“You haven’t solved the problem of the weather,” Verlein said.
“And your knowledge is nothing without a strong arm to see it put into practice,” Streln said.
Dabrena was bemused. “People welcome the knowledge we bring.”
“If they won’t act on your knowledge, you must compel them.”
“We don’t compel anyone. We offer ideas they haven’t thought of or couldn’t see from their vantage point.”
“You could lie.”
“I don’t see what that would gain us. We lie, our recommendations fail, we lose the respect we’ve earned. Folk trust those in white because we can be relied upon to help them. What we do works only because we do it accurately and honorably.”
Streln gave a thoughtful nod. That got through to him, she thought. Then he said, “But sometimes folk cannot see what is best for them. Have you the authority to make them bend?”
“Your insistence on compulsion has no relevance. If a thing makes sense and has worked before, folk try it. If they don’t, the consequences are their own to bear. We present the known alternatives. Eight times out of nine they choose the right one.”
“You are a fool.”
“And you are clearly very wise. Tell me what I’ve missed.”
“You’ve missed everything. You’ve missed the world.”
Evrael spoke up—quickly, as if to belay something: “What you describe is not unlike our halls on Khine. We decide by consensus, and the consensus of training and experience always chooses the wisest path. We are not unalike, in this way.”
It seemed he would have gone on, but Verlein broke in, “You [133] claim to traffic in cures, yet you have no cure for this weather, nor any idea why it is the way it is.”
“Not yet. But we will.”
“You can’t cause rain to fall in the Heartlands by diverting the flow of rivers. You can’t stop the storms that batter the village outside your own front door.”
“We cured bonebreak fever in the Toes. We introduced rice crops to hopelessly flooded Girdle bottomlands—”
“What you have done,” Streln said, “has been an admirable allocation of resources over a large landmass. We ourselves recently benefited from one of your suggestions. You have taken solutions discovered in isolated areas and efficiently shared them with the rest of Eiden Myr. You are yourselves a valuable resource. But you fail to adequately control a land in chaos.”
“We have not failed because our intent has never been to control, Streln. Your reiteration grows tedious. With help, and time, we will do more to soothe the troubled land. ‘Chaos’ is far too strong a word.”
“What kind of help?” Verlein asked. “The only aid my folk can give you is some tips on building seawalls.”
“Your folk could be dispersed inland to show your seawalls to Midlanders trying to build dikes.”
Verlein grinned widely. “Aha! You would see my shield dismantled that we might coach farmers in crop watering.”
“Not dismantled. A reduced watch. Your folk have expertise that could be valuably developed.”
“And we are not valuable now?”
“You produce nothing. You’re a burden on every coastal village.”
“My folk are the warders now, Dabrena.”
“And where is this great bladed storm you ward against? In six years, why has no one come?”
“Someone sank the ships we sent.”
“Perhaps they just sank. Perhaps they got lost. Perhaps there are no outer realms anymore at all.”
“You haven’t been to the Fist since it happened. You know nothing, buried here in your black rock. You can see the land on the horizon!”
“Perhaps it’s a trick of the light. Perhaps Galandra’s warding wasn’t broken but only breached, so that we might go out but nothing might come in—or back. There are a nonned possible answers, Verlein, and no way to study the question.”
“Senana might have shed some light,” Pelkin said. “Graefel n’Traeyen was ever stubborn and self-absorbed, but you have other [134] scholars here, don’t you? This bears more discussion. Summon one of them, and let us proceed more ... knowledgeably.”
Whether Verlein had bristled at the reference to Senana or to Pelkin’s home-village association with its head, Dabrena could not tell, but she snarled, “You don’t run your proxy circle any longer, old man, and this is no Ennead to report to. Don’t pretend to power you no longer have.”
The old man smiled. Verlein looked away from whatever she saw in his eyes, but she persisted, “Those ships were sunk by outworlders. They know of us now. They’ll be coming. You mark me.”
