by James Enge
He winced and sighed. “Well, I suppose it’s too late to pretend now that I’m something other than I am.”
They sat in the garden, empty of other patrons as the blue chill of evening approached. Without looking at the server, a young woman with streaked hair who looked at him with sad, sympathetic eyes, Naevros ordered pork seared with cherries and thrummin on the side. Noreê had a plate of jeckfruit and grondil. Aloê ordered chicken and mushrooms, and they shared a carafe of the house wine.
“I suppose you’ve come to break down my resistance,” Naevros said, when they all had a glass. “You want to ask me questions, expecting no answers, just hoping to plant doubts that will soften the real examination on the Witness Stone. Is that it?”
“What if it is?” Aloê replied.
“If it is, to hell with it. Ask me your questions. I’ll answer. I’m not going to put on a defense. I did what I did, and I’ll pay for it without whining.”
Perhaps only a little whining, Aloê thought to herself. Naevros favored her with a green glance, and she wondered if he had understood her unspoken response. It repelled her, but their rapport was as strong as ever. Aloud she said, “I know what you did, and most if not all of your fellow conspirators. What I don’t understand is why you did it.”
“Don’t you?”
“No.”
“A simple reason, for a Guardian. I did it to maintain the Guard.”
She looked at him without speaking.
“No, really!” he insisted.
“You’ll have to put some more lines in the drawing, Naevros. I don’t see what you’re getting at. How did murdering Earno help maintain the Guard?”
“I don’t know all the details. But Lernaion and Bleys had a plan to save the Wardlands from the effects of the dying sun. Earno was planning to interfere with it, or they thought he was. So he had to be killed.”
“Why would you believe them?” Aloê asked.
Naevros seemed genuinely surprised. “Wouldn’t you?”
Aloê looked away instead of answering. She wondered if he had always been this stupid and she hadn’t noticed it, or whether something had happened to him. She marveled that she had ever felt torn between this clever, shallow, pretty man and ugly, powerful, crafty Morlock Ambrosius. She missed him very much at that moment, and there was a shrill, fearful quality to the feeling. She was worried that the loss was permanent, that he would never return from the journey he’d begun.
She pushed the feeling away. The food came then, and she managed to ask Naevros a few more questions through the meal, but she didn’t learn much, and she was increasingly convinced that she never would learn more from Naevros.
After the meal the two vocates parted company with Naevros and rode westward to the lockhouse in Fungustown.
“Would your father say Naevros was a real man?” Aloê said, breaking a long silence.
“Unquestionably. Why?”
“He seems the mirror image of Ulvana. He killed and lied and betrayed every trust so that he could have what he wanted.”
“A hero’s mantle, you mean? Yes, I agree with you there.”
“And what good would it have been to him if he had it?” Aloê asked. She felt the cool pressure of Noreê’s regard and turned toward the older woman. “Do you mean this was really about me? He was trying to impress me?”
Noreê laughed in surprise. “Your insight is sharp, Vocate. That is what I almost said. But I didn’t say it because, on second thought, it seems to me too superficial. Naevros always seems to have a woman against whom he measures himself and whom he tries to impress. If it weren’t you, it would be someone else. If you had ever yielded to his charms he would have despised you the way he does every woman he has seduced, and he would have found some other bitch-goddess to pray to.”
“I don’t like that term applied to me,” Aloê said quietly.
“I don’t, Vocate. I apply it to his idea of you.”
Aloê thought she was right and yet not all right. Still, it was a trivial matter to waste the dying sun’s light on.
They arrived at the lockhouse to see Bleys. He was the last Guardian in the lockup; Lernaion, Naevros, and the thains had all sworn self-binding oaths to appear at Station; only Bleys had refused.
The thains at the lockhouse door were divided among the purple-legging crowd, the red-cap crowd, the green-armband crowd, and some thains who had not yet been branded by their masters.
“Guardians,” said Aloê, “do not hinder me or Noreê or any vocate going about her self-set tasks, and you may remain. If you challenge me, you will curse the day you chose to pledge yourself to the Graith.”
