by Greg Keyes
When he met her eyes now, there was suddenly so much more than his first glance had found, and her features came into clearer focus. For the first time he saw them as her own.
“Well,” she said, “that’s what you get for kissing a girl before you’ve seen her.”
“You kissed me,” he blurted, realizing in the same breath that it wasn’t what he was supposed to say.
She just shrugged and pushed the hood of her cloak back on her head.
“Yes,” she allowed.
“Wait,” he said.
She turned and cocked her head.
“What’s happening here?” he asked desperately.
“Most likely the praifec and his men are just starting after us,” she replied. “We’ll need mounts, and we can get some just ahead. After that, we might stay ahead of them.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know that,” she replied.
“Well, then? I mean, I hardly know you. It’s simply not reasonable.”
“Where I come from,” Pale said, “everything isn’t reasonable. And we don’t wait a lifetime for a perfect kiss from the perfect person, because then we die alone. I kissed you because I wanted to, and you wanted me to, and maybe we both needed it. And until the sun came up, you seemed to be happy with that and maybe ready to do it some more.
“But here we are instead, and that’s life, too, and not worth dwelling on. We can only get so much done before we die, yes? So let’s go.”
CAZIO HEARD someone shout his name; it was a thin, distant thing.
He’d had most of his attention on climbing, wedging boot tips and fingers into the precarious notches that had been cut into the stone and mortar. He’d been delighted to find them there and wondered who had carved them originally. Some ancient thief? Children exploring the wall, or perhaps a Sefry magician? It didn’t matter, really. He could probably have managed the climb at the intersection of the walls using only the meager purchase offered naturally by the masonry, but the ancient climbers had helped him considerably.
They increased his chances of survival only slightly, however, when he spotted the soldiers who were rushing toward him. He still had a kingsyard to go, and at the rate he was climbing, he wasn’t going to make it before cold iron married him.
With a silent prayer to Mamres and Fiussa, he flexed his knees and leapt as hard as he could up and to his right, toward the first spearman.
The problem with that was that the jump threw him away from the wall. Not much, but enough that he wouldn’t be able to reach it again. He felt the cobbles of Gobelin Court below him, eager to smash his spine, as he stretched his arms nearly out of their sockets.
As he had prayed, the spearman was taken aback, seeing a crazy man leaping toward him. If logical thought was his guide, he would step away, watch Cazio grasp at empty air, and laugh as he fell.
Instead, the man reacted instinctively and thrust the spear at his attacker.
Cazio caught the thick shaft just above the wickedly pointed steel, and to his delight, the guard’s second reaction was to yank back. That pulled Cazio toward the wall, and he let go so he could catch the top of the edifice with his arms and upper chest.
The spearman, overcompensating, tumbled backward. The wall was sufficiently wide that he didn’t fall off, but with him down and his companion still a few strides away, Cazio had the time to jerk himself to his feet and draw Acredo.
Heedless, the second fellow lowered the sharp of his weapon and prepared for the attack. Cazio was pleased to see that he was wearing only chain, a breastplate, and a helm rather than a knight’s plate.
As the thrust came, he parried prismo and stepped quickly toward his opponent, lifting his left hand to seize the shaft and then flipping the tip of his blade up for a long lunge that ended in the man’s throat. If it hadn’t been for the armor, he might have tried for a less lethal spot, but the only other exposed place was the thigh, where his sword point might become lodged in bone.
As the man dropped his spear and whistled in despair through novel lips, Cazio turned to the first fellow, who was regaining his feet.
“Contro z’osta,” Cazio said, “Zo dessrator comatia anter c’acra.”
“What are you babbling about?” the man screamed, clearly distressed. “What are you saying?”
“My apologies,” Cazio said. “When I speak of love, wine, or swordplay, I find it easier to use my native tongue. I quote the famous treatise of Mestro Papa Avradio Vallaimo, who states—”
He was rudely interrupted as the man screamed and lunged forward, leaving Cazio wondering exactly how much training these men had been given.