“Then why haven’t they come?” Pelkin said. “We’d be a little difficult to miss.”
“You’re the spymaster. You tell me.”
“The what?” Pelkin said, still smiling, head cocked, but his eyes as flat as silver plates.
“Have they come already? Have you spirited them off somewhere that we might not know of them, not interrogate them, find out what it is we can expect when the main forces come?”
Dabrena began, “Verlein, you’ve gone far b—”
“Then you explain it! You tell me! But until you can, do not consider for one moment that you may have even one blade of mine.”
“I can’t explain it, Verlein. We haven’t the means. The scholars haven’t, either, Pelkin, though I too would have liked to hear Graefel’s thoughts.”
“Then perhaps you should go to him,” Pelkin said. “Perhaps you should find out if his island is what you have concluded it to be, from accounts delivered to you here in your holding.”
Pelkin’s quiet words were as much a challenge as Verlein’s and Streln’s blunt attacks. She could not untangle the dual threads of his statement. Was his point that she was too cloistered here? Or were the runners more closely allied with the isle than she had known? Pelkin was not, as she had expected him to be, on her side. She had expected them all to be on her side, once she had explained things to them.
Verlein would not give up her argument. “When they come, if some Ennead pretender like you has sent my people inland to carve ruts in the dirt with their longblades—”
Exasperated, Dabrena snapped, “I don’t want to send your people anywhere!”
Her own words flowed down the long corridors of her mind and echoed back with the words she hadn’t said. I don’t want to send your people anywhere. I want you to send them.
She had mastered this holding by delegating. You go here, you go [135] there, you both come back and report. It was all based on that, at heart. For all her weariness, for all the dead ends, for all the agonising slowness of the work, she was proud of what she had built and how. She had rallied the warders to divert the last Great Storm, when the Ennead—who existed not to control Eiden Myr, not to head a hierarchy of mages, but simply to guard the land against those Great Storms—was busy trying to destroy the outer realms instead of saving their own. She had persuaded the best warders to stay, when, stunned by the loss of their magelight, they’d been poised to flee the Holding in droves. She had pulled them from their stupor, she had convinced them there was reason to go on. With her inconvenient child strapped to her back, she had harangued and pleaded and contrived work for them to do, and they had gradually found their way, creating something where there had been nothing. Something wonderful. Something to be proud of.
These folk argued as her warders had, in the beginning. But these folk were not warders. Even Pelkin, who had been a mage and a proxy, was a foreigner to her now. She did not have the words to sway them. They had become something new and incomprehensible while she was buried in her maps and reports. The Khinish she had known were strong, sensible folk with their heads on straight who could be relied upon in a pinch, not dark, antagonistic strangers from a culture alien to hers. The runners she had known had been reckoners at heart, mages accustomed to working in proxy—not adversaries.
These people shared her goals: to restore Eiden Myr to safe prosperity. Sh
e had expected them to share her methods as well, once she made them clear. Hers was so obviously the right way to proceed.
But she had not been in the world, as they had. She had been watching the world through the window of her menders’ accounts. It had changed profoundly during her time here, and she had no direct experience of it.
We all think our way is the only way. Who is to say that I am right and they are wrong?
The debate had continued while she was lost in thought. Some aides had spoken up and been shushed. Now Streln was speaking to her. “You have made a craft of efficiently allocating resources,” he said. “Now you seek to allocate us. Verlein will not permit it. She is leader of her folk and intends to remain so, guarding our coasts as she sees fit. Let her keep her vigil. The villagers who support her folk are happy enough to do it, to know they are guarded. You seem to be the only one perturbed by what you perceive as an imbalance in what they consume to what they provide. They provide an illusion of safety. Let them provide it.”
[136] “It is no illusion,” Verlein growled low in her throat.
