House War 03 - House Name

by Michelle West

  She could only watch the god-born for so long, and while Moorelas had always fascinated her, an hour staring at his unmoving face and stone hair was long enough.

  She watched the gathered people instead, for they were many.

  The Kings’ Swords had closed off the streets, and only those carrying the Kings’ writ were granted passage to the Sanctum. This had apparently caused a near riot, but the Kings’ Swords seemed to expect that, and King Cormalyn himself had chosen to address the panicked, angry crowd.

  “Tonight,” he told them, “the Six Days draw to a close. It is now time for the Kings and their armies to go to battle, for our enemy has at last revealed himself, and there is a way, both ancient and dangerous, to approach him that did not exist before. The Sanctum of Moorelas will not be safe, for it is now entirely in his shadow. Go back to your families; go back to your homes. Await the dawn; it will come.”

  He spoke over the quivering screams of a dying man. They heard him. They went home. They didn’t go silently, but it didn’t matter; even terrified they weren’t insane enough to attack the Kings’ men or the Kings’ banner while the Kings were present.

  The guard on the road was heavy, however, and it did not diminish.

  The Terafin, Devon ATerafin, and Jewel passed through the checkpoint, along with a select handful of the Terafin House Guard. Through that same checkpoint came members of the Order of Knowledge: Sigurne Mellifas, Meralonne APhaniel, and many others that Jewel didn’t recognize. The Senniel bards came as well. The god-born were already in place by the time the Terafin contingent had reached the street closest to the Sanctum; they could not approach it—not without cutting through a large number of people.

  There were no lights in the buildings that faced the Sanctum; the observation of the Six Days ruled here, in strength. The magelights had been doused as well. But the city wasn’t dark; the moons were high and full, and the clouds were almost ethereal.

  But the night was dark and cold; nothing remained of the passing day. Here, the voices of the god-born seemed to echo, as if the sea were a wall, as if the whole city were one great stone room, meant to trap and hoard all sound. Sometimes The Terafin spoke, because the god-born paused for five minutes of each hour, as if to gather breath to continue. They held hands when they chanted, closing their odd circle. Jewel thought she could see the glow of their eyes at this distance.

  She could certainly smell the incense that wafted on the breeze from the sea.

  But when the cadences of the voices shifted, she felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. Their voices weren’t loud, or rather, the god-born weren’t shouting—but she felt that their incomprehensible words must be heard across the whole of the city. It should have been comforting. It wasn’t.

  “Peace, Jewel.”

  She startled, turned, and bumped into Devon ATerafin. “They are almost done.”

  She nodded and turned away. “The Kings look like they’re dressed for war.”

  “The Kings,” he said quietly, his voice low and almost silent, “will ride to war.”

  “Ride?”

  “It’s a phrase.” He glanced at her again and repeated the words.

  Annoyed, even here, she said, “It doesn’t work that way, Devon. You know that.”

  He didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed. “You yourself have said you’ve no idea when—or how—vision will come. If we lose either King at this time, we are in peril, and any insight at all, any hint, might well save—”

  “Devon,” The Terafin said coldly.

  He drew breath as if to speak; he didn’t.

  But Jewel said, “You won’t need me. Someone will be there to guide you.” Jewel glanced at The Terafin, who said nothing. At all.

  He left, then, and navigated his way through the crowd; when he reached the Kings’ men, he stopped. She could see him, but only barely, and only because there was a lot of metal on the Kings’ men that caught the light, reflecting it.

  She was hungry, she was cold, and she was tired. She had been on her feet for over half the day. But it wasn’t a picnic; they hadn’t brought much in the way of food. She had the usual waterskin, which she was discreetly emptying.

  But she kept her complaints to herself; she had watched the god-born since she had arrived, and except for those five minutes once an hour, they had not paused. They hadn’t eaten. They drank water—at least she thought it was water—in the brief break granted them, and then they returned to their task.

  As two of those god-born were Kings, no one else was going to be offered—or allowed—food.

