The Sentinel holding the sword sighed and sheathed it. “Very well,” he said. Gaspard recognized the voice as belonging to Major Metsfurth. The Major stepped back into the ranks.
Rannald stretched out his arm, pointing behind Gaspard. Gaspard turned. The Sentinels behind him parted, making a path.
“There,” said Rannald, “lies your test.”
The filaments of light along the path revealed a large box hovering just above the floor. It looked very much like a coffin.
Gaspard had to remind himself that all these men had survived the trial before he could get himself to take the first step and walk to the box. The lid was already open on its hinges. He looked in. It was padded and lined with silk of a color he couldn’t quite make out, though it looked to be the color of wine. Or blood. He glanced at the masked faces, but saw nothing in them, of course. There was no help to be found here. And no other way out.
He climbed into the box.
Gaspard could no longer see anything but the faintest outline of the lid above him. But once it was shut by unseen hands, even that was gone.
Chapter 23: The Oath
For several moments, the Sentinels stood in silence, watching the box in apprehension. Only when Rannald removed his ceremonial helmet and mask did any of them relax.
Major Metsfurth did the same, revealing a bleak expression. “You talked to him, Arrion?” asked Rannald.
Arrion shrugged. “I tried. Just another fool who thinks he can do anything.”
Rannald nodded and sighed. “So you think this is his first trial?”
“His first real one, though I doubt he would tell it that way. He’s accomplished, to be sure, and likely would have gone far if he had chosen a different path. But I don’t think he has any idea what he’s about to go through.”
Rannald snorted. “Did any of us?”
Arrion’s face grew bleaker. “Perhaps.”
Rannald looked around at the men assembled before him as they, too, began to remove their masks and helmets. While no one truly knew how the magic of the Ritual worked—none of the men were Patterners, and outsiders were not allowed down in the underhalls to study the chamber—Rannald had his suspicions, and they were generally shared by the others. Each of them had one thing in common: they had lived through something horrible. Some of them, like Rannald, had seen war and survived. Others had seen dreams crushed, love die, lived through something that forced them to wonder if life truly were preferable to death.
Rannald closed his eyes, his hand moving to the empty scabbard hanging at his hip. Even touching the scabbard was enough to send flashes of memory jolting through his mind like a bolt of lightning, momentarily stunning him with remembered screams of the dying, screams caused by his sword.
He had already survived his first trial before coming to this chamber for his own Ritual of Joining. When he had climbed into the same coffin as that young man Gaspard, Rannald had already lived through his fears, and relived them every night in his dreams, causing him to wake screaming and weeping. The worst the Ritual could do to him was bring those memories back into focus, into stark clarity, and make him remember what it was like to wield a sword.
Yes, he had survived. But it was a near thing.
Arrion turned at the sound of scratching coming from the coffin. “That didn’t take long.”
“To us,” said Rannald. “To that boy in there? It likely felt like days.”
“Still,” Arrion said, frowning. “Usually they last a little longer.” Then, as if the implications of that finally dawned on him, he sighed and drew his sword. “Here we go again.”
One of the men was already standing by with a bucket of water and a rag, and another pair with a stretcher—out of sight, of course. They were always there, even when the potential recruit looked promising. Because one never knew how a man would react until he had actually gone through the Ritual.
Soon came whimpering from the coffin, and then cries for his mother. It was always the same. Everyone seemed to have the same kinds of reactions and in the same order. Rannald wondered if that was just the way people thought, or if these were the kinds of reactions the magic tried to induce. He tried not to think about it too much; just hearing it over and over and over was enough for him to realize he just didn’t care.
The whimpering quickly turned into pitched screaming, the scratching turning into punches in the desire to escape. While it was true that the magic wouldn’t kill him, it also wouldn’t stop him from injuring himself. The confines of the coffin prevented the potentials from damaging themselves too much, but Rannald had seen more than his fair share of broken fingers and toes during the Ritual.
Rannald nodded at a pair of men, who moved into position behind the lid. Everyone re-affixed their masks and helmets. The time was near.
