Dabrena’s chair was in her hands and driving toward the brown bulk of the Khinish guard. He was pinned between its legs, against a tapestry, turned two-thirds to her, one elbow bashed against the wall, the arm dropping loose. Kara was scrambling to her feet, uninjured, the fall didn’t hurt her, and blood was pouring from the guard’s neck. The chair’s legs had ripped his tunic and probably the flesh underneath. Why was his neck ...
Dabrena’s wild focus did not take in that a knife had pierced his throat until she saw him grab for it. His eyes, a mirror of the shock in her own, slid away, seeking guidance from his leader, but the life went from them before he found it.
She shoved herself back. The chair’s legs grated against stone through the tapestry before it fell and the wood jarred apart against the floor. Some visceral part of her wanted it to be the guard’s bones. She reached for Kara without looking, pulled her tight against her [140] side. A palsied trembling took hold of her body. She wrapped every nerve, every muscle tight.
“Waste of a good blade,” said Verlein. “That stone will have ruined the point.” The hand that had launched the knife was only now dropping back to her side. Her words were brusque, but she looked shaken. Not because she had just killed a man without a moment’s reflection. Not because Evrael held a dagger against the cavity below her ribs. She was staring at Kara, the way you’d stare at a child just snatched from beneath a wagon’s wheels, still seeing the averted disaster.
A nonned things could have caused that blade to go wild and hit Kara instead.
Dabrena wrenched her gaze around to Streln. “What lesson did you hope to teach by this display?” Kara’s heart was pounding against her hip, her little hands fisted in the skirt of her white velvet tunic. Dabrena tightened her grip, not letting her look at the dead man.
“What lesson have you taken from it?” Streln said. His voice was silk. It did not belong to a man that stony.
What could she say to such a man? He wasn’t foreign because he was Khinish. He was foreign because when you put blades in people’s hands they became something that no human language would reach. “That you are the kind of man who would waste a life to make an irrelevant point,” she said at last.
“The shieldmaster took the life,” Streln said.
Verlein could have killed Kara as easily as the Khinishman.
Streln went on, “I have demonstrated that under threat you would use force to defend what you cherish and you would be unable to control the shieldmaster. Perhaps my man would not have harmed the child. Perhaps I would not have given the order. It would have been irrational, absurd, yes? But perhaps I would have. Verlein did not wait to find out. Neither did you.”
“Your demonstration is lost on me. Get out.”
“And if I refuse?”
She would have snatched the blade from Verlein’s scabbard and plunged it into his heart, if I didn’t have the child if there were hands I trusted to put her in while I did it—if it wouldn’t betray everything I stand for.
You wear mender’s white, but you are no mender.
You do understand his point, it’s a valid point despite the madness of its making, you just don’t want to hear it.
This wasn’t even the issue under discussion.
He’s trolling for something else.
[141] But what? She couldn’t think. Had he sacrificed a man and threatened her flesh and blood to throw her off kilter!
“If you refuse, I will call for your removal. Some of the armed folk in this chamber will press to effect it and some will resist. You will then find out which are which. Perhaps that serves your purposes. It does not interest me. Our work here has nothing to do with you. Go back to your island and stay there.”
Streln pressed his fist to his heart, looking her straight in the eyes, before he turned to leave. The gesture chilled her. In the ancient codices, martial forces were pictured giving fealty to their leaders with such gestures. Among the Khinish in her lifetime it had ever been an open hand. Now it was a fist.
The lonely, cadenced tap of one pair of boots echoed down the passageway. Everyone turned toward the sound; even the runner being sick in the far corner lifted his head to watch the door. Weapons came up, guards adjusted the lines of their bodies.
“Am I late?” said a voice from beyond the doorway.
When the weapons lowered a fraction, their bearers assessing him as no threat, a short man in scholar’s gray stepped into the chamber. He looked around, brows rising as he took note of those assembled; then something made him turn, and he saw the man slumped among overturned stools under a blood-smeared tapestry.
“Ah,” he said, very softly. “Yes, it appears I am.”
Evrael stared at the scholar with no comprehension and no interest. What he was seeing was an afterimage of Streln’s movements as he set up his own man to die. Eldrisil was a good man, young and earnest if sometimes coarse, from a family of moderate stature. He might have risen, given time. A hard worker. A loyal son. His death was a loss to Khine.
Streln had thrown him away.
He would have to justify this in hall. Evrael saw no way for him to do it except to claim a preemptive, hotheaded overreaction from the shieldmaster. Did Streln hope to leverage conflict with the shield? Put the mainland at odds with him, defying any need for alliance, spitting on their ideal of cooperation? Evrael had watched him work Dabrena as he would work an opponent in a dirt wedge. He changed lines on her fluidly, now supporting Verlein, now mocking her, now praising the holding, now challenging it. Dabrena had put up her blade. It was the correct response. Let him tire himself rather than chase after his whimsical shifts. What Streln had done shocked him to the core. This was not the man he knew.
[142] What a fool he was, not to have realised how deeply Streln had steeped in Lerissa’s poisons.
The appearance of the scholar was so ill timed it was humorous. Verlein felt hilarity bubble up. She quashed it. A reaction to shock. Streln had ordered his man to threaten a child. It was unthinkable. She had not expected Dabrena to react so quickly, so fiercely. That was too bad; she would have spared the man’s life. But it was done now. She had Dabrena’s measure. She had Khine’s, as well, though not its fleet’s. And here came the Isle of Senana, in the form of a bald Weak Legger as thick and tough as a stump, pale-eyed and ash-skinned, bearing no weapon but a penknife and a sack of quills and scrolls. This was not the head scholar, who was a pale, redheaded Highlander. Nor was it the keeper of codices, who was a woman and black as night. Just some lackey.
And he had the misfortune to walk in on this.