  She glanced at the face of the full moon and saw the second moon in shadow. Now, she thought.

  The voices of the god-born built, each syllable carried by eight voices, each word louder than the last. The slow and steady drone of repetition was broken here; it was as if twelve hours of steady, constant pleading had built into this storm of sudden sound. There was beauty in it, although it was not quite song, but there was terror in it as well, for when it was over, they would have an answer.

  She hadn’t stopped to wonder what that answer would be, or what form it would take. Now, holding her breath, she waited as the raised voices suddenly stopped, and silence, deafening in contrast, took their place.

  Then, syllables like hammer against anvil, the god-born spoke again. Eight words. Eight, one for each standing man and woman who formed the human chain around the base of the Sanctum’s famous statue.

  When the eighth word was finished, they were done with speaking. Jewel watched as they raised arms, hands still clasped, and lifted their tense, still faces, toward the heavens; toward the moon with its nimbus glow; toward the cold and icy glance of thousands of stars. Exalted, Sacred and Kings, they were supplicants here, mortals treading upon the ground the gods had forbidden them.

  A second passed. Two. Maybe even a minute before they had their answer. The statue of Moorelas, hero of legend, moved.

  His face was stone and nothing about that changed. Nothing about his grim visage changed much either, and his sword didn’t magically become metal, nor his vestments cloth. But Jewel could see, as if he were the moon come down to earth, a nimbus of light surrounding his carved body; it was almost too bright too look at.

  She looked anyway, squinting. It didn’t matter; no one was watching her. No one, she thought, was watching anyone but Moorelas of Aston.

  He, in turn, glanced down at the upturned faces of the eight who had somehow wakened him: The Exalted of the Mother, Cormaris and Reymaris. The Sacred of Mandaros and Cartanis. The son of Teos, Lord of Knowledge, a man wearing not the robes of a priest but the more familiar robes of the Order of Knowledge. Last, he looked at the first men in the Empire: King Cormalyn. King Reymalyn.

  To each, he offered a single nod, and as he did, they stepped out of the circle, breaking it.

  Beyond them, his gaze traveled to the assembled army. Jewel’s traveled as well, as if drawn by his attention, by what he considered worthy of that attention. She saw the armored men who served Cartanis, Lord of Just War, the armed and armored men who likewise served Reymaris and Cormaris. But she saw, as well, the children of the Mother, and she recognized them because they weren’t girded for war: they wore their usual workaday robes, and they carried not weapons but baskets; their hips were heavy with hanging skins that carried more, she thought, than simple water.

  To one side, robed and unarmored, she saw mages from the Order of Knowledge, Meralonne APhaniel at their head. But this Meralonne she had seen only once before, in the foyer of the Terafin manse. His hair was long and white, and his skin was pale; he was Winter, to Jewel.

  Moorelas nodded to each of them and then spoke.

  “Well met.”

  They bent, then. Bowing or falling to one knee, they offered this statue respect. Even Jewel, who stood so far beneath him his gaze hadn’t so much as grazed her forehead.

  One man, however, failed to show the awe or the respect that was Moorelas’ due. He stood
, surrounded by his dogs, and he waited.

  “Follower of Bredan,” the statue said to him.

  Lord Gilliam looked up and met the gaze of the statue in silence.

  “Free your Lord, and you will have peace.”

  The Hunter Lord’s grip on the spear shifted, and only then did he bow his head; he did not kneel. Jewel wondered if any force existed that would bend those knees.

  But the statue seemed satisfied and turned once again to the assembled men and women who continued to offer the obvious, physical show of respect.

  “The time is not yet, but the ways will be opened. Touch not what you see, and seek not to disturb it—or you will break the compact that your Lords—and mine—have made.”

  He bent, then—and he could, which should have been more of a shock, kneeling upon the dais that had supported him for, well, ever. He lifted his great stone sword in both hands, point toward the center of the pedestal. “Fare thee well, for ere this night is past, many of you will walk upon Mandaros’ fields and in his halls. Walk in honor.”

