House War 03 - House Name

by Michelle West

  Arann was surprised he’d even answered.

  “If intruders are detected, you are to sound the alarm. The runes on the walls at either end of each hall can be activated at need; if you cannot reach them safely, wind your horns.”

  Arann grimaced. Most of the sound he’d managed to pull from a horn wouldn’t carry far enough to do anything but embarrass him.

  “You picked a good day to start,” Claris told him.

  As Arann was thinking the exact opposite, he winced. “The horn—” he began.

  Claris waved him off. “One of us’ll sound it. First day—first week, if you don’t get a chance to practice, and given your sword arm, you won’t get much—you’ll just come out sounding like a wet fart.”

  Claris was Arann’s sparring partner. He looked less bruised, and in a good deal less pain, than Arann felt.

  “What do you think’s going to happen? Why do you think all the guard’s been mobilized? It’s got to be something big,” he added. Arann’s failure to answer hadn’t slowed him down all shift.

  He glanced at the back of Decarus Holloran, who was conferring with one of the Chosen; the urge to tell Claris to lower his voice and avoid the sergeant’s attention was strong. But it was also pointless; Claris could start at a whisper; he just didn’t stay that way.

  “It’s got to be something big.”

  Arann nodded as Holloran turned. They’d not impressed Holloran in either practice or drill, and judging from the look on the Decarus’ face, impressing him was not going to be an option, at least not tonight.

  “Cartan, Morris.”

  Or ever.

  “I’m this close to suspending you for the action. You are here to watch and listen—and if necessary, to fight—not to jabber like off-duty servants. Is that understood?”

  “Sir!”

  “Good.” He glared at them both. Since Arann rarely saw him do anything but glare, this was almost normal. But he didn’t turn on heel and walk away, which was not. “Cartan.”

  It was what he called Arann. It was what he called anyone who arrived at the House Guard without a surname, which Arann had found both strange and comforting. Obviously, if the House Guard had some provision for cases like this, he wasn’t the first off the streets.

  “Sir!”

  “You didn’t come to Terafin on your own, did you? Just answer the question; when I want you to think, I’ll tell you.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I see. And the person or persons that you traveled with also remain within the grounds of Terafin?”

  “Yes, sir.” It was clear that Holloran already knew this, but Arann had, over a single long and grueling day, become accustomed to questions that were in no way asked for the sake of actually gathering information.

  “What can you tell me about your . . . leader?”

  Oh, no. Arann stiffened, and looked instinctively to the door. He managed to drag his gaze back, but not quickly. Jay, he thought. Jay, what’s happening?

  But he thought he knew, now. Jay had set this in motion. She’d seen something. She’d seen something big.

  Holloran was waiting, like an afterthought, and Arann shook himself. “What—what do you want to know?”

  But Holloran shook his head in what was for him mild disapproval. “You’ve told me most of what the guard needs to know. Tell me this, then. Can we trust her?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have no doubt?”

  “None, sir. If she—if she’s the one that says something’s happening, then that’s the way it is.”

  “Good. Because it doesn’t appear we have any choice.”

  Across the House, in quiet rooms, sleep deserted House Terafin. In the healerie, Alowan and all of his assistants prepared the infirmary beds, cutting bandages, laying out disinfectants, and—where it was possible—praying. Alowan himself, roused from sleep, oversaw them. He was gentle in his insttructions because he was always gentle—but he was weary. In his early days at the side of the woman who now ruled Terafin, he had spent days, even weeks, in such preparations as these, and the end of the House War had brought with it the end of such funereal work.

  At least that had been the hope.

  “Will it be bad?” Maria asked him, her voice shaking only slightly.

  He said nothing, but he touched her shoulder gently.

  Arann’s group was not the unit that sounded the alarm, but the alarm did sound. They were out in the West garden—as far from the East Halls as it was possible to be—when the horns blew. Claris froze, and Arann almost ran into him, but the man in charge—not, thank Kalliaris, the Decarus—did not notice.

  What no one failed to notice was the single note, the lowing of that horn. They’d been tense and watchful for the better part of an hour, and Arann hadn’t thought they could get any worse. He was wrong. Here, surrounded by the shadows of trees and the nimbus of light from the decorative standing stones in the garden, the men stiffened, froze, and then began to move as if—as if hunted. Not hunting.

  But Decarus Mallan listened; the next horn call was three notes. He cursed once and then lifted his own horn and blew it, starting the relay. “They’ll send orders,” he told his troop. “Wait now, and watch.”

  “What’s happening?” Claris asked, his voice a little higher than usual.

  “We’ve intruders in the gardens,” was the grim reply. “And if we’re lucky, it’s only the gardens.”

  But Mallan’s voice didn’t sound like the voice of a man who thought luck, if it came at all, would be good.

  In the darkness of the halls, Jay stiffened.

  “Jay?”

  She cursed, a low string of blurred, hurried Torra.

  “They found us,” Finch heard herself whisper. A whisper was all she could force out of the tight walls of her throat. The only people in the halls that they’d seen so far were House Guards—and given the number of guards, it was clear that House Terafin was now preparing not for trouble, whatever that word meant, but for war.

  “It’s not us they’re looking for,” Jay replied. It should have been comforting. It wasn’t. They were in the wrong place, now, for comfort. She lifted a hand and began to move more quickly, and they followed; no one asked her where she was going.

  They’d been here for months now; they knew the halls as well as Jay did. Hells, Finch thought, given the time the den had spent in the manse while Jay searched through the dirt, they probably knew them better. Jay was driven by instinct; she crossed the small hall, turned into the largest of the galleries, and swept past the shadowed tapestries, the paintings, the glass cases.

  Heading, Finch realized, not in, and not toward the rooms The Terafin occupied at the height of the manse, but out, toward the front doors, the gates, and the guardhouse. Out, on the other hand, was still a long distance away.

  Horns sounded; lights flared at their backs; men’s voices were raised, but, more ominous, their feet suddenly hit marble, and the cascading echoes of hard boots—as opposed to the den’s more modest shoes—echoed like thunder as they hurried.

  Amarais Handernesse ATerafin came down the stairs armed for war. She wore armor and carried a shield, but these were shiny and new; they had not seen any use that was not ceremonial since she had taken the House.

  In and of itself, it was significant, but it was not the most significant thing she wore: She was girded with a sword. If she had not been raised to war, she had been, as many young women in ambitious houses, allowed to dally in the shadows of the weaponsmasters who had been hired for the sake of her brother.

  Her dead brother.

  Morretz walked behind and to one side; he would not leave her now, no matter what she said or did. She knew it; knew that the contract that she had signed so many years ago, which clearly delineated the roles of both master and domicis, was merely a simple guide to what was, in the end, a deceptively complex relationship. He was domicis, yes, and he served the Guild of Domicis—but he, as the House, was hers.

  She let
one hand rest against the cold hilt of a sword that she very seldom wore. She wore it now, not as an act of self-defense, but as a statement; the sword belonged to the House. It was the Terafin Sword, and it was older, by far, than she. It would be recognized. Was, she thought, as she saw the heavily armored men and women forming up in the heart of the foyer, already recognized.

  They were too well trained to comment; they simply saw and acknowledged its presence in silence. She took the stairs as quickly as dignity allowed; she understood the importance of that dignity at this time. She was the House personified. All panic, all fear, all loss of control would be reflected. That knowledge was her armor, and she bore it as she made her way to the foyer in which the Chosen were now operating beneath the perpetual brilliance of the chandeliers.

  Captain Alayra, the woman who ruled the Chosen in her name, was waiting. She raised mailed fist to chest and out in salute. “Terafin.”

  “Report.”

  “There are men in the West garden, near the House shrine.”

  “Ours?”

  “No.”

  “And?”

  “And down the road, perhaps half a mile, there’s a large procession moving toward us. It may be coincidence, but they carry torches, not lamps, and the torchlight is glinting off steel.”

  Amarais was silent as she considered this.

  Nothing could hide a large body of armed men moving, at speed, to House Terafin. Whatever secrecy, whatever subtlety, her enemies had employed, they had chosen to cast it aside. They could not now recover it, and they considered the loss worth the risk.

  But risk, she thought bitterly, of what?

  What did she know? What did she have? What threat was now in her possession that justified this public war, this public exposure? They were desperate, yes; she recognized the desperation in the boldness of the strike.

  Alayra watched. “Terafin.”

  Amarais nodded, although she heard the word at a distance. Something had changed for her enemies. Could it be that they understood, fully, what Devon and Jewel Markess had discovered? It was a possibility. But . . . they had known, for almost two months, that someone was searching for some entry into the undercity of Jewel’s description, and that search—with its attendant risks—had not provoked this frenzy of open activity.

  No, she thought. Although it was just possible that they were afraid of the weight of Devon’s discovery, she thought it unlikely that it would cause such a drastic change in their game. But if not that, what?

  She glanced around the foyer, at her Chosen. Not for anything but funerals had they gathered in such numbers in all of her years upon the House Seat. The Captain of the Chosen conferred, briefly, with the Captain of the House Guard before they parted; the Chosen would remain with The Terafin.

  She did not interfere, did not speak. If not Devon and Jewel, it was something else. Something had changed within Terafin.

  The Hunter Lords, she thought. She had, within these walls, the Hunter Lords. Devon had brought them here, to the safety of Terafin, from the Halls of Avantari. He had said little, but he had made it clear that they had already suffered one attack within the palace grounds.

  It had not been, she thought, an attack composed of soldiery.

  But perhaps there, it hadn’t been necessary. In House Terafin, however, they might have few agents, if any.

  They might also succeed with force of arms in a way that they could not, were the Hunter Lords in Avantari. If she had regret to spare for her hospitality, she did not waste the time; the Hunter Lords were here, now, and if their presence served no other purpose, it served one:

  They had brought the game, at last, into the open.

  The horns had stopped their winding cry, but the halls were now lit from one end to another. It wasn’t the magelights; those were always lit. It was a different light. The paint itself seemed imbued with a gray, diffuse nimbus. The glow had started when the alarm had been raised, and it had spread. But it was an odd light; the glass in the windows didn’t reflect it, and as they crossed the gallery, moon’s silver could be seen above the still, dark shadows of the Terafin grounds.

  If battle came to these halls, darkness wouldn’t be an issue.

  Angel nearly ran into Jay’s back when she stopped short in the long stretch of oddly lit hall. She froze, almost in midstep, and then she cursed in the Torra that she used so often when things were bad.

  Lifting an arm, signaling to her den, she began to run.

  The ground shook.

  Silence followed in the wake of its rumbling protest as men and women looked up. They looked to Amarais.

  “It’s got to be the West Wing.”

  The Hunter Lords were in the East. Or had been.

  “Where is the mage?” The Terafin asked softly.

  “The mage,” Meralonne APhaniel said, stepping into the foyer, “is here.”

  “Where is Torvan?”

  “He could not travel in haste. Not armored and burdened as he was. I chose to travel ahead to the rendezvous. If that is acceptable to The Terafin?”

  “It is acceptable.” But barely, and only at need. His search through the inner holdings had taken all of his time—if his complaints and his reports were to be believed—and the enchantments laid upon the room the Chosen had used to summon him in emergencies had not been remade. She regretted that now, and bitterly.

  But it was not the only error that she had made in her life.

  “Good. What, by the dark court, is happening?”

  “Torvan didn’t brief you?”

