Jakot crossed the grassy areas of Santagithi’s citadel. Wordlessly passing a trio of off-duty guards, he opened the barracks door and wandered past rows of personal quarters to the strategy room at the end of the hall. He was not disappointed. Its lock was sprung, indicating occupancy. Santagithi had not initiated a foray in the eight months since his daughter had disappeared, and it seemed odd that he would choose his war room for solace. Yet often he did just that. His absences from the house and the dinner table wounded his wife; despite Jakot’s cover, Santagithi’s disappearance from the guards’ daily routines had not gone unnoticed. In the past, Santagithi would occasionally share his concerns with Nantel. With the archer’s captain gone, the general confided in no one.
Quietly, Jakot edged open the strategy room door. Santagithi sat with his back to his captain, hunched over a table. Maps lay, neatly stacked, near his left elbow. He was alone.
Concerned that Santagithi might be crying, Jakot cleared his throat to announce his presence. He remained in the doorway.
Santagithi did not move. It was as if he had heard nothing.
“Sir?”
“What is it, Jakot?” Santagithi identified his acting-captain without turning.
Concerned for his leader’s sanity, Jakot spoke slowly. “Sir, you have a visitor. An old man who calls himself Shadimar and claims to be the Eastern Wizard. There’s a wolf with him. He says he has important business.”
No reply.
Jakot shuffled uneasily. “Will you see him?”
Santagithi twisted to face his acting-captain. To Jakot’s surprise, the general’s gray eyes were dry and clear, marred only by bitterness. They pronounced him fully sane and in control, and his movement revealed the source of his distraction. A chessboard lay on the tabletop, the pieces set in stalemate. “I’ll see the Wizard.” He added, as if in afterthought. “Here.”
“Here, sir?” Jakot bit back his concern, trying not to sound patronizing. “We could easily set up the audience room for—”
Santagithi broke in forcefully but without hostility. “Here, Jakot. Safety is of no concern, but secrecy might be. If Shadimar wished to break procedure or harm me, he could have done so already. Bring the Wizard here.”
Jakot backed from the room, too accustomed to trusting Santagithi’s judgment to question it even now. Closing the strategy room door, he retraced his steps to the gate where Donnerval stood facing a patient Eastern Wizard.
“Come with me.” Motioning to Donnerval to stay at his post, Jakot led Shadimar back toward the barracks. The wolf padded along behind him.
Several more guards had joined those gathered before the barracks. A card game had begun, and Jakot smelled wine. He smiled tolerantly as they passed. He would have preferred the guards to choose a more productive hobby and a different location, but they had no way of knowing Santagithi would use his strategy room as a meeting place. Even Rache had not begrudged the off-duty guardsmen an occasional binge.
Jakot held the door for Shadimar and Secodon, followed them inside, then took the lead again.
Jakot and his charges strode the length of the hallway in a silence broken only by the tap of the acting-captain’s boot soles on stone. The footfalls of the Wizard and his pet made no sound.
At length, they arrived before the strategy room door. Grasping the ring, Jakot pulled the unadorned panel open. Santagithi still sat before the chess table with his back to the door, his head twisted far enough to watch Wizard, wolf, and guard enter. Shadimar accepted the seat across from Santagithi, and the wolf settled at his master’s feet. Santagithi waved for Jakot to leave him and the Wizard alone.
Concerned for his leader, Jakot pretended not to see the gesture. Closing the door, he took a position behind Santagithi where he could assess the Eastern Wizard’s every expression and movement. Torn between protecting and obeying the general to whom he had sworn his loyalty, Jakot contemplated the consequences of his actions. If Santagithi commands me to leave, will I have the courage to resist his word? And, if I do, will it undermine his authority in front of a visiting dignitary? Sweat broke out on Jakot’s forehead as he contemplated his options.
Luckily, Santagithi saved Jakot the decision. The general settled into his chair, facing Shadimar, and made no further mention of his captain’s presence.
Though Jakot appreciated the reprieve, he hoped it came of Santagithi’s famous empathy with his men rather than simple apathy.