The blue filaments of light running along the floor suddenly turned yellow.
“Not very long at all,” muttered Arrion under his breath, adjusting his grip on the sword. Rannald turned a reproving glare at him, but said nothing.
The two men opened the lid.
Gaspard flung an arm over the edge of the coffin and pulled himself up, gasping and wide-eyed. He looked years older, though Rannald knew it was only the pain in his eyes that made him look so. His hair was soaked with sweat. Bloody scratches covered his face and shoulders—scratches caused by his own fingernails. His tunic had been ripped apart, and a small strip of scalp had been laid bare and bloody. He looked at them with the wildness of an animal beaten within an inch of its death, seeking nothing but escape from the hell it had just lived through. He looked at them as if they were both the cause of all his suffering, as well as his only hope for salvation.
Rannald felt weary. He was so, so tired of seeing this.
“You now know what it means to fear,” he said, projecting his voice. “To suffer. To lose. It is something that few people truly experience, even though many of them believe their lives have been nothing but hardship. If anyone—”
Gaspard rolled over the edge of the coffin and fell hard on his back. The men who had lifted the lid rushed around to help him up, but he struggled as if he didn’t realize they were there. Once he had finally regained his feet, he rushed over to Arrion, who rested his hands on the pommel of his sword, its tip against ground. Gaspard fell to his knees and grabbed Arrion’s cloak in his fists, his eyes filled with tears and pleading.
“Kill me, please!”
Arrion turned to Rannald. “He will not kill you, Gaspard,” said Rannald. “That is not what we are here to do. We are only here to give you a choice, and it is a choice of the sword. But you must take that sword yourself.”
“Get up, man,” said Arrion harshly. “Show some dignity.”
Gaspard looked as if dignity were some alien concept he had yet to discover. Still, he stood, eyeing the sword with a combination of repulsion and eagerness.
Rannald continued. “You have seen the inner reaches of your soul. You have seen the limits of your endurance. You now have a choice. Use this sword to vanquish your fear, to slay it, to see what lies beyond the limits you have discovered within yourself. Or use it to slay yourself, to protect yourself from any further pain. It is a choice that rests on a question. Which do you fear more: life, or death?”
Gaspard moved to answer that question. He snatched the sword from Arrion’s hand, spun it, dropped the pommel to the floor, and leaned onto the blade. With the sound of steel grating on the bones of his ribs, the point pierced Gaspard’s chest and came out his back. He fell to his side, eyes lifeless and blood pooling around him.
Without a moment’s hesitation, the body was loaded onto the stretcher and the blood mopped up. The men had no need of instructions; they had done this often enough. Gaspard’s body would be returned to his relatives, along with a brief, prewritten note expressing sorrow for their loss. Rannald would sign the letter, and then he would wait for the next dewy-eyed youth to show up on the doorstep of their keep with no fear or understanding o
f death, ready to throw his life away.
Rannald picked up the orb and swiveled the bottom half. The blue light vanished, as did the illusion of darkness that obscured the details of the rather ordinary, stone-walled chamber. The others began filing out, but Arrion hung back. He removed his mask. His eyes showed concerned.
After a moment, Rannald removed his own mask and smiled to allay his major’s concerns. “I just wish these young men would stop coming here.”
Arrion smiled back, but it looked genuine. “If you didn’t, we wouldn’t follow you.”
Rannald nodded, but he said nothing as he followed the rest of his men out.
Chapter 24: Councilor of the Wall
Not the knees,” Councilor Yarid said from the cushioned chair he lounged upon. “I want her to be able to walk, after all.”
Jordin, his manservant, stood with his back to Yarid, holding the cane in his hands. Without turning to his meet his master’s gaze, he nodded slowly before resuming. The crack of cane meeting flesh echoed off the stone walls of the small underground discipline chamber. To her credit, the woman servant—what was her name again? Yarid found it hard to remember their names sometimes—didn’t cry out. Only muffled whimpers escaped her lips as she hung by her wrists from the rope in the center of the room.