“That is agreeable with our orders, Vocate Aloê,” said one of the green armbanders, and the rest of the gray-caped chickens took up the chorus: orders-squawk-orders-squawk.
Aloê dismounted in their midst, waded through them, leading Raudhfax by the reins, and finally tied up her palfrey outside the lockhouse.
Noreê left her horse in custody of one of the unmarked thains—one of her own, no doubt—and strode through the crowd to follow Aloê inside.
“Some of the other vocates disliked the thought that I had sole mastery of the prisoners,” she explained, “so they recruited their own thains and sent them to assist.”
“You see what you’ve started. Will every vocate now have a personal army of thains to do her bidding?”
“Perhaps they should,” Noreê said good-humoredly. “This is only for the emergency, Aloê.”
“After this one there will be another.”
“Perhaps.” Noreê seemed determined not to fight with her, so Aloê gave up—for the moment.
The entrance to the basement was guarded by thains with an ill-assorted rainbow of badges. Aloê brushed them aside and descended, taking a coldlight from a pocket of her cloak as she descended the crumbling stairs to the basement.
A dizzying wave of stink swept over her. The sting of urine was in her eyes and nose, and it wasn’t the most alarming thread in the reek. . . .
She took the songbow from her shoulder and gripped it in her hand like a club. The hot smell of fresh blood rode the foul air.
The chaos of the basement made no sense to her eye at first. She had stumbled over a bundle of something at her feet before she realized it was a bundle of limbs—a Khnauront, lying on its side, its throat cut from ear to ear.
“Call your thains,” Aloê said over her shoulder.
“Oh, there’s no need for that, Vocate,” said Bleys’ warm voice from across the dim basement.
Aloê lifted the coldlight high to see better and caught sight of the summoner across the floor of the basement, strewn with dead Khnauronts. He was holding a bright piece of metal in one hand and with the other was pulling at the nose of a Khnauront to expose his bare neck. Two quick slashes and the Khnauront was spraying blood, dark in the bluish light. Bleys released him and he fell on his side.
The summoner stepped over to where the last Khnauront was sitting upright, his back against the far wall. He looked at Bleys and his bloody little piece of metal incuriously.
“Don’t!” shouted Aloê.
“With you in a moment, my dears,” called Bleys cheerily. He slashed the throat of the last Khnauront and let him fall. He dropped the piece of metal beside the dying body and then picked his way carefully across the carnage toward the thunderstruck vocates.
“You don’t need to thank me,” Bleys said, as he got nearer. “Although I don’t think it would be a good idea to take my hands.” He held them up: they gleamed with blood. “After a few days of probing their minds, I determined that these objects could be no use to themselves or anyone else, and decided to get rid of them . . . since the Graith, in its usual way, could not decide what to do with them.”
Aloê exhaled, then, more reluctantly, inhaled.
“I assure you, these things were not human—merely machines for turning food into shit, as the saying goes. What can I do for you, my dears?”
; Aloê said, “I wanted to urge you to swear a self-binding oath so that you could be released from this hellhole.”
“I’m afraid I can’t, my dear,” said the smiling, blood-stained old man. “Before either of you were born, I had a counterspell against binding spells engraved on my collarbone. That prevents me from swearing a self-binding oath; you can ask Lernaion about it, if you like.”
“Ur. Well, maybe we can find more acceptable quarters for you.”
“These quarters are perfectly acceptable to me. I’m not particular about things. Perhaps you’re thinking about the nightmares from the decaying fungus, but really I don’t mind them. If you ever get to be my age, which I do not wholeheartedly recommend, you’ll understand how pleasant it is to have a vivid dream, even a nightmare, awake or asleep.”
“If some of the upper floors are intact, I’m sure you can have your nightmares and cleaner air to go with them. We must have you alive to testify, Bleys.”
“I’ll drink to that, as your husband might say, my dear. Yes, I can’t wait to testify. The sooner young Illion is done with healing the Witness Stone, the better I’ll like it. Shouldn’t you be helping him, Noreê, instead of playing chief jailor to an old man?”
“I intend to,” Noreê said quietly.
“Wonderful.”
“You could tell us something of what you have to say now,” Aloê observed.
“But would you believe it? Should you believe it? I would not recommend it, if I were some third person with your best interests at heart (as I am not, of course). No, you will have to wait. Because it’s very important that you believe what I have to say.” Bleys absentmindedly wiped his hands on his white mantle of office. “I wonder what’s for supper?” he said wistfully. “Could one of you ask about it for me on your way out?”
Bleys got his wish a pair of months later. They were very long months from Aloê’s point of view. Most of the vocates started recruiting personal forces of thains, and many had companies of them marching through the streets.
Aloê and Jordel watched them pass by one day from the second floor of his house.
“I suppose they all have to swing their feet at the same time,” Jordel said, “if they’re going to walk so close with everybody’s elbow up everybody else’s ass. But I tell you, Aloê. . . .”
“Tell me, J.”
“I think that they’re doing it to threaten people.”
“I think they’re doing it because they’re afraid.”
“I think that we’re saying the same thing.”
Fear was in the eyes of the thains marching, and fear was in the eyes of the Guarded, watching from the windows in their houses and towers, and fear was in the eyes of the vocates marching at the head of their companies on the long-awaited day of Station.
Since Lernaion, the Summoner of the City, had been charged with Impairment of the Guard, it fell to the vocates to summon themselves to Station. But when Illion gave word that the Witness Stone was healed, Noreê sent her thains as messengers to summon the members of the Graith. Whether they loved Noreê or hated her, the vocates obeyed. Many whispered to each other that she would be chosen as the new summoner, to fill the place left vacant by Earno’s murder.
On the chilly summer day of the Station, Aloê rose before dawn. She was staying with Jordel again because the empty ancientness of Tower Ambrose distressed her. They walked together, without a single thain-attendant, to the Chamber of the Graith. They met Illion, also walking without a thain, and Styrth Anvri, Sundra, Callion, and Keluaê Hendaij, who contented themselves with a single thain-attendant each.
But the streets adjoining the Dome were a solid mass of gray capes and clashing badges. Aloê was idly considering the possibility of making her way through the crowd on stilts when Jordel began to shout, in a shocking stentorian roar, “Make way for the Graith’s vengeancer! Make way!”
The thains-come-lately looked over their shoulders aghast and pressed back against those nearest them. Cracks opened up in the wall of gray capes, and the vocates plunged into them. Jordel continued his shouting, and soon they could hear his brother Baran doing the same in another part of the crowd, and Illion began shouting it, too, and no one in recorded history had ever heard Illion shout anything, and eventually they were on the other side of the crowd, climbing the stairs into the Chamber.
A few vocates were standing before the open double doors to the Chamber proper: Rild of Eastwall, resplendent in purple leggings; Gnython the Rememberer, wearing a green armband on both arms; Kothala of Sandport, sporting a red cap, and a few others.
“Fine ladies and gentlemen,” Jordel rasped (his voice still ragged from shouting), “perhaps you could tell your underlings not to block the streets. There’s more than one way to impair the Guard,” he added.
That spurred them to action; it takes fear to motivate the frightened, Aloê thought. They rushed away to give orders to their disorderly followers.
The pale sun had climbed more than half way up the cool blue sky before the vocates were assembled at Station, and the Guardians accused of Impairing the Guard stood, with folded hands, awaiting the Graith’s judgment. Aloê was obscurely pleased that Naevros had rallied for the occasion. If his clothes were not new, they looked it. His wounded hand looked almost healthy, except for the angry red line where it had been reattached to his arm. He held himself like a person who mattered. But he did not wear the red cloak of his office, and neither did Bavro wear his gray cape.
Lernaion did wear his white mantle of office, however, and Bleys presumably did, too, but it was hard to tell whether the oldest Guardian’s cloak was actually white. His clothes were filthy; his person was filthy; Aloê could smell him from where she stood at the Long Table, halfway across the great Chamber of the Graith. If he was at all embarrassed by his condition, he didn’t show it.