He threw his rear leg back and dropped his body and head below the line of the attack while extending his arm. Carried by momentum, the attacker more or less threw himself onto the tip of Cazio’s blade.
“‘Against the spear, the swordsman shall move inside the point,’” Cazio continued as the man folded over on his side.
Here came another one out of the tower to his left. He set his stance and waited, wondering how many of them he would have to fight before the Craftsmen joined him.
This one proved more interesting, because he understood that Cazio had to come within reach. So he used his feet like a dessrator, allowing Cazio what looked like a good chance to close the distance, when in fact it was a ruse designed to make him commit to his own foolish charge.
Even more interesting were the shouts he heard coming from behind him and the next man running along the wall in the direction he was facing.
With a grim smile, he began teaching the rest of Mestro Papa’s chapter “Contro z’osta.”
Anne watched breathlessly as Cazio, in typical form, did the craziest thing imaginable and somehow survived.
Austra stood there, fists at her sides, growing whiter and whiter as the battle went on, until at last the Craftsmen appeared, swarming up the wall and joining the Vitellian. Then they split up and ran toward the towers. They appeared there a short time later, waving pennants.
Cazio had his broad-brimmed hat clutched in one hand.
“Saints,” Austra breathed. “Why must he always—” She didn’t finish but sighed instead. “He loves fighting more than he loves me.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Anne replied, trying to sound convincing. “Anyway, at least it’s not another woman.”
“I’d almost rather that,” Austra replied.
“When it happens,” Anne said, “I’ll take your bearings again.”
“You mean if it happens,” Austra said, sounding a bit defensive.
“Yes, that’s what I meant,” Anne said. But she knew better. Men took mistresses, didn’t they? Her father had had many. The ladies of the court had always agreed that it was the nature of the beast.
She glanced back at the Sefry house. She and Austra had backed up to witness the action on the wall, but Mother Uun was still waiting in the shadow of her doorway.
“I apologize for the distraction, Mother Uun,” she said, “but I would be pleased to discuss the Crepling passage now.”
“Of course,” the old woman replied. “Please come in.”
The room where the Sefry took them was disappointingly ordinary. It had touches of the exotic, to be sure: a colorful rug, an oil lamp made of some sort of bone carved into the form of a swan, panes of dark blue glass that gave the room a pleasant, murky underwater feel. Except for that last feature, however, the room could have belonged to any merchant who traded in goods from far away.
Mother Uun indicated several armchairs arranged in a circle and waited until they were settled before she herself took a seat. Almost the instant she did so, another Sefry—a man—entered the room with a tray. He bowed without upsetting the teapot and cups he was carrying, then placed it all onto a small table.
“Will you have some tea?” Mother Uun asked pleasantly.
“That would be nice,” Anne replied.
The Sefry man seemed young, no older than Anne�
��s seventeen winters. He was handsome in a thin, alien way, and his eyes were a striking cobalt blue.
He then departed, only to return moments later with walnut bread and marmalade.
Anne sipped the tea and found it tasted of lemons, oranges, and some spice she wasn’t familiar with. It occurred to her that it might be poison. Mother Uun was drinking from the same pot, but since she’d touched the Sefry assassin and found him so wrong inside, she thought it possible that what was poison to a human might be pleasing to a Sefry.
Her next sip was feigned, and she hoped Austra was doing the same, although if her maid drank it, at least she would know if it was poisoned.
Horror followed swiftly on the heels of that thought. What was wrong with her?
Austra’s face crinkled in concern, and that only made matters worse.
“Anne?”
“It’s nothing,” she replied. “I had an unpleasant thought.”
She remembered that her father had had someone to taste his food. She needed someone like that, someone she didn’t care about. But not Austra.
Mother Uun sipped her tea.
“When we arrived,” Anne began, “you said something about watching someone. Will you explain that?”