Streln ignored her. “What I have seen in my journey here is unacceptable.” His face was dark. His arms were crossed. His legs were spread. Dabrena felt a queer flutter in her belly, perhaps a response to the way Evrael shifted in his obviously unaccustomed chair, the way Pelkin’s silver brows drew down, the way inked quills paused over sedgeweave. They had lost control of this meeting. They had all arrived here with causes, and none of this was going the way any of them had planned. Not even Streln.
“Conflict,” Streln said. “Riots. Brigandage. Killings.” He paused to let them take this in, then said, “Chaos.”
Dabrena shot a look at Selen, who received the initial reports of all their folk returned to the holding; she shrugged with a slight, amazed shake of her head. Loris, their birdmaster, opened his hands and stared back wide-eyed.
“We know nothing of such horrors,” she said. “We have suffered drought, flood, plague, fire, earthquake, blight, every natural disaster that magecraft kept from us, but in every case folk have worked together to overcome them. Doggedly. Rationally. Peacefully. What you describe is ... a nightmare born of your own fears.”
“I have seen what I have seen,” Streln said. “With waking eyes. You have failed your land. It is coming apart as we speak. You have not been in it, so you do not know.”
Unless he was lying—he must be lying we would have heard we would have known of this—his eyewitness account superseded anything she or Selen or Loris might say. None of them had been in the field in years. Dontra went out periodically, sometimes as far as the Neck or Shrug, but that was not far enough. She must call in the menders sent most recently along the route Streln had traveled. “Where?” she said sharply. “When? Give me details.”
“I am not one of your obedient talebearers.”
“Tell me, Streln. You’ve left this far too late.”
“So you do take responsibility.”
“If there is a problem we can mend it. No one riots over nothing. Perhaps trade routes have been blocked by some local calamity, perhaps food has run short. You’ve made a claim. Support it with details or admit the claim was a false one designed to test this sense of responsibility you keep harping on.”
“We saw a man killed for his clothes in the Boot two moons ago. We were set upon by brigands in the Strong Leg. A miners’ water squabble in the Druilors left their camp deserted but for the bodies. In the Girdle we heard of men and women killed in their own huts. [137] At the foot of the Oriels, more brigands, out for our horses. In the Heartlands they were rioting for food.”
Selen pushed a sedgeweave leaf across the table. Dabrena had thought she was noting the incidents, but the scribing said, Porfinn was in the Boot. No one has come from the other areas more recently than Streln. They had not heard from Porfinn in at least two moons. They had been more irritated with her than concerned, but sometimes messages got lost or menders declined to send word until they had completed their tasks. Was that the first of many signs she should have recognized?
She shoved the leaf away. “If things were as bad as you claim, our folk would have sent birds.” She glanced at Loris. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Streln, but I cannot respond to your claims as the crisis you believe them to be. You saw localised conflicts. No doubt they were resolved after you passed. We will send extra folk in case problems persist and we may be of aid, and I do thank you for telling us,” though it took you long enough, you bloody bullock, “but for the purposes of this discussion I’m afraid I must conclude that you are overreacting. The mainland is not Khine. Perhaps you misunderstood. If not, then we can only do what we have always done. Overcome the fundamental problem that has brought folk into conflict, and the conflict dissolves.”
“It is too late for that,” Streln said. “Order must be restored.”
Dabrena ground her teeth. “Order restores itself as difficulties are overcome. You insult our mainland folk, Streln. They are controlled by decency and common sense.”
“Some towns employ bladed guards,” Verlein said.
“Which is their decision,” Dabrena began, but Streln cut her off with “Who came from you, no doubt, and bear weapons they do not know how to wield.”
“You’re just itching for a fight, aren’t you, Headman,” Verlein replied. She broke the toothpick she’d been toying with and tossed the pieces on the table. “What is it you actually want, besides to see us all at odds?”
He gazed at her with a mildness that could not disguise contempt. “I supported your futile vigil, Shieldmaster.”
“Deriding me all the way. My gratitude is boundless.”
“No. But it will be. Just so long as your blades remain pointed seaward.”