Shadimar did not dance around his point. “King Siderin has mustered his army and is headed for the Westlands. The Great War has begun.”
Jakot stiffened, not daring to believe a contest steeped in centuries and generations of legend would begin with an old man nattering words at an aging general over a chessboard. Carefully, so as not to draw attention, Jakot shifted to a position where he could clearly read Santagithi’s expression. But, by the time the captain moved, all sign of the general’s initial reaction had disappeared, replaced by the sagging, weary look that had grown from alarming to familiar in the last few months.
“Indeed?” Santagithi laced his knuckles at the edge of the game board. “Why bring this news to me? You’re powerful beyond my understanding. Why can’t you handle the matter yourself?”
The words shocked Jakot. Always before, Santagithi had met threat with logic and violence, the worse the enemy, the more complete the attack. To entrust strangers with responsibility for his people went against every tenet the general had upheld.
Surprise creased the Eastern Wizard’s face, seeming out of place on his timeless countenance. He followed the expression with a scowl of dissatisfied understanding. Apparently, he had assumed Santagithi would rush into war with the same rash boldness he had in youth and only now realized outside encouragement might become necessary. The Eastern Wizard cared little for the change that had come over Santagithi, and Jakot understood his concern all too well. Impatiently, Shadimar tapped a gnarled finger onto the white king. “This is you, Santagithi.” Reaching to the opposite side of the board, he indicated the black king. “This is Siderin.” He sat back. “This is me.” Shadimar outlined his real person in the chair in Santagithi’s strategy room, towering over the tiny figures on the game board.
“Are you saying you manipulate us like toys?”
“No. I’m saying I could. Luckily for humans, my vows forbid it. I can guide. But would you see mankind reduced to mindless figurines manipulated by Wizards and gods? It would take all joy from glory and success, all driving determination from failure. It would leave men without reason or need to live.”
Santagithi changed the subject, dismissing the Wizard’s words as beyond the topic. “But why waste time telling me about the Great War? Why not alert the western cities with armies large enough to handle such a threat?”
The wolf raised his head in distress as his master spoke. “The cities to your west are the Western Wizard’s concern. It’s my job to inform the West’s prime strategist of the War. Do what you will with the information.” He started to rise.
Santagithi halted the Wizard with a raised hand. “What does the West need with a withered, old warrior? What sort of strategist would send his finest swordsman away on a fool’s errand, stripping him first of the very respect and dignity he would need to succeed?” Santagithi’s gaze fell to his knuckles where veins drew bold, blue lines beneath wind-burned skin. “I’ve lost my daughter, both my captains, and a piece of my army is in a distant city. My judgment has shriveled with my sword arm. Is that the sort of general the Western armies need?” Santagithi slammed his fist on the table. The force sent chessmen jumping askew. From habit, Santagithi returned each piece to its proper position. “Prime strategist, indeed.”
Santagithi’s self-deprecation pained Jakot. He bit his lip, hoping the Eastern Wizard could say something to break a mood Jakot had tried to chip away at for months without success.
Shadimar remained half-standing, and his voice gained resonance and power. “You are the West’s prime strategist. Th
at’s fact, not speculation.”
Santagithi opened his mouth to interrupt, but Shadimar shouted him down with a warning. “Don’t question the gods, Santagithi, and don’t argue against truth with self-doubt. The only one your reasons could convince is yourself, and you’ve done too much of that already.” The Wizard took his seat, face flushed with anger. “There was a time when you made every decision an absolute and stood behind it, when your men followed your word because they would distrust their own decisions and motives before they would question yours. When you revised a course of action, it was not because the decision was wrong, but because circumstance made the change of plan necessary.”
Shadimar leaned across the chessboard. “Santagithi, your own doubts will destroy you and the Westlands. Either lose those uncertainties and lead the West to possible victory, or surrender to Siderin and let him shatter everything you’ve created. Siderin won’t just kill your men, he’ll torture them and leave them to a slow agony of death. Your women will know the whip and servitude to Easterners, and that enslavement will prove so harsh, they’ll choose to take their own lives. Santagithi, your wife, Nantel, Rache, and Mitrian will not be spared.”