Yarid took a sip of tea, focusing on some insignificant spot on the opposite wall. Just because he understood the necessity of such beatings didn’t mean he enjoyed watching them. He wasn’t a monster.
Well, at least no more than anyone else.
The woman hadn’t done anything wrong. Neither had Jordin. But Yarid occasionally needed to remind his servants of the hierarchy in his household, to remind them of their places.
Yarid’s place, of course, was at the top.
Nothing reminded them of this as effectively as a good beating. That is, nothing except for a good unearned beating.
“Enough,” Yarid said with a waggle of his fingers. With perhaps a little too much haste in his movements, Jordin returned the cane to the rack with the others. Two other servants, who had stood one either side of Yarid’s sofa, rushed to untie the woman. Once she was free, she rubbed her wrists and wiped the tears from her eyes before stepping before Yarid.
“How can I serve you, master?” she said, eyes lowered.
“Refrain from bleeding on my carpets for a start.” He handed her his empty cup. With a bow of her head, she took the cup and headed up the stairs, wincing with each step. Yarid watched her disappear from sight and stood, flipping his thick brown braid back over his shoulder. Turning to the other two servants, he snapped his fingers at the chair. “Take it back upstairs.” They complied, and Jordin fell in behind Yarid as he, too, went back upstairs.
Back in his room, Yarid walked to the window. Gray clouds filled the sky without a break in sight. A few raindrops trickled down the glass. Not enough to warrant a change of wardrobe, but enough to be a bother.
Outside his window, beyond the courtyard of his manse and the tall iron fence encircling it, Garoshmir was subdued. Relatively few people were out for the time of day, though anyone from a smaller city would have still called it bustling. Yarid understood Garoshmir better than them, better than even most of those who had grown up here, as he had. Few people knew what Garoshmir wanted like he did. That was how he had become such an important figure in the political landscape not only of the city, but of the whole of the Accord lands. No one wielded as much power as the Councilors of the Wall. And no one held sway in the Council like Yarid.
At least he had that to look forward to. The Council was meeting today, late in the afternoon. He wasn’t sure what time it was now, but he suspected that he had a couple of hours before he had to go. The midday bell had yet to toll.
He stood there, slippered foot tapping impatiently as he decided what he could do until then.
The problem was that many of the tasks he would normally perform in preparation for the council session he had delegated. A stack of reports sat on the desk in the study adjacent to his bedroom, sealed against prying eyes. They had been put there by Jordin. An array of messengers delivered them to the side door of the manse, where Jordin collected them and brought them here. Doubtless he thought they were mere missives keeping Yarid informed of general happenings throughout Garoshmir and beyond—which was, in its own way, true, but only a fraction of the truth. This stack of reports was the prime of the pump of rule in this city. It held all of the secrets of its most powerful citizens. Jordin wouldn’t suspect that, considering how cavalierly Yarid treated them. Jordin was a professional, and likely wouldn’t even start to consider their contents, much less arrive at the truth of them.
Yarid went to the study and sat down in his maple desk chair, delicately carved with exquisite scrollwork, and cracked open the top report, which was sealed with blue wax. He didn’t even bother to read his reports in secret. Doing so would arouse suspicion, and Yarid believed that the best secrets were those in the open. So did many of the Councilors, heads of merchant houses, and other quality people, apparently, but at least Yarid knew how to have an open secret remain that: a secret. The fact that his stack of reports was as large as it was proved that few of his rivals had that skill.
This particular report outlined the worth of seashell necklaces in Garoshmiri copper ghellia, a typical trade report that was innocuously dull and appropriate to one such as Yarid, but it said much more than that. As Yarid deciphered the message encoded within the report, he learned that the governor from the seaside city-state of Twelve Towers, Shad Belgrith, was on her way to Garoshmir to petition the Council. Belgrith had been the primary architect of the Runeway and had supplied the Council with many of the Patterners required to build it. She herself had a seat on the Council of the Wall, but despite that, she had never once shown her face in Garoshmir. All of her correspondence had either been written or conveyed by a proxy representative. Now, it seemed, she was coming in person. Yarid wondered what she wanted.