  “He said it was urgent that I meet you in the foyer as it was where you would be directing affairs. Or something similar; I confess that I don’t remember his exact wording. When I attempted to discover what, exactly, it is that you expect to be—” his pause, as he glanced at the assembled guards was significant—“fighting, he didn’t have a satisfactory answer.”

  “No. But I hope you do. If I’m not mistaken, our enemies—and I believe they are at the very least Allasakari—have just attacked our walls.”

  “Walls?” he said sharply. “The manse doesn’t have walls. It barely has gates.”

  “Ah. I meant, of course, the walls of the mansion itself.”

  “Interesting.”

  Mages were the bane of the civilized Empire on a good day; they fussed, they preened, they demanded, and they carried a conversation as if speaking itself were a chore that had been invented to waste time. The Terafin, as any man or woman of power, was accustomed to their oddities.

  This mage was different. His focus had sharpened, but he looked neither confused nor afraid. She thought, seeing the slow shift in his expression, that there was anticipation in it. She had spoken with him almost daily for two months, and he could barely manage civil; he was usually either bored or irritated.

  He was neither, now.

  The ground shook again, lending physical sensation to the sound of shattering glass and the short, but distinct, cries that followed. At this distance it wasn’t possible to tell who shouted; it wasn’t possible to tell what had been said.

  The next sound: horns. They were close.

  “The gatehouse,” Alayra said. She spoke quietly, but the two words carried. The Terafin nodded and turned away from the mage.

  Jay led them to the foyer. There, at the foot of the entrance, she paused, drawing one sharp breath. The foyer wasn’t empty. The Chosen filled it, surrounding The Terafin. Angel almost failed to recognize her—she wore armor, although her helm was raised; she wore a long sword that trailed inches above the ground. But Morretz was by her side, and he stood beside no other in that fashion; he, however, wore his usual robes.

  To one side of The Terafin stood the mage, Meralonne APhaniel. He, too, was robed, although his robes were strange; they seemed to shimmer in the fractured chandelier light, and it was hard to tell what color they were, the shade shifted so often. He wore no obvious weapons, and his hair was way too long, and unbound; he clearly hadn’t been expecting
to fight.

  And yet.

  Something about his expression, even at this distance, made a lie of that. Angel was not his father, not Terrick; he didn’t think of himself as a warrior. But Meralonne, in that instant, was.

  From across the hall, a man in armor entered the foyer at a run. He wore Terafin colors, and he headed directly to The Terafin; the Chosen must have recognized him, because they didn’t stop him. He was already bending his knee before he had completely slowed, and he skidded on that knee as he struck his breastplate with a fist.

  In the hall, the sound echoed as everyone turned to look at him, even the den.

  “Report,” The Terafin said calmly.

  “The gate’s being attacked. It won’t last long. I think there’s at least one mage out there. Probably two.”

  “Who is attacking?”

  “It’s—it’s Darias.”

  “Darias?” The Terafin’s expression didn’t change, but her posture stiffened until she seemed the personification of the sword she bore.

  “Darias colors,” he replied. “Captain Jed’ra confirmed it.”

  “But that’s insane!” Alayra said, speaking for every person who stood in the hall—everyone but the den, who had grown up in streets where den wars were always in the open. “They—they must be fighting under false colors.”

  “They aren’t our friends and never have been,” the young man countered. “Captain Jed’ra—Captain Jed’ra recognized some of the guards. The officers. Three of them. He says they’re Darias all right. There are a hundred and fifty men, maybe two hundred. And that’s only at the gate.”

  “Go back to the captain,” The Terafin told him. “Resume your post. Alayra.”

  Alayra saluted. “Terafin.”

  “It’s not just two hundred,” a new voice said, as a man emerged from the doors that the messenger now made his way toward. Torvan ATerafin came from the small hall to the south into the foyer. “They’ve about forty men in the back. None of them are wearing any colors; they’re in dark clothing. We spotted them early, and the archers were keeping them at bay.”