Verlein rose to her feet. The guards at the doorway tensed, stepped away from each other, shifted weapons more easily to hand.
The headman smiled for the first time. “Would you raise your blade against a Khinishman?”
[138] “Would you raise yours against a blademaster?”
“You are no blademaster, though perhaps you were trained by one,” Streln said. “The tradition is dilute in you, more dilute still in those who emulate you. If your shield were twice nine nonned blademasters strong, I would fear you indeed.”
Verlein slid a hooked dagger from one of the many sheaths at her belt. Dabrena cursed herself for not disarming them all at the door, but the breath she drew to object caught in her throat. Lamplight swirled into the dagger’s strange metal and was swallowed in quicksilver vortices. Verlein held point and pommel in her fingertips, tilting the dagger to augment the effect, and said, “Do you know what this is?”
“A magecrafted blade,” Streln said. “A very old one. A very little one.”
The corner of Verlein’s mouth pulled up and back. “This is a cheit, one of a kenai’s three weapons, each of which must be passed to a worthy student before death. I received it from a kenai, who received it from the kenai who trained her. A flesh-and-blood kenai, who found me worthy.” She sheathed the hypnotic weapon abruptly and said, “You’ve relearned your heritage through dusty tomes. I look at you and want to sneeze.”
“It was always in us,” Streln replied, unperturbed. “It survived in the blood, in our way of life. I have heard of the kenai blademasters. They worked alone. You have tried to create a legion of kenaila, an unnatural thing. Your kenai master, if such she truly was and not merely the descendant of thieves, has rejected you. You have turned a rare art into something rough and crass. Your ‘blademasters’ are cottars wielding sharpened sticks.”
The insults bit so deep that even Dabrena felt a twinge. She had been a cottar once, in a way still was. Verlein grinned, a feral baring of teeth that made the blood run cold. Her eyes shone. Her face was flushed. “Try me, Streln.”
“Sit down, the both of you,” Dabrena said.
“And if we won’t?” There was nothing bellicose in Streln’s question. He seemed genuinely curiou
s—but with an intensity suggesting that her answer would matter very much to him. “What will you do then?”
Dabrena was through with his tests. “Lock you in here and let you lop each other’s limbs off,” she said, “and solve the irritation of yourselves. We’ve gotten—”
“That might ruin your tidy chamber,” Streln persisted, taking a step closer to the table, to her. “Drench your tapestries in blood. Nick your pretty table.”
[139] Dabrena raised her eyes and met his steadily. She had not asked him here. He was an irritant, a self-styled killer who had no place in the lightless world she was trying to shepherd. Until he’d imposed his physical presence on her holding, it had had productive dealings with Khine. Yes, she had thought to delegate those at this table. Yes, that was a misjudgment. She would reevaluate. She would investigate his unsettling claims. But she did not have to endure his instigations. “If you have something straightforward to say, Streln, say it.”
Pelkin, Evrael, and Verlein all started to speak, but Dabrena belayed them with a gesture.
“You may call me Headman.” Pleasure curled in Streln’s voice.
“I will not accommodate you,” she said, and waited.
“You see no use in this world for blades. You think to reason with those who wield them. You think to bleed the shieldmaster’s hard-won ranks, send trained fighters inland to reinforce ditches. Perhaps you think to make use of the ships I’ve commissioned, brokering our mastwood trade with an eye toward a patrol of your mainland coasts. Perhaps you would rather waste Khinish seafolk on what you believe is a fool’s vigil. But imagine, for a moment, that that child in the corner is Eiden Myr. And suppose, just for argument’s sake, that one of my men ... Eldrisil ... were to take that child and hold a blade to her ...”
It happened before Dabrena could translate whatever subtle sign of genuine command he sent his guard. Kara was squealing, suspended by the back of her tunic at the length of a muscled arm, punching and kicking the air. The other muscled, banded arm held a blade curved like a scythe.
“... and, with one nod from me, were to—”
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 17