In the dense blue light from the windows, Mother Uun’s skin seemed less transparent, because the fine veins were no longer visible. Anne wondered idly if that was why she’d chosen indigo for her glass rather than orange or yellow. She also seemed somehow larger.
“You’ve heard him, I think,” Mother Uun said. “His whispers are loud enough now to escape his prison.”
“Again,” Anne said impatiently, “of whom do you speak?”
“I will not say his name, not just yet,” Mother Uun replied. “But I ask you to recall your history. Do you remember what once stood where this city now stands?”
“I was a poor student in every subject,” Anne replied, “history included. But everyone knows that. Eslen was built on the ruins of the last fortress of the Scaosen.”
“Scaosen,” Mother Uun mused. “How time deforms words. The older term, of course, was ‘Skasloi,’ though even that was merely an attempt to pronounce the unpronounceable. But yes, here is where your ancestress Virgenya Dare won her final battle against our ancient masters and pressed her booted foot on the neck of the last of their kind. Here the scepter passed from the race of demons to the race of woman.”
“I know the story,” Anne said absently, interested by the Sefry’s odd turn of phrase.
“When the Skasloi ruled here, it was known as Ulheqelesh,” Mother Uun continued. “It was the greatest of the Skasloi strongholds, its lord the most powerful of his kind.”
“Yes,” Anne said. “Why do you say ‘woman,’ though, and not ‘man’?”
“Because Virgenya Dare was a woman,” Mother Uun replied.
“I understand that,” Anne said. “But the name of her race was not ‘woman.’”
“I meant the race to which women belong, I suppose,” the Sefry said.
“But you are a woman, are you not, though not of Man-kin?”
“Indeed,” she said, the corners of her mouth lifting faintly.
Anne frowned but wasn’t sure she wanted to crawl farther into this odd warren of semantics, not when the Sefry seemed perfectly content to be drawn farther and farther from the original question.
“Never mind,” she said. “This person you say whispers to me. I want to know about him.”
“Ah,” Mother Uun said. “Yes. Virgenya Dare did not kill the last of the Skasloi. She kept him alive in the dungeons of Eslen.
“He is there yet, and it is my charge to make certain that he stays there.”
An unexpected vertigo seized Anne; she felt as if her chair were nailed to the ceiling and she must grip its arms tightly to keep from falling out as the room slowly revolved.
Again she heard unintelligible words breathed into her ear, but this time she thought…almost…that she understood them. The voices of strange birds warbled beyond the window.
No, not birds at all, but Austra and Mother Uun.
She focused on them.
“That’s impossible,” Austra was saying. “The histories clearly say that she killed him. Besides, that would make him more than two thousand years old.”
“He was older than that when his kingdom fell,” Mother Uun replied. “The Skasloi did not age as your kind does. Some of them did not age at all. Qexqaneh is one of those.”
“Qexqaneh?”
As she said the name, Anne suddenly felt something rough sliding against her skin, and her nostrils filled with a scent like burning pine. It happened so quickly that she burst into a fit of coughing.
“I should have warned you to be careful with that name,” Mother Uun said. “It draws his attention, but it also gives you power to command him, if your will is strong enough.”
“Why?” Anne asked hoarsely. “Why keep such a thing alive?”
“Who knows the mind of the Born Queen?” Mother Uun said. “Perhaps, at first, to gloat. Or perhaps from fear. He made a prophecy, you know.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Anne said.
Mother Uun closed her eyes, and her voice changed. It dropped lower and canted somewhere between song and chant.
“You were born slaves,” she said. “You will die slaves. You have merely summoned a new master. The daughters of your seed will face what you have wrought, and it will obliterate them.”
Anne felt as though a hand were cupped across her mouth and nose. She could hardly draw breath.
“What did he mean by that?” she managed.
