereint waited for the mage’s mind to slice into his, but it did not happen. “While I would prefer your willing service,” Beguchren Teshrichten said at last, “your absolute submission will be adequate. Punishment as well as reward is within my authority. Do you understand?”

  Gereint understood that very well. He said nothing.

  “Do you believe you can withhold any answer I would demand? You have no protection whatsoever against anything I might choose to do to you,” Beguchren reminded Gereint, unnecessarily.

  Gereint stared silently back at him, taking refuge in a slave’s practiced impassivity. It was the only refuge available to him.

  “Strip,” the mage commanded him. “And wait here for me.” He turned his back and left the room.

  Gereint had never imagined he would have reason to be grateful to Perech Fellesteden for anything. But he found he was grateful now for the hard lessons in endurance he had learned at Fellesteden’s hands. He knew how to accept humiliation, how to believe that all things pass, how to flatten his awareness so that he did not think even a moment ahead—so that he barely thought even of the moment as it actually passed.

  What he could not believe was that the king’s mage had first lifted him so high and then cast him so far down—no. No. He had done it to himself. Nothing the mage had said had ever been real, and an experienced slave should have known it was not real. Beguchren Teshrichten had never intended to free him. Only to hold out the hope of freedom… Gereint folded his clothing neatly across a nearby chair and turned to face the mage as the mage returned.

  Beguchren carried a branding iron in one hand and a riding whip in the other. Next to the iron, the whip seemed almost innocent. Gereint tried not to stare at the iron. He fixed his gaze instead on one of the paintings: a scene that showed the south side of the Hill of Iron in the afternoon of a mellow autumn day. The white marble of the king’s palace seemed, in that golden light, to have been poured out of honey; the gilded rooftops on the towers seemed to be made out of flame. It was a beautiful painting, full of warmth and peace; a surprising piece, perhaps, to find in the dwelling of a cold mage.

  “Gereint,” Beguchren said softly. His voice was still soft, but it carried all the implacable cold the painting denied.

  Gereint looked at him, he hoped, steadily. Everything depended on the next moments: If he yielded now to the mage’s demands, then they would both know he would always yield before any threat. But if he held fast, he might persuade the mage that he could not be broken. That belief might set the terms of this new servitude into a more tolerable path. If anything could. Gereint stared at the mage with flat defiance and said nothing at all.

  But the white-haired mage’s air of calm assurance was chilling. Beguchren laid both iron and whip on a table and faced Gereint. “I will set the brand back on your face, give you this whip, and send you, naked, to the bottom of Wide Hill. I will command you to tell any passersby that you are being punished for impudence and defiance and that your master invites them t
o punish you as they choose.” The mage paused. He touched the iron with a fingertip, and its circular head first frosted and then smoked with a cold as frightening as any coal-red glow.

  “Or you may simply obey me,” added Beguchren, after a silence long enough to allow Gereint to contemplate the threatened punishment. “Do as I command and I will forget your defiance. Serve me well, and I will restore your freedom.” Another pause. “Well?” he asked at last.

  Wide Hill encompassed the worst areas of Breidechboden. Gereint could well imagine the reaction of the rough denizens of that area to such an invitation. He knew he had probably paled. But he did not let his expression change. In a way, he was even glad of the brutal threat, because he was far too angry now to capitulate. He said harshly, “You had better send retainers of yours to be sure I survive your punishment, master. We can both imagine, I’m sure, the creativity of the men who will find your invitation amusing.”

  Beguchren began, sounding mildly exasperated, “Gereint—”

  Gereint stepped forward, picked up the iron by its wooden handle, and held it out to his master. “You had better phrase your command carefully when you send me down to Wide Hill. Or I swear I will kill the first baseborn dog-livered coward who touches me.”

  There was a silence. The mage did not move to take the iron.

  “Perech Fellesteden owned me for eight years,” Gereint said with contained fury. “Do you think there is anything of degradation I do not know? Do what you will: I have been trained to endure and I will yield nothing.”