Since the Summoner of the City was among the accused, Noreê stood forward to convene the Station. No one objected to this—at least not out loud. But Aloê could not have been the only vocate who thought their peer was taking too much on herself.
“Vocates,” she said, actually rapping the Long Table with the silver staff of exile, “stand to order! We are come here to settle the fates of our members, accused of Impairment of the Guard and murder of the Guarded. I called you here because the Summoner of the City is among the accused and may not speak here, except in his own defense. If you prefer that someone else preside here, I will stand back.”
Silence.
“Go ahead, Noreê,” suggested Gyrla.
“Thank you, Guardians,” Noreê said. “I call on our vengeancer, Aloê Oaij.”
All faces in the room turned to Aloê. She’d thought much about this moment. It was a chance to wax rhetorical, to magnify herself in the minds of those who are impressed by torrents of well-chosen words. The last trial for Impairment had happened around the time she was being born, but she had read about that case and many others.
In the end, she eschewed any attempt to soothe or startle her listeners with rhetoric. She stated plainly what the conspirators had done and how she had discovered it. She concluded by saying, “The only witness I see who is not present is Ulvana, late of the Order of Arbiters. She was under guard at the High Arbitrate; perhaps she could be sent for.”
“That won’t be possible, I’m afraid,” Noreê said. “I received word from the High Arbitrate last night that Ulvana had committed suicide.”
Aloê felt a sudden stab of grief and pain at this. She was also angry: that the message had come to Noreê and not her; that Noreê had not bothered to tell her until now. The pale cold Guardian loomed over them all these days, sole ruler of the Wardlands. It would have to be stopped somehow.
“Did she jump or was she pushed?” Aloê snapped back.
“If I understand you, Vocate Aloê, you are suggesting that the High Arbitrate may have killed Ulvana in secret to prevent her testimony today.”
“It seems possible, at least.”
“It seems
irrelevant, at best. Unless her testimony is key to your case.”
“No. I have stated my case. It is time for the witnesses to ascend to the Witness Stone.”
“May I speak?” Naevros called up from the floor.
“You may speak in your defense after you testify on the Stone,” Noreê said.
“That’s just it. I don’t intend to present a defense. Neither does my junior colleague. We will accept death or exile at the Graith’s choosing, or your vengeancer’s alone.”
“Hm.” Noreê allowed herself a cold smile and turned to Aloê. “What do you say, Vengeancer?”
“I’ll abide by the Graith’s decision, or exercise the prerogative if we can’t come to an agreement. But I think the accused should stand together in punishment; they are all equally guilty.”
“We can save part of a day if the summoners also waive their defense,” Noreê said, without much sign of hope. “Lernaion, what say you? Do you admit your guilt?”
“I defer to the judgement of my elder peer,” said Lernaion.
“Bleys: will you admit your guilt?”
This was the moment that horrible old man had waited for. He did not speak at first, but pretended to consider. Then he lifted his head high and cried out, “Waive my defense? I might do so for the good the Graith and the Guard, to which I have devoted the entirety of my very long life. But I will not waive, for the convenience of you, my fellow Guardians, or for the well-being of anyone in the world, my defense of the Wardlands. Everything, everything that the dedicated young vengeancer has told you is true. And it is not all. I have many secret deeds of blood and fear to my credit. I have killed—extorted—threatened—seduced—corrupted—stolen. These are crimes, if you please, if we stood in one of the courts of the unguarded lands. But we do not. All that I have done, all that I have ever done, was done to maintain the Guard.”
“Summoner Earno,” said Noreê coldly, “you may speak in your defense after you testify on the Stone—”
“Is that a threat?” shouted the red-faced old summoner. “I tell you, young Noreê, that I have come here expressly to testify on the Stone! I will speak, not in my defense, but in the defense of the Wardlands and in defense of my colleagues too shamed and bemused to speak for themselves. I have suffered; I have been beaten; I have endured night and day the torments of nightmares in that hellhole you consigned me to; I have kept the thin, fragile thread of life unbroken in my ancient body for this, and this alone: to speak and be heard where I could not be silenced! Lead me to your Witness Stone and let the Graith read the truths written in my heart!”