by John F. Carr
Her laugh sounded like the tinkling of bells. "He is a madman, of course. We've discussed that many times. He is looking for air in a rock. But doesn't Styphon's Treasury need more gold to pay for her armies?"
"Yes, but we already have more than enough. Roxthar is creating a climate of fear, and, if it continues, it will break out in a thunderstorm—and who will take the brunt?"
Thessamona nodded. "The Inner Circle and Highpriests. Roxthar will say it was their corruption that has incensed the mobs. When it is the fear of his Investigation that has driven the multitudes out into the streets."
Anaxthenes nodded, squeezing her shoulder, in an unusual display of affection. "You understand what my fellow highpriests do not. Sesklos now fears Roxthar more than Hadron's demons! The old priest has at last outlived his usefulness."
"What about one of your vials?"
"I was tempted last winter, but that was before Roxthar's ascendancy. No, it might prove too convenient. Too many fingers would point my way."
"Someone has to take the helm of your rudderless galley, before a rock rips out the belly."
"A most apt metaphor, Thessamona. What the fools of Inner Circle don't realize is, Styphon's Temple was doomed the moment Kalvan"—he hissed the word—"learned the Fireseed Mystery. Of course, the Temple had anticipated such an event. In the past hundred winters, we have killed two other alchemists that 'learned' the Mystery. Kalvan was not known to us and worked in secrecy in a small princedom that had escaped our eye until Styphon's gold was discovered in one of their valleys. It's not a common substance, like the other ingredients of the Mystery, and smells of Regwam's Caverns."
"Then why are we still here? You have enough gold for a prince." Anaxthenes smiled. "And leave a lifetime's work! I am no voluptuary, who can sit and drink myself insensate, or lose myself in the weaknesses of the flesh. My pleasure is in bending men to my will and changing their lives."
"Yes, it is hard to imagine you sitting still for any length of time." He stopped his pacing to laugh. "You know me too well, Thessie."
"I still do not understand why the Temple of Styphon is doomed, as you say. The Temple owns more gold than all the Great Kings combined, it owns the Great Banking Houses, it commands a huge trading fleet and war fleet, as well, and owns more land than is contained within the borders of Hos-Agrys."
"All of what you say is true, and more," Anaxthenes replied. "The Temple has wealth like a farmer has manure. Unfortunately, our greatest weapon—the Mystery—has been pillaged. Some think this Kalvan is a former Zygrosi Temple underpriest who joined the Temple to steal our Mystery. It may be true, although he takes to command like one born to it."
"As does, my lord," Thessamona replied.
Even after all these years, she was still in awe of his noble birth. Yes, he was of the nobility, the fifth son of a penniless baron, who left the family tarr to make his own fortune. Years later he had bought the family estate, kicked his older brothers out, and put their former seneschal in charge. That the estate had thereafter shown good profit had amused him to no end.
"Yet," he continued, "without the Mystery to hold over the barons and princes like a club, we are no more useful than a merchant. The day some Great King decides to tax our Banking Houses or put duties on our cotton our time is ended—maybe not that moment in time, but shortly thereafter. Outside of the Temple underpriests, how many true believers of Styphon are there? Archpriest Roxthar. And Archpriest Cimon, the one they call the 'Peasant Priest,' who is so rare a bird that he was elevated to the Inner Circle so that we could display his piety to those besotted worshipers of Dralm! How many 'real' converts has Roxthar's Investigation brought? Not one whose faith in Styphon will last one day longer than Roxthar's last breath!"
Thessamona sighed. "I have never seen you so heated. Why do you not use one of your vials upon—?"
"Don't say it, don't think it! That wolf-in-man's clothing will smell it, I tell you. He breathes in thoughts. If Roxthar were to die, his followers—mostly ambitious underpriests who hang upon his robes to further their own careers—would turn upon the Inner Circle and kill us all. These are no longer men of restraint: they have tasted human blood and suffering and now they gorge themselves upon it. Roxthar feeds them and thus he owns them. The Investigators are outcasts to all humanity."