“Mitrian?” Santagithi went rigid. Guarded hope shone in eyes like ice chips. “She’s alive?”
Joy spiraled through Jakot. He cared for Mitrian, but, mostly he saw the news as a means to break Santagithi’s depression.
Santagithi pressed. “How is she?”
“Changed.”
“Is she well?”
“I don’t know.”
Too caught up in his questioning, Santagithi did not seem to realize he had not gotten a satisfactory answer. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” the Wizard repeated.
Santagithi frowned. “You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know? Surely you could know these things.”
“Surely,” Shadimar admitted.
Santagithi made a broad gesture to indicate an explanation should be forthcoming.
Shadimar plucked the white queen from its space, moved it randomly across the board, then rested his elbow in the hole where the piece had stood. “I’ve not seen her in eight months.”
Jakot cringed. Santagithi guarded his chessboard like a child. While engaged in a game, he knew the location of every piece on the board, and the men had learned never to touch it in his absence unless every piece was carefully set back into the position in which it had been found.
Santagithi glared, but otherwise seemed to take no notice of the Wizard’s transgression. “You know Mitrian’s alive?”
Shadimar nodded once. Removing his arm from the board, he sat straighter in his chair.
“You could check on Mitrian anytime, but you haven’t done so in the last eight months?” Santagithi’s gaze drifted to the displaced queen and froze there.
Noting that Santagithi could no longer see his face, Shadimar spoke as he nodded. “Correct.”
Irritably, Santagithi replaced the white queen. He met Shadimar’s gaze. “Why not?”
“That’s why.” The Eastern Wizard indicated the chess piece that Santagithi had just replaced.
“What?”
“Because,” Shadimar said with a hint of a smile. “If I watch my people too closely, I’m tempted . . . no . . . obsessed with the need to manipulate them the same way you manipulated that queen. Mitrian specifically asked me not to interfere with her destiny. She wants to make her own mistakes, and I respect that. By not watching her too closely, I remove the temptation.”
“That’s crazy!” Enraged, Santagithi toppled all the pieces on the board. Chessmen fell, rattled and rolled, some striking the floor with a shrill splatter of sound. “Mitrian is a child. She needs direction, guidance. . . .”
“She got both of those things,” Shadimar said gently. “You instilled a sense of morality and also independence. Mitrian wants to make her own life and her own consequences. She has that right.”
“Damn it!” Santagithi shouted, and Jakot could almost feel his general’s pain. “Can’t I be a part of that life she’s chosen?”
Shadimar’s hand fell to his wolf’s head. “Only Mitrian can answer that. She’ll almost certainly be among one of the armies at the Great War. You’ll see her there, if the West’s prime strategist deigns to come.”
“Armies?” Santagithi’s voice emerged in a hoarse whisper.
A deep silence fell. Jakot held his breath.
Suddenly, Santagithi whirled to face his acting-captain. “Jakot, tell those sluggards to burn the damned wine and cards. Send a messenger to King Tenja in Vikerin informing him of the Great War. We’ll take Valr Kirin, as promised, and any other men he can spare. Better, tell the Northie bastard to lead his own troops to war. Then I want every guard not on sentry in this room now! And damn it, Captain, I know you thought you were protecting me, but disobey my command again and I’ll have you flogged raw! Now go. Go!”
Surprised by his general’s abrupt jolt to normalcy, Jakot scurried from the strategy room. Despite the threat and a coming war, he felt a wild, savage satisfaction he had not known for months.
* * *
Just beyond the western boundary of the city of Pudar, wind rocked a line of docked jolly boats into a bobbing dance. Feet braced against the gunwales, Garn hurled crate after crate to the dock, watching as his coworkers struggled in pairs and trios to lug those same boxes to waiting carts. His linen shirt clung, sweat-plastered to the hollows between his muscles and itchy against the tangle of chest hair. Most of the other loaders worked bare-chested, but Garn endured the discomfort of his clothing to obviate the need to explain whip cuts and sword scars to a pack of coarse-mouthed strangers.
Distance muffled the rustle of wind through folded canvas sails and the chime of clamps against masts from the ships anchored beyond the docks. Yet their soft, irregularly recurring song lent soothing background to a job Garn had come to enjoy. In the two weeks since he had started, the routine of tossing crates to the docks, sorting cartons by merchant, and bearing them to the carts had become familiar. The work kept his body toned but left his mind free to ramble.
Now Garn watched Sterrane’s dark, hairy form toss a crate onto a cart with the same ease as Garn had unloaded it from the jolly boat, though it had taken three others to haul it from the docks to Sterrane’s pile. To Garn’s right, oars cut water, the paddles streaming a line of droplets that disturbed the surface in widening rings. He grasped another crate. This evening would be his first payday. Excitement awoke in him at the thought. He and Mitrian had used gems from her pouch to buy the cottage next door to Bel’s and their necessities for the last two weeks. The idea of supporting his wife and coming child with money earned by his own hand sent a thrill through Garn. The feat of independence allowed him to throw off a few more of the chains that bound him to his past.
Garn tossed the crate to the waiting loaders and turned for the next. There remained two things for him to overcome: a cultural naiveté that made him seem like an outsider, even among his coworkers, and a temper as swift and merciless as lightning. Garn grasped another crate. Social experience, Garn knew, would come with time. The other was not so easy. Since childhood, Garn had learned to react to pain and affronts by killing; Rache had forced that lesson upon him until it had become instinct. Now on the deck, thoughts of Rache drove fiery, irrational rage through Garn. His grip tightened, slivering splinters beneath his fingernails, and the pain fueled his anger further. He heaved the box onto the dock with such violence that it bounced, scudding over the planking. The waiting loaders scurried from its path. Two swore. One shook his fist at Garn, but the green-eyed newcomer had already pivoted for the next crate.
My temper dies the day I gain the control Colbey taught AND USE IT TO DESTROY RACHE. Every week since the elder Renshai’s lesson in the forest, Garn had tried to master the riddle of the steel without success. The halves of Colbey’s broken horseshoe had become a fixture in Garn’s pocket, a constant reminder of his inadequacy an
d the one Northman captain who still stood between him and freedom. He hefted another crate, prepared to fling it viciously to the dock. Cued by his stance and expression, his coworkers backed away, leaving space for the crate to splinter or ricochet.
Garn hesitated, crate balanced on raised arms, suddenly aware that he was channeling his anger against the wrong target. He calmed himself with thoughts of Mitrian. That the beautiful, vibrant woman of his dreams had become his was the pride of his existence. For the first time, he also reveled in the vengeance their coupling had won him. Strangely, knowing the anguish that Mitrian’s love for Garn would cause Santagithi seemed nearly enough to balance the years the general had kept Garn enslaved. The only one who has to die is Rache. Giving a name and face to the enemy haunting him allowed Garn to funnel his hatred. His manner calmed, and he tossed the crate with appropriate care, to his companions’ obvious relief.
Garn continued to think of Mitrian as he worked. He loved her dearly; of that, he was certain. Yet, lately, she was acting unlike the Mitrian he had come to know in the last nine months. One moment, she would be chastising him bitterly for eating the last apple, the next weeping in his arms as apology. The change had distressed him until Bel and Arduwyn reassured him that this behavior was common in pregnant women and that Mitrian would return to normal after the birth of their child. Our child. A child who will grow up to be the world’s finest swordsman with parents who love him and a free father who earns enough money to buy him the things he wants and needs.
Thrilled by this new track of thought, Garn doubled his pace, pitching crates in gentle arcs faster than his coworkers could remove them. As dusk colored the sky with layers, each ruffle of baby blue cloud tipped pink as embers, the other loaders left alone or in groups to collect their pay. Garn sprang down and helped Sterrane finish stocking the last of the carts. Even when the last carton was loaded, Garn lingered, enjoying the lap of waves against the dock and the symphony of pulleys against masts. He saw beauty in the sinking rainbow of sunset unmarred by the solid, iron stripes of bars.
The Last of the Renshai Page 47