“No one knows,” the Sefry replied. “But the time he spoke of has come; that much is certain.” Her voice was of normal pitch now, but she was almost whispering.
“Even bound, he is terribly dangerous. To enter the castle, you must pass him. Be strong. Do nothing he asks and do not forget that it is in your blood to command him. If you ask him a question, he cannot lie, but he will nevertheless do his best to mislead you.”
“My father? My mother? Did they know of him?”
“All the kings of Eslen have known the Kept,” Mother Uun replied. “As will you. As you must.”
Well, at least that wasn’t something I missed when I wasn’t paying attention, Anne mused to herself.
“Tell me,” she said, “do you know anything about a certain tomb beneath a horz in Eslen-of-Shadows?”
“Anne!” Austra gasped, but Anne shushed her with a motion of her hand.
Mother Uun paused, the cup just inches from her lips, and her smooth brow wrinkled.
“I can’t say that I do,” she replied at last.
“What of the Faiths? Can you tell me anything about them?”
“I suspect you know them better than I,” the old woman said.
“But I would be more than moderately pleased to learn what you know of them,” Anne countered in what she hoped was an insistent tone.
“Sorceresses of the most ancient sort,” the old woman offered. “Some say they are immortal; others say that they are the heads of a secret order and are replaced with each generation.”
“Really? Which explanation do you fancy?”
“I do not know if they are immortal, but I suspect they are long-lived.”
Anne sighed. “This is no more than I have already heard. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me why they wish me to be queen in Eslen.”
Mother Uun was silent for a moment, then she sighed.
“The great forces of the world are not aware of themselves,” she said. “What drives the wind, what pulls the falling rock to earth, what pulses life into our shells and pulls it away—these things are senseless, with no will, no intelligence, no desires or intentions. They simply are.”
“And yet the saints control these things,” Anne said.
“Hardly. The saints—No, leave that aside. Here is what is important: Those forces might be diverted by art, certainly. The wind can be harnessed to
pump water or drive a ship. A river can be dammed, its currents used to drive a mill. The sedos power can be tapped. But the forces themselves dictate the ultimate shape of things, and they do so by their nature, not by their design.
“The Skasloi knew this; they did not worship gods, or saints, or any other such creatures. They found the sources of power and learned how to use them to their advantage. They fought for control of these sources, fought for millennia, until their world was all but destroyed.
“Finally, to save themselves, a few banded together, slaughtered their kin, and began remaking the world. They discovered the thrones and used them to keep the powers in check.”
“Thrones?”
“It’s not a good term, really. They aren’t seats or even places. They are more like the position of king or queen, an office to be filled, and once filled it confers the powers and obligations of the throne on the person who is filling it. There are several sorts of arcane power in the lands of fate, and each possesses a throne. These powers wax and wane in relative puissance. The throne that controls the power you know as sedos has been strengthening for millennia.”
“But you say there are others?”
“Of course. Do you think the Briar King is nurtured by the sedoi? He is not. He sits a very different throne.”
“And the Faiths?”
“Counselors. Queenmakers. They fight to see you receive the power, sit the sedos throne, rather than seeing it fall into the hands of another. But they have enemies, as do you.”
“But the sedoi are controlled by the Church,” Anne said.
“Up until now, yes, insomuch as they were controlled at all.”
“Then surely Fratrex Prismo already sits on that throne,” Anne said.
“He does not,” Mother Uun said. “No one does.”
“But why?”
“The Skasloi hid it.”
“Hid it? But why?”
“They forbade the use of the sedos power,” she replied. “Of all the forces they knew, it was the most destructive and could be used most effectively against the other thrones. Whoever sits the sedos throne can destroy the world. Virgenya Dare found that throne, used it to free your people and mine, and then abdicated it for fear of what it might do. For two thousand years men have been searching for it in vain. But now, like a season long in coming or a slow tide rising, the sedos power waxes again, and the throne will reveal itself. When that happens, it is important that the right person seize it.”