Wealth and power were the obvious answer, of course. Belgrith had expended significant resources in providing the means to create the Runeway, and who knew how much she paid just for the development of the underlying Pattern itself. But how that desire for wealth and power manifested itself was what intrigued Yarid.
Perhaps she was coming in regard to the little hangup involving the people of Naruvieth. Yarid found their protest amusing. What was not amusing, however, was the Council’s response, which was little more than hand-wringing and waiting. They simply stopped construction while they figured out how to handle the situation. And while the partially-constructed Runeway had fulfilled half of Belgrith’s promise—that the Rift separating Naruvieth from the lands of the Accord would be spanned, thus opening up new avenues of trade, and some other nonsense about changing the course of history—it could not make good on its much more alluring promise of bridging all of the Accord lands with a travel Pattern so advanced it stumped the best Patterners the Academy had to offer. Even Tirfaun, arguably the most talented Patterner not affiliated with the Academy, was disturbed by just how advanced the Runeway was. Each step down it would be as good as five, meaning travel from one location to the next would only take a fraction of the time. That was the true lure, one that left nearly every member of the Council, and the trading houses in their pockets, drooling. In trading, a deal that took only a fifth of the time was as good as five times the profits—or much greater, as things that would perish during an extended journey could be moved much farther. Wealth would simply grow like magic, and at a truly unprecedented rate.
Now that was changing the course of history.
But that was only part of it. As surely as wealth trickled out of Garoshmir, so did law and order—a particular export that was the Council’s specialty. The dispersal of laws and their subsequent enforcement required time and resources, but with the completion of the Runeway, such obstructions would become trivial. The Council’s influence would grow exponentially, and when the Council took credit
for the Runeway’s construction—they were, after all, the ones who permitted its existence—the people would be more willing to bear a tax increase with their newfound windfall. It was the perfect arrangement: the Council gained in influence, and the people welcomed it. Would that all political maneuvers were so elegant and symmetrical.
However, none of that mattered so long as the Council allowed Naruvieth to interfere with the construction of the Runeway. It was a ridiculous situation, and it angered Yarid every time he considered it. Naruvieth was sending a representative to the Council to speak on his city’s behalf. The man called himself the Warden; supposedly he was their leader, but from what Yarid had heard, he had very little real power. Hopefully he would travel by Runeway. Even though, being unfinished, it wouldn’t get him here any faster than mundane means, it would show precisely the sort of monumental undertaking he was interfering with. It would give him some perspective before the Council ate him alive and spat him back to his little backwater town. Then, finally, civilization would be able to continue.
With a practiced flick of his wrist, Yarid tossed the report into the low-burning hearth to his right. The paper burned quickly; flashpaper was one of the requirements Yarid held his contacts to. No sense in leaving his messages vulnerable to being recovered for enemy eyes. This way, only the most talented Patterners could reconstruct the message, and Yarid had already ensured that they had no reason to do so.
The rest of the reports weren’t nearly so interesting, and had a difficult time keeping him engaged. Sometimes being Councilor was tedious work. As he stared at the smudged handwriting of one of his least educated spies, rapping his fingers on the herringbone pattern of his mahogany desk, Yarid wondered what Tirfaun was doing right now.
While he could not match the Academy’s most powerful Patterners in terms of ability—being, perhaps, only the third most powerful—Tirfaun was the one whose company Yarid actually enjoyed. Tirfaun had been disgraced several years back, something to do with illegal acts and children, and had been subsequently cut off from the attention of all quality persons in Garoshmir—save for Yarid, of course. Yarid was not quite so picky in his allies, and he found that on certain things, he and Tirfaun had similar views. While he wouldn’t go so far as to call Tirfaun a friend, Yarid did consider him more than a mere acquaintance or political tool. It may have been nothing more than companionship by convenience, but Yarid had a mischievous streak, and Tirfaun had nowhere else to go and nothing else for which to use his powers, save getting himself in trouble. He was bored more often than Yarid, which meant he was likely doing nothing at the same time as Yarid.
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