  He, too, lifted his face toward the moons and the heavens, and then he closed his eyes and drove the point of his sword directly into the heart of the pedestal.

  The light that flared from the contact point was not a single color, but all of them, and it was bright and harsh, as lightning would have been if the storm from which it came were gods themselves.

  That light now ate away at the carved reliefs that surrounded the statue, the reliefs upon which the god-born had stood for most of the day. Details of Moorelas’ life faded, losing shape and texture, until only smooth plates of flat light ringed the statue.

  “Pass through,” Moorelas said, his voice quieter. “And quickly. The time is short.” He withdrew his sword as he spoke, and he rose once again and turned his face out toward the sea, which he always faced.

  Life left him, but the light that circled him remained, and only when he was utterly still did the Kings begin to move.

  Devon ATerafin gazed—once—at the woman whose name he bore. Terafin. She returned that gaze and held it, her own measured and without any hint of softness. Or regret. There was anger in her, and it burned her the way the much more obvious shame, desire, and rage made Jewel almost incandescent in her youth. That youth would dwindle, in time, if she survived.

  He nodded, once, to The Terafin, for she was distant, and then he gave the whole of his attention to the monument. The familiar engraved depictions of a legendary hero’s life had faded into smooth, even plates that glowed; moonlight was trapped there, and magic—magic made old and wild and utterly inexplicable by the voices and the touch of the god-born.

  He touched the hilts of his daggers as if gesture were prayer, and then he moved to stand behind the armored Kings. He was now one of the many shadows they cast and would remain so, in silence, until the end of the journey, even if that journey brought him, at last, to the halls of Mandaros, as Moorelas’ statue had suggested. These men, these Twin Kings, were the heart and mind of the Empire.

  Devon had dedicated his life to their protection and preservation. But they did not directly command him; that was left to Duvari, the most hated man in the Empire.

  “ATerafin,” the leader of the Astari now said, and Devon nodded, his gaze never leaving the Kings. “You have what you require?”

  “I do.”

  “The Terafin seer—”

  “The Terafin has refused to surrender her, Duvari, and what the Kings will not compel, I cannot. But we will have another guide, if I am not mistaken.”

  “The mage?”

  “No.”

  Duvari’s silence was a thing to be dreaded, and many men filled it with stammering; Devon did not. He did not like Duvari—no one did—but he did not fear or despise him. Duvari, alone among the men and women who served, had made no compromise that had not been decreed by the Kings who were the sole focus of his life. Not for a man of Duvari’s steel the double life of a man who served as a semidistinguished trade official in Avantari; not for Duvari the uneasy struggle between serving two masters and two causes.

  But Duvari was pragmatic; he understood the need for men like Devon ATerafin. Inasmuch as he could, Duvari trusted Devon. “Who, then?”

  “There is another seer in the Empire, but she is strange, and not without power.”

  “I do not see her.”

  “She has not yet arrived. You will see her, in due time.”

  The Kings began to speak, and Devon and Duvari fell silent to listen—although they listened for very different things. Duvari tested, always, the mood and tone of the gathered crowd. Today, in Devon’s estimation, it was pointless. If the fractious and divided Empire ever worked together, they did so now; they were of one mind.

  But if Duvari listened as the Kings gave their orders and addressed—possibly for the last time—their sons and Queens, he heard what Devon heard as the Kings were at last fully fitted with the Sword and the Rod: The Kings meant to lead.

  One heartbeat of silence followed this simple declaration. Devon would not have spoken a word against it, and perhaps his training and his tenure in the House of a powerful Lord had instilled this instant acceptance of the whims of rulers. Duvari, however, was not Devon.

  “Your Majesties,” the Lord of the Compact said, his voice the only clear voice in the muted silence. “Nothing is known about the Sanctum or what lies beyond these glowing walls. The magi have done some preliminary investigation with the tools at hand, but we have received no word of what they have found.”

  “Indeed,” King Cormalyn said. King Reymalyn did not speak a word. “Nor would we expect otherwise, Lord of the Compact. But the Sanctum was created by the living gods, and we are their scions in this mortal world.

  “They have given us the sternest of their warnings, and they have allowed us, in their wisdom, to enter what has been long, long forbidden. We will not send our own to explore what we must, at need, explore. Where we command men to follow, we will lead.”

  “Let us precede you, Your Majesty, if you will not ask this of any others.”

  King Cormalyn’s smile was bright, if weary, and his eyes were glowing gently, gold to the silver of the statue’s base and pedestal. “I think we must deny that request.” He glanced at King Reymalyn, the man who was commonly called his brother, although there were no actual blood ties between them.

  Duvari opened his mouth, and King Reymalyn, silent until this moment, turned to face the Lord of the Compact fully. He did not speak, but his expression made clear that he was the son of the god of Justice, and the god’s blood was strong in him this night. He was done with pragmatism and wisdom, and if King Cormalyn could accept this lapse, everyone else must also do so. Even Duvari.

  Duvari was not fool enough to stand before the silent rage of Kings, and he fell silent at once, bowing fully before he stepped away.

  King Reymalyn then turned to the Wisdom-born King, and King Cormalyn nodded. It was therefore King Reymalyn, sword in hand, who entered the Sanctum first. He walked directly toward the pale luminescent base of the statue, and as he did, his feet began to descend through what had once been carved rock. If he felt pain, he did not show it; nor would he. What he carried within was worse.

  King Cormalyn did not wait until the Justice-born King had vanished from sight before he, too, followed. In his wake, the Kings’ Swords began their descent, but they followed Duvari and Devon.

  Jewel watched as the men and women who were meant to go to war began to move, following the orders that trickled back from the Kings. The Kings themselves were fussed over by other men and women, and they bore it silently, as if it were a fact of life. She thought she’d hate that.

  But she wanted to follow them. She wanted to slip between the Terafin Chosen and dog their steps, to see for herself the battle, the end of the war—however it turned out. She wanted to see the demons die, and die horribly; they had—she knew—killed her kin. Killed Duster in the open streets, and beneath those streets killed Le
fty and Fisher and Lander.

  “We would not have come this far without you,” The Terafin said quietly. “No dream would have led us to this place, and we would have no chance at all.

  “You are ATerafin, Jewel. You must learn to think beyond the fist that strikes or the dagger that draws blood. Instead of one hand, you have called upon many. Where you have no hold on the fires or the elements, the mages have come; where you cannot heal or offer succor, the priests; where you cannot fight and stand against the force of demonic strength, the warriors.” She lifted her hood and drew it above her shoulders; it was large for her face and framed it poorly. “Come.”

  Jewel swallowed and nodded as, one by one, the Kings’ men stepped upon the plates of light and vanished from sight. She wanted to watch them leave; she wanted to wait until the last soldier had been swallowed by magic that was as old as the gods.

  But The Terafin was waiting. Jewel cast one backward glance at Moorelas, who stood, once again, unmoved by anything as paltry as the living, and she bowed her head.

  The Hunter Lord approached The Terafin as the men began their descent, and he bowed to her. It was a stiff bow, but everything about the man had been stiff since the death of his Huntbrother, and that would not change until either he or the god was dead. Jewel understood it better than she understood most things about nobles.

  “Lord Elseth,” The Terafin said, granting him his due. “Will you descend now in the wake of the Kings?”

  “I will,” was his grave reply. “But I ask a boon.”

  “If it is within my power, I will grant it.”

  “I wish to leave my dogs here.”

  The silence was not long, but it felt endless. The Hunter Lord looked away. “These are not,” he finally said, picking the foreign words carefully, “the lands of my birth. They are not the lands in which my dogs were born. Here they are treated as animals.”

  They were animals, Jewel thought, but she was wise enough to say nothing.