"You are not thinking clearly, my lord. Who is it that owns the Temple? Not the old fool they call Styphon's Voice. Nor is it Dracar for all his plots and counter-plots. Nor is it Cimon, for all his piety. Nor is it Roxthar for all his terror. It is you, my lord. You who know the Archpriests and their appetites. You who know their secrets and where they are buried. It is time you made some plans."
Anaxthenes nodded. "You are right, as always, Thessamona. I must or the Temple is doomed."
"If Roxthar is made Styphon's Voice, even the peasants will throw rocks at the priests of Styphon!"
"Yes, the devil must know that. That is why he uses others in his place. Sesklos is not worth the candle it takes to light his chamber, since it will be snuffed out soon. Dracar is the key."
Thessamona smiled as if she could read his thoughts. "Do you want me to boil the roots upon the next full moon?"
Anaxthenes shook his head. "The time is not right. I will let you know when the time has come for Dracar to join Hadron's Realm."
SIXTEEN
Danar Sirna, Outtime Historian and one of the political peons of the Second Kalvan Study Team, listened to the rain on the roof and to the argument in the Foundry common room, wishing earnestly that one would grow loud enough to drown out the other. Sirna didn't much care which; both the argument and the rain had gone on much too long and she was growing more depressed with each passing minute.
The argument was the latest round in the endless feud between Aranth Sain, the Teams' only military specialist, on the one hand and Varnath Lala and Lathor Karv on the other, over the Study Teams' attitude toward the 'true gods' when they reached Nostor to set up a new foundry there. Varnath and Lathor saw this as the ideal opportunity to introduce rational patterns of thought into Kalvan's Time-Line, by at the very least not mentioning any of the gods as they taught the new foundry workers.
A blatant violation of the Paratime Code's anti-contamination act , thought Sirna. Too bad I'm not spying for Chief Verkan .
Aranth saw his colleagues' proposal as pointless at best, likely to expose the Study Team to a charge of heresy at worst. Both sides had long since ceased to come up with any new arguments; neither was so far gone that they carried on the argument in the presence of any Fourth Level listeners.
"The Council of Dralm hasn't developed the concept of heresy," Lathor Karv was saying in what, for him, passed for a reasonable tone of voice. "Therefore how can you argue that we'll be in danger of being charged with a crime that doesn't exist?"
"That doesn't exist now," Professor Aranth replied rather grimly, Sirna thought. She wondered if what bothered him was the strength of the opposition, possible danger to the Team, or simply that an argument he'd probably begun to cure his own boredom was now making it worse, now that the professional nit-pickers had gotten into it. "We have no idea what the highpriests of Dralm may eventually decide is appropriate, in the face of Styphon's House and what is on the verge of becoming a full-blown religious war. Kalvan can't do a Dralm-damned thing to stop them from inventing heresy if they want to, either, so don't give me your usual song-and-dance about Kalvan, Eldra."
Baltrov Eldra just sighed and looked bored.
"You're showing a typical male reversion pattern, Aranth," Varnath Lala said. "The minute men get into a patriarchal culture like this one, they seem to soak up its attitudes with the air they breathe and the water they drink. If they can't do anything else, they are rude to their female colleagues. You've gone completely out of sight on oath-bonding as well."
"You call yourself a pre-Industrial Specialist—even if it is Metallurgy, Lala, and actually have the gall to say oaths aren't taken seriously? Guilds that work metal
take oath's especially strong." Aranth Saln's voice held honest incredulity, and Sirna had to admit that once again Varnath Lala had left herself wide open in an effort to ruffle a man. That wasn't the first time for that, either, or the twentieth. In part, brought on by the attempt to pass for 'free' women among Fourth Level foundry workers, who didn't believe the term free applied to women in any sense, the rest because of her irascible personality.
"I don't think it can honestly be said that we've sworn any oaths that require us to mention the 'true gods,'" Lathor Karv said, in his lecture-hall tone of voice. "Therefore I don't think we will be considered oath-breakers as long as we observe the appropriate rituals and don't break taboos or interfere with the priests."
Even over the rain and crackle of fire in the next room, Sirna heard Varnath Lala's hiss of indrawn breath, then her tight-voiced reply.
"I'm afraid I lack your enthusiasm or your talent for hypocrisy, Lathor. Kalvan himself didn't mince words calling fireseed the result of 'simple mechanic arts' any child could learn. Why shouldn't we follow in the Great King's own footsteps?"
"I, for one, lack enthusiasm for wet rugs," Baltrov Eldra said, "and in case none of you has noticed, the roof is leaking again."
Sirna listened to the names of a number of gods being taken in vain in the next room, the thump of a rug being rolled up, the clatter of a bucket being set down, and the steady plink-plink-plink of the leak dripping into it. Sirna would have invoked the weather goddess herself, except that this weather seemed more likely to have been a gift of Lyklos, god of lies and practical jokes.
To do Lyklos as much justice as the Trickster ever deserved, it wasn't entirely the fault of the rainy weather that the University Study Team hadn't long since been on its way to Nostor Town. If they'd just had to transport themselves and their personal possessions, riding horses and pack mules would have done the job well enough. Sirna's buttocks and thighs ached at the mere thought of long days in the saddle, but she had to admit that only a few of them would have taken her and her companions to Nostor.
However, the University had to transport not only their nearly complete set of blacksmithing tools, but their specialized Zygrosi foundry equipment, too. That meant a load running over a hundred tons, which in turn meant a fair-sized train of wagons and carts, since at best the Zarthani covered wagons could transport about twenty tons each. They also had food and clothing and provisions for the Foundry workers and teamsters. All that meant waiting until the roads were passable—sometime next spring. No number of draft horses and ox teams that the Great King could spare would be able to haul the foundry train to Nostor over roads knee-high in mud, and in another moon or two snow.
If the Foundry crew traveled light, they would arrive sooner but would need four to five moons to build everything from scratch. Due to massive unemployment in Nostor, Kalvan wanted the new Foundry built there, rather than expanding the old one. It was Eldra's opinion that Kalvan wanted it closer to the Harphax City, where he would need it once the city fell.
There the matter settled—and the University Kalvan Study Team as well, trapped ten miles outside Hostigos Town and trying to fight boredom and cabin fever without drinking too much or interfering with their Hostigi workers.
Sirna decided that she was in the mood for some fresh air, before anybody missed her and came looking to dragoon her into a floor-mopping brigade. She knew the fresh air would be at least half water and the ground more than half mud, but she didn't care. She slipped past the half-open door toward the wardrobe in the outer hall where the outdoor clothing hung.
The mud was even deeper than Sirna expected, and it took her nearly half an hour to make one circuit of the entrenchments around the foundry and storage buildings. By then the rain was beginning to soak through her outer clothing. Oiled leather was better than nothing, she admitted, but it was as heavy as a suit of armor, prone to crack and leak, foul-smelling wet or dry, and not really all that waterproof. If she stayed out here much longer, she'd pay for her fresh air by being soaked to the skin, and it would be just her luck for the Team leader to decide that one of the University team members should come down with a cold so as not to arouse suspicion of sorcery by undue immunity to disease!
At times like this Sirna sympathized with the idea of playing god-sent-teacher-to-the-unenlightened; at least one could wear sensible clothing and use First Level medicine.
In her half year on Kalvan's Subsector she'd reported no conditions of outtime contamination by Kalvan, yet Tharn—who sent her regular letters as Uncle T.—seemed inordinately happy with her posts. She couldn't figure out why. Most everything she'd reported could have been taken from a standard University Kalvan Study Team press release.
Why should she feel so obligated to follow Hadron's orders? True, if it hadn't been for his pull she never would have gotten such a high-prestige assignment, but he could hardly report her to the University for that. On the other hand, he could make trouble with her parents—who would certainly put politics above mere 'anarchistic familial ties'—as well as stifle her future career at Dhergabar University. Even though Hadron had been expelled after some sort of outtime fiasco involving the Paratime Police that nobody—even his supporters wanted to talk about—but his grants to the University were a major source of funding for outtime research.