“What should we do with him?” Selen said under her breath. Dabrena thought she meant the scholar. Find the dullest task you can and set him to it, she thought, and let that be our response to Graefel’s insult. Then Selen prompted, “They won’t come for him if we just stand here,” and she was glad she’d kept her mouth shut.
She turned to Evrael. “Is there a ceremony you observe? We have a chamber where the bonefolk ...”
“Take him to your chamber,” Streln said over his shoulder. “The fleetmaster would cast him into the sea.”
Dabrena did nothing until Evrael nodded; then she looked at Verlein, who moved toward the dead man. Eldrisil. Eldrisil tul Khine, Eldrisil who was of Khine. Their connectives cast the dead in the past.
To the scholar, she said, “You are late, you are not Graefel n’Traeyen, and you can tell him his mockery missed its mark by as much as you missed the meeting. Stay and work, or go back to Senana, it’s up to you.” She took Kara’s shoulders firmly in her hands and crouched before her. “I must bear the dead to the bonefolk’s chamber,” she said. “I am partly responsible for the loss of his life. Will you follow me quietly?”
“No,” Kara said. “I want to help carry.”
Sweet spirits, absolutely not. I don’t even want you to get a good look at him. “Are you sure?” You’ll bear the scar of this the rest of your life. Streln made good on his threat to harm you, though your body is whole. I [143] sho
uld have kept you closer. I should have placated him. I should have silenced him. I should have killed him. But Streln had gone, and his remaining man with him.
“I want to help carry him,” Kara said again.
“We’ll all do it,” Pelkin said, we were all party to this act,” and they did, bearing him down passageways and stone steps, Verlein at the head to take the most weight, Pelkin and Evrael at the sides, Dabrena and her tiny daughter at the feet. Kara never faltered, and when they left him in the cold, dark chamber, she was the one who gave him into the spirits’ keeping. She looked to Evrael for aid in getting his full name right, as if she understood something of how the adults around her were connected, when Dabrena thought she’d been daydreaming or counting her beads in the corner. At the last moment she bent down to whisper something into the dead man’s ear. Taking her hand as they left that chamber, Dabrena asked what she had said, but Kara wouldn’t tell her.
The child and her secrets.
“There was more for us to discuss,” Pelkin said outside in the corridor, with a neutral glance toward the scholar, who despite Dabrena’s dismissal had followed at a respectful distance, with the other runners, Verlein’s seconds, Selen and Loris, and the handful of holding folk who had joined them as they passed. “Perhaps in one of those scriptoria or maphalls you wished to show us?”
The noon bells had not yet rung. Dabrena felt a brief vertigo, that so much had passed in the space of less than a morning. She still had not recovered from seeing her child held aloft by a man with a blade. They don’t know, they can’t know what happened, what I did. ... She realised that both the old man and the fleetmaster were standing closer than propriety dictated, as if to buttress her with their respective strength and years. Verlein stood at the closed door to the bonefolk’s chamber, saying something in a low voice; her woman, though watching the passageway, mouthed the same words silently. Selen and Loris awaited her, as Narilyn and Reiligh and Corle and the others would await all three of them at noon, to hear the report. It would be disheartening to give them news of only petty strife and pointless death. Perhaps something could be salvaged. She must not let Streln win.
As if reading her thoughts, Evrael stepped even closer, shielding his words from his sailors’ ears, and said, “He’s made you hate him, and he’s made you fear him. Do not permit him to wield that power. Step down from your position if you must. Somewhere deep inside you will always fear, now, the moment when he comes for your child and you are too late to stop him. It will hinder you in what is to come.”
[144] “I have always feared the moment when someone comes for my child and I am unable to save her,” Dabrena murmured. “What difference if it’s your headman? I fear shadows and nightmares, I fear the heat, I fear the chill. Streln has gained no ground he didn’t already own.”
“Nonetheless,” he said, and stepped away.
So did Pelkin. She felt diminished. He held a reserved strength and wisdom too easily overlooked until you felt its absence.
Dabrena faced Verlein, whose chanting or recitation at the bonefolk’s door had come to an end. “You must leave this holding, Shield-master,” she said. “You took a life here. Stay the night if you must, but be gone by morning bells.”
Verlein nodded. “You may call on my blades should you need them again,” she said. “For defense, not ditches. But you take my meaning.”
If I need you to kill someone else I’ve already incapacitated, I will send word immediately, Dabrena thought. But “I do” was all she said, and she bowed to Verlein, who had been a harvestmaster once, as she had, and Verlein, though not of the holding, returned the bow before she went.
Evrael followed suit, with his seafolk and no further acknowledgment.
Dabrena turned to find Pelkin dismissing his aides to find rest or food. He wanted his word with her in private. “There is a maphall you might find interesting,” she replied at last.
“Maps!” said the scholar. “I’d love to see some maps.”
Dabrena had forgotten him. Moving toward them through the ill-lit passageway, he looked like some smoky, stunted reversal of a bone-man. “I gave you your instructions.”
“Don’t punish me because you’re peeved at Graefel.”
“It was Graefel I invited, not an aide, and he declined.”
“He was wrong.”
“Yes, he was. Now go on with you.”
“I’d get lost, like any vocate. Rather follow you.”
Her flare of exasperation guttered into weary puzzlement. Did he think he was a vocate, wearing the dove gray the vocates had worn under the old Ennead? Was he some crackpot who’d wandered in here looking for a hierarchy gone the better part of a nineyear?” Graefel didn’t send you,” she guessed.
A bright, happy smile lit up his whole face, like a child’s. “His exact words were ‘Bleeding spirits, go then, if it means so much to you, but leave me in peace.’ Does that qualify?”
Loris came forward bearing a short sedgeweave scroll that looked [145] the worse for wear and was crimