The Three Lands Omnibus (2011 Edition)

by Dusk Peterson

  The scene shifted. I was in the Court of Judgment now, looking down from the balcony upon Henry. The Chara sat on his throne, his face cold and rigid; he had just placed his prisoner under the high doom. I saw Henry's head, which he had held erect throughout the trial, slowly bow, as though he were showing either fear or obedience or simply had already died. Then the guards came forward to escort him out, and as he turned I saw that the prisoner was not Henry but John, naked-faced. At that moment he looked up toward me, and I saw his eyes: they were filled with pain.

  Once again the scene shifted, and I knew that the Jackal had died. I was standing near the tavern, watching the flames as they came closer to my mother and the Emorian soldier. But the soldier was not the soldier who had enslaved me but the subcaptain I had spoken to the day before, and he was dying as he tried to save Ursula from the flames. And I realized that I was not in Koretia but in Emor, for I heard Lord Dean's voice say in my ear: "If the Chara dies, this land will erupt into a war as terrible as those in Koretia."

  Then I was in darkness. I longed to stay there, shielded from the images I had just seen, but I heard words whispering to me: Peter saying, "I can find nothing that will help me to bring peace to that land." John, making the same oath to the Jackal that the god himself had made, "I vow to bring peace to this land." Peter saying, "This is the Chara's oath, sworn to those who receive my peace." And finally, John saying, his voice filled with human pain, "I suppose that the gods always bring peace to those who pray to them, but their ways are mysterious . . ."

  Then only silence remained, and the silence seemed to form itself into something tangible in the blackness around me: It was John, quietly judging before he pronounced the words of the Jackal. It was Peter, sitting silently on the Chara's throne of judgment. And a voice spoke, and I knew that it was neither of these men, but someone or something I had never known and would never know, but who knew me. The voice said, "Bring to my servants the mercy of peace."

  As his quiet command faded in my mind, I was left with the image I had seen first: Peter, raising his head to look at the upraised dagger of the Jackal.

  I knew I had not lifted my eyelids, but I found myself where I had been before, sitting upright in the bed beside Ursula. She still slept, and I could tell that the moon had not moved since I saw it last. Carefully I moved Ursula's head from my lap. She murmured again but did not wake. I left the room, the final words of my vision still echoing in my head.

  They were holding him in the windowless cell where Ursula and I had spent the previous night. The thief guarding the cell let me in without any questions, and I stood near the door for a moment, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the candlelight. The Chara stood with his back to me. His forearm was pressed horizontally against the wall, and his head was resting upon his arm, as though he were looking out a window at a view. As the door closed, I saw his spine stiffen, but still he did not move. Finally he turned and leaned back against the wall, folding his arms against his chest. His eyes were guarded, and they seemed in the dim light as dark as my own.

  He said in a deceptively light tone, "I have spent today counting spiderwebs. I have not yet come to agree with Lord Carle that Koretia is a maggot-infested land, but there are certainly many spiders here. I counted twenty-four webs."

  I made no reply. He added, "I also watched the spiders eating their food, and learned quite a lot about how they trap their victims. I could not think of any other sports to occupy myself with after that. How was your day?"

  I walked over to the table and placed on it the emblem brooch. Peter glanced at it, and then turned his gaze back toward me.

  "I went to the palace today," I said. Peter remained silent, so I added, "John sent me there to fetch your papers."

  "Then I hope that John learned more from them than I did."

  I waited, realized that I would once more be forced to speak, and said, "I met Lord Carle."

  Something passed over Peter's face then, but he merely said, "Poor Lord Carle. Did you take the opportunity at your final meeting to tell him what you thought of him?"

  "He gave me a letter to deliver to you."

  Peter smiled then, but it was not the smile I expected to see on his face. His smile was a cold, dark one that brought back the chill of memory to me, though I could not recall where I had seen the smile last. "Knowing Carle," said Peter, "I expect that he wrote something very cryptic that no one except myself would understand. And though I have had little time to get to know your Jackal, he does not strike me as the type of man to routinely pass on letters to prisoners. Moreover, I see that you are holding no letter."

  "John burnt it. He said that you must not know the contents."

  Peter tilted his head back against the wall, gazing at me with narrowed eyes. "Much as my opinion of you has been forced to change during the past few hours, I find it hard to believe that you have come here for the purpose of placing me under torture of the spirit. Why are you telling me this?"

  "Because I wish to give you Lord Carle's message."

  Peter's smile faded. His eyes grew darker. He said tersely, "I do not believe I wish to hear the message."

  "He said that it might help you."

  "Then I can be certain that it would. It might even save my life. If I were under normal conditions, I would consider it my duty as Chara to hear the message, no matter who the messenger was. But just now I am not being rational, and I do not particularly care to hear Carle's message if it is to be delivered by a man who has betrayed his old land and his old master and who now demonstrates that he plans to betray his new land and his new master."

  I could not reply; my throat was clogged and my mouth dry. Peter pushed himself off of the wall, balanced himself delicately with one hand against the table, and said, in the same detached, frigid tone, "I had respect for you after you betrayed me. I told myself that this was your native land and that John was your blood brother and that you had a blood vow to fulfill. All of these things came before you ever met me, and I could respect you for returning to your first loyalties. But now I wonder whether loyalty is something you actually understand. You betray me, and then you come here to help me against the orders of the Jackal. I am not sure what you will do next. I see that you have the dagger I gave you – do you plan to kill me? I suppose that John gave the dagger into your keeping – will you kill him? I have reached the conclusion during the past few minutes that you are exactly what Carle told me you were on the day I came to beg him to sell you to me. He said that you were a dog, and worse than his own dog, who at least knew how to love one master. You, he said, were not capable of that type of love; you would lick a hand and then bite it, and do the same with the next master you served and the next. You were, he said – and you will appreciate the depths of his statement – more treacherous even than the Koretians."

  I felt myself shaking inwardly, though my body gave no sign of this. I walked blindly back to the door and took hold of the door frame, half turned toward the door, half turned toward Peter, who watched me with unchanging expression. Finally I said, my voice low, "What Lord Carle said is right. I cannot understand what I do – it makes no sense, and it is more barbaric than anything he ever did to me. I heard a voice I thought was the god, telling me to do this. But the gods reward loyalty, not treachery, and so the voice must have been a base and evil demon who was wearing the mask of a god. Still, since I have already lost your friendship and will lose the friendship of John when he learns why I came here, it will do me no further harm to obey that voice and tell you Lord Carle's message, whether you wish to hear it from me or not. Lord Carle said: I have them."

  Peter did not move. His voice revealed no thoughts as he said, "I would like to see the Jackal, if I may." Then he turned his back upon me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I found the Jackal in the sanctuary, standing by the window in conversation with Brendon. I waited by the door for a minute, trying to still my inner trembling, until John looked up and said, "I thought I a
sked you to stay with Ursula."

  I walked over to him until I reached the patch of moonlight stretching out from the window. "I went to see the Chara," I said. "He wishes to speak to you."

  John held my eyes for a moment. Then he picked up the mask he had laid on the windowseat and said to Brendon quietly, "Please go look after Ursula in her room. And on your way, see that the Chara is brought here to me."

  Brendon nodded and left, and I was left alone with the Jackal, his mask now steady in his hands.

  He said, "You told him."

  "Yes." Though I had not defended myself to Peter, I found myself saying, "John—"

  He brushed away my words with a gesture, then laid his hand on my shoulder and said, "I am to blame. It was too much to ask of you – I should have ordered the others to keep you from his cell. There is no need for us to say any more about this."

  My eyes fell to the mask. "It was the god I betrayed."

  John stepped back and began swinging the mask lightly in his hand. After a while he said, "Perhaps. But I spoke to you unmasked, as the Jackal's servant rather than through the god's own voice; it may be that I was wrong. We will see. In any case, I know that you must have had your reasons for doing what you did, and I doubt it was due to sentimentality or some other weakness."

  "I don't know what it was," I replied wearily. "Peter said I was simply treacherous. All I know is that something spoke to me that seemed to care nothing about blood brothers or lands or any other loyalties. It demanded obedience from me."

  For the first time, an expression I could not identify passed over John's face. But he had no chance to say anything more, because the door opened and the Chara appeared, escorted by two thieves. John waited until Peter had come to stand near the window and the thieves had left before saying, "What does the message mean?"

  "It means," said Peter in his neutral voice, "that Lord Carle has discovered the papers I asked him to find, the papers which prove that the governor was disobeying my orders."

  John glanced at me before saying, with no note of accusation in his voice, "That does not sound like something Lord Carle would do, if I have understood rightly what Andrew reports. He said that Lord Carle hates the Koretians more than anything else."

  Peter looked over at me and gave a cold smile. In the moonlight, his face looked as grey as the funeral bindings of a corpse or the tunic of one of the Living Dead. "Andrew would hardly know, would he? He has not been witness to my friendship with Carle."

  I am not sure what my face revealed at that moment. All I knew was that John looked at me sharply. Relentlessly, Peter continued, with his gaze fixed on me, "Neither Andrew nor any other Koretian is ever likely to encounter Lord Carle's better qualities, and for this reason I have never spoken to Andrew of my friendship with Carle. I intensely dislike Carle's manner of speech, and I am much angered by his behavior toward those whom he considers his inferiors. But he is my most loyal subject and is now the only man whom I trust completely."

  The small word "now" was like the slice of a dagger-thigh into my life's blood. I saw, stretched across my memory, the subtle, secret war that Lord Carle had been waging against me all these years. He had finally won.

  For a moment more, the Chara continued to smile his council lord's smile – Peter had had many opportunities over the years to learn that smile, I now recognized. Then he looked back at John, and his expression grew serious as he said, "That is why I asked Lord Carle to accompany me on this trip. He shares the governor's opinion of the inhabitants of this land, and he therefore has gained the governor's confidence and received access to parts of the palace where I could not go. But one thing Lord Carle hates more than the Koretians, and that is anyone who disobeys the Chara. For this reason, he has been as eager as I have been to uncover evidence of the governor's treachery, no matter what benefits this might bring to Koretia. Lord Carle has already told me that he will enter a charge against Lord Alan, and that in doing so, he will take the governor out of the council's care and place him under my judgment. He plans to charge the governor with disobedience to the Chara so that I may place Lord Alan under the high doom. I now have the power to free Koretia."

  The night was very quiet. Even the soldiers who patrolled the city streets below could not be heard. The wind, still making its deadly way down the mountain and over the city, gently rocked the mask that John held. He said, "And will you?"

  "That," said Peter, "is a difficult question for me to answer right now." He turned away, as though he were among friends rather than his captors, and leaned against the window jamb, staring down the mountainside. He said quietly, "I am your prisoner, and you have told me that you intend to kill me soon unless I free Koretia. It is possible that I might go against my true judgment and give you the answer you want so that I could escape execution. As long as I am in your power, neither you nor I nor anyone else can be sure that the answer I give you will be the one the Chara would give or simply something that I, Peter, would say to save my life."

  He turned his head slightly so that it faced John. "You have said that you cannot trust me. But unless you trust me enough to free me, I cannot give you my answer."

  He turned his attention back to the view. I could no longer see his face.

  "Trust . . ." murmured John. He raised his mask slightly, and I wondered whether he would consult the god. Then he let his hand drop, and he said, "I trust Andrew, and Andrew knows whether you are to be trusted. I will leave it to my blood brother to decide."

  Peter did not face my way. He continued to stare out the window – not at the city, I now realized, but at the mountains beyond. I said, my voice shaking with emotion and exhaustion, "No doubt the Chara will continue to believe that I am being treacherous, no matter what my answer. So I will not try to determine here to whom I should be loyal, as I have been struggling to do for the past day."

  I paused, but Peter remained motionless. John was standing close to me; I kept my gaze focussed away from him and instead stared into the darkness of the sanctuary. "What I think is this," I said, my voice turning flat with dispassion. "The first time Peter spoke to me, I was a Koretian slave, and he spoke to me in friendship. I have never seen him show less care toward the Koretians than he does toward the Emorians. I do not know whether he will free our land, but I trust that he will make the decision he does from love, and you told me—" I turned to John and said, "You told me that there is nothing more that you and your thieves can demand of each other than love and trust. The Chara has shown that he loves this land by risking his life to come to Koretia. I think that you must match his sacrifice by giving him your trust." I looked back at Peter.

  Barely audible over the whisper of the wind, John said, "You have heard Andrew. You are free to leave when you wish."

  For a moment, Peter did not move. Then, as though he had been bodily released, he slid down the wall and sat with a thump on the windowseat, leaning his head back against the wall. The mask upon his face dissolved, and I saw the tears of my dream.

  o—o—o

  He said nothing for several minutes, but breathed raggedly, trying to swallow his tears. John and I waited. In the end, Peter's breathing calmed, and he turned his head toward John. "Now I can tell you what I was thinking in my cell in between counting those twenty-four cursed spiderwebs. I was thinking about the other difficulty I mentioned, of finding a Koretian ruler. I told you I knew no one whom I could trust to work with both me and the Koretians, no man who would be loyal to the Koretians' best interests rather than to some narrow view of Koretian independence. That was true until I met the Jackal today. Will the Jackal take over the government so that I can free Koretia?"

  My breath catching, I turned my gaze toward John. I saw for a moment a look of shock in his eyes that matched my own. Then his eyes grew quiet again, and he scanned Peter's face, as though looking for something he had not seen before. For the first time that evening, a smile travelled onto John's face, one of his old smiles that transformed his serious express
ion. Without a word, he turned and walked beyond the patch of moonlight into the darkness of the sanctuary.

  When he turned again, it was as though he had been swallowed up by the darkness. All that I could see were three lights: a red light burning from the god-mask badge above his heart, a silver light shining from his dagger, and a gold light glowing from his eyes.

  "Oddly enough," he said, "I too have spent the day thinking about this question, because of a conversation Andrew reported to me – a conversation he held with one of the governor's subcaptains. But as I told you not long ago, Chara, it is the god who must answer your question." And he put on the mask.

  My eyes were fixed on the Jackal, but I heard the swift intake of Peter's breath as he rose to his feet. The god's power was all around us, surrounding us in its smoky fold, feeding upon us and transforming us through that feeding into something new. Fifteen years before, something had brought forth this power as I stood in the cave looking at Peter. Now it was John's eyes that captured my thoughts.