And there was one more reason she would follow Tharn's orders until her assignment to Kalvan Prime was over—Hadron Tharn scared her to death. There was something in those dead eyes of his that told you he'd no more regret ending your life than that of some insect that happened to get in his way.
All her life Sirna had been dominated by men. First her father, who had really wanted a son, but lacked the will to defy her mother and who'd settled for a daughter who would follow in his footsteps. Then, when she became 'inconvenient,' dumped her into a University creche when her mother went outtime. Next, there was her husband who had wanted the appearance, but not the actuality of a wife. Now by Hadron Tharn, who wanted her to do his dirty work against Verkan Vail and the Paratime Police.
She wished she had the courage to say To Styphon with the entire lot!
Sirna had nearly completed the circuit of the foundry entrenchments when a broad figure in a woolen cloak and high-combed morion helmet loomed out of the darkness ahead of her. She froze, cursing herself for going outside without a pistol as well as her dagger.
Then, remembering the odds against a flintlock's firing in this kind of downpour, she shouted, "Who is it?"
"Master Aranth, of the Royal Hostigos Foundry," the figure answered. "Who are you?"
Sirna sighed with relief, while wondering what brought the military man out on a night like this. "Sirna, Mistress Pattern-Maker. What are you doing out here, Master Aranth?"
"The same thing you are, Mistress," he said, pointing to the Foundry quarters. "Escaping the bedlam of too much talk about too little. And call me Sain."
"Me too, Sain. I think I'd rather attend one of Xentos' prayer meetings for deliverance from Styphon's House at the Temple of Dralm than spend another five minutes in there."
Aranth Sain laughed, exposing a mouthful of well-formed and broad teeth. "Right, Xentos is back from the Council at Agrys City. No one seems too happy about it. Ranthar said it had something to do with the Council refusing to recognize the Sixth Great Kingdom and its ruler. No one at the palace is talking, but the Paratime Police have established agents at all the capitals and big cities."
Finally, Sirna had something to report and it came from a reputable source even; however, it was less than significant, but would at least show she was doing her job.
"Trader Ranthar seems like a good man, even if he is with the Paratime Police."
"They have a lot of good men, another year on this time-line and you'll lose a lot more of your University prejudices."
"It looks like the rain has stopped for a time," Aranth said. "Would you like to accompany me to Hostigos Town? I'm going to the One-Eyed Owl for some good company."
> Sirna had heard Varnath Lala go on about how the One-Eyed Owl, a tavern where mercenaries and the King's regulars liked to do their drinking, was a cesspit of male supremacy; well, the company would have to be pretty bad before she'd miss the bickering and one-ups-manship here at the Foundry.
"Sure, Aranth, I'd love to go."
Sirna followed Aranth Sain to the stable where he helped her bridle and saddle a gentle bay mare. By the time they'd left the stable, a full moon was casting a silvery glow over the hills and the rain had come to a complete stop. Thank you, Lystris, she said under her breath.
As they slowly made their way through the muddy path leading to the Great King's Highway, Sirna noticed that beneath his cloak Aranth was wearing a back and breast with taces.
"Why all the steel?" she asked.
"Footpads. Even the Great King's Patrol and the weather won't convince them to keep their distance any better than tempered steel.' Despite the calm of the past few moons, there's still a war going on here and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that a few stragglers from the Battle of Phyrax are still skulking around."
"After all this time?"
"Yup. Tuad, the chief carpenter, was telling me that about a ten-day ago someone stole half a dozen chickens and a bushel of turnips from the Foundry garden."
A lone wolf howl echoed through the hills and Sirna shivered. "Are we going to have troubles with wolves, too?"
"That's the first one I've heard this fall. Kalvan had his wolf hunters stake out the battlefields this year and thin their ranks. He's kept the bounty high enough that the only wolves you're going see this winter are the two-legged variety."
Aranth slowed down his horse. "Be careful getting onto the highway. This would be a nasty place for a fall." Aranth paused and added, "Your own hands are properly dirty."