  Beguchren Teshrichten took the iron from Gereint and laid it once again aside on the table, where the vicious cold of its head scored the polished wood as a flame might. The mage smoothed the mark out of the wood with the tip of a finger, studied Gereint for a moment longer, and then said, his tone absolutely uninflected, “Come with me. You will not need to dress.”

  It would have taken Gereint an instant to recover from the surprise of this apparent admission of defeat and follow the mage, except for the compulsion of the geas, which did not allow hesitation.

  This time, his master led Gereint to a starkly plain, windowless room that contained only a table cluttered with the obscure paraphernalia of a mage and a narrow thin-mattressed cot. Beguchren picked up and contemplated an iron flask. He appeared utterly unconcerned about Gereint. Gereint, for his part, stood in the doorway and tried not to speculate about the things on the table or wonder why there was a cot in this room.

  Beguchren poured a generous measure of pale green liquid from the flask into a earthenware cup, turned, and held the cup out to Gereint. “Drink this,” he commanded. “And sit down there.” He indicated the cot.

  Gereint took the cup and tossed the green liquid back like cheap ale. It tasted like herbs and winter ice, like new-mown hay and hoarfrost. The taste was not unpleasant, but nothing in the taste was familiar or identifiable, and the liquid chilled his tongue and throat unpleasantly. Gereint gave the cup back to the mage and sat down on the cot. He waited to see what would happen. He wanted to ask, but would not give his new master the satisfaction of knowing he was frightened.

  Dizziness rose up through Gereint like a mist, spreading from his belly outward along all his limbs, rising last to his head. He seemed to taste the drink again and swallowed heavily against a sudden nausea, which at least did not grow worse. The dizziness did, however. He closed his eyes against it. He knew he should lie down, but he was no longer certain exactly where the cot was. He felt around uncertainly, searching for its edges. But his fingers felt distant and… strange, like they belonged to someone else very far away… A small, strong hand closed on his arm, and he let himself be led downward, though in a way it seemed he was rising and not falling. Cold green mist poured through Gereint, carrying his mind upward as it rose to the clouds… He was very cold… and then nothing was left but green mist.

  CHAPTER 5

  Gereint woke in a large, heavy bed hung with sky-blue curtains. The mattress was soft. That was what he knew first. The mattress was soft and there were plenty of down-stuffed pillows. The curtains that surrounded the bed turned the light to a softly luminous blue. The ceiling was white plaster. Gereint gazed at it, trying to think. The sounds of birds singing came to him, muffled by the curtains. The delicate liquid songs of finches and sparrows… So it was morning.

  He felt… very strange. Light, in a way that had nothing to do with his actual weight. As though he had laid down some great burden in the night. But he could not remember anything of the night that had led him to this room and this bed. He tried to think back further but could not remember the previous evening either. Yet he did not think he had been ill, certainly not so ill that he should not remember the past day. He frowned at the ceiling, pushed himself slowly to sit up, and put aside the bed curtains.

  The room beyond the bed was all ivory and rose and blue, gentle in the soft morning light. There was a painting on the far wall: The artist had painted Seven Son Hill at dawn in the springtime, from above, as though he had captured the view of a finch or a sparrow.

  Memory rose through Gereint like mist. His breath caught. He shut his eyes and pressed a hand across his face, at once terrified and violently furious. All the horror of the previous days flooded through him, utterly unexpected. He thought he might shout; he thought he might weep. He held perfectly still, pressing his hands across his eyes, and waited, shaking, for the storm to pass.

  It did pass, eventually. The room was quiet except for the songs of the birds. He might have been the only one awake in all the house, in all the court entire, except for the birds.

  The shaking eased at last. Gereint took hold of the bedpost and got to his feet. He was naked. But if the king’s mage had done anything to him while he was unconscious, he could not tell it. He felt normal. Except for that odd lightness, so that he wondered whether, if he leaped down from the window of this room, he might float down to the gardens below as gently as a down feather from his pillow. This was not an unpleasant feeling. But it was unusual and uncomfortable because he almost thought he should recognize the feeling, only he did not.

  There was a jug of water, a wide brass basin, and a small pile of folded clothing on a table next to the bed. The room was not large. It contained little save for the bed and the table and a small writing desk. There was paper on the desk and a quill and a bottle of ink. The ink was sapphire blue.

  Gereint poured water into the basin and washed his face. He put on the clothing. It was not blue and white nor any other livery, but plain brown and tan. But the material was good, and the clothing fit.

  There were no boots, but house sandals sat under the table. Gereint picked them up and sat down at the desk to put them on. And stopped. He sat still for a long time, staring down.

  The silver geas rings were gone. Not merely the little chains Beguchren Teshrichten had threaded through them: the rings themselves. Gone entirely. Nothing but small scarred holes interrupted the smooth skin between tendon and bone. When Gereint tentatively reached down to touch his ankles where the rings had been, he felt the holes. But the rings themselves were gone.

  Gereint had felt only joy and gratitude when Eben Amnachudran had removed the brand from his face. He did not know what he felt now.

  There were servants outside the blue room: a broom-wielding woman in servant’s drab brown and, more to the point, a man in livery waiting outside the door. The man, who addressed Gereint as “honored sir,” guided him through halls and up stairs and along a pillared gallery open to the weather, and at last through an intricately carved portico into an antechamber hung with blue and violet and decorated with mosaics of birds and trees. All of this was clearly part of the palace; all of it was clearly designed to impress and overwhelm.

  It made Gereint angry—he was ready to be angry, he found. To be furious. Everything in this place was meant to manipulate, to make a man feel small and subservient—and that meant everything was of a piece, because everything here had been a manipulatio
n, right from the beginning—and for what unguessable purpose? Beguchren Teshrichten needed Gereint, clearly. And had deliberately put him through all that farce of bait and threat, and for what? For what?

  The liveried man gestured respectfully that Gereint should wait in the antechamber and himself went through a curtained doorway. Gereint did not wait, but followed on his heels.

  “My lord—” the man was saying to the frost-haired mage.

  The mage himself was sitting on the edge of an enormous desk, looking rather like a child who had made himself at home in his father’s study. A man sized to fit the desk was lounging in a chair to one side of the room, but Gereint barely looked at him. He had no attention to spare for anyone but the mage.

  Beguchren Teshrichten had been running the long feather of a quill pen absently through his fingers. He did not seem to be paying very much attention to the liveried man, but he looked up sharply when Gereint came in, waved the man silent, and hopped down off the desk to face Gereint. He was not smiling, but his calm seriousness was just as inscrutable as his smile. He said to the man, in a tone of polite dismissal, “Thank you, Terechen,” and the man darted an unsettled look at Gereint and went away.

  Gereint had just enough self-command to wait for the liveried man to leave. Then he took two steps forward and said through his teeth, “The man who took away the scar of the brand did it for kindness. And why did you do this?” He gestured sharply downward. “Not for kindness, is it? What is this but payment for service—and for what service? What was that game with the threats and the iron? What do you want from me?—Not that it matters: if you think I’m interested in playing your game, you’re badly mistaken, my lord.”

  The mage did not answer, but impassively looked aside from Gereint’s angry stare, laying the feather quill carefully down on the desk.

  The other man, however, stood up and set his fists on his hips. “What?” he demanded. He was not quite as tall as Gereint, but broader all through, and his voice matched his big frame: deep and guttural. That deep voice was especially harsh now, with annoyance and also with an odd kind of disdain. “You object to payment, do you?” he went on, glowering at Gereint. “What, do you find the payment is not sufficient? Is it base coin? What service would you have refused for this coin? Would you wish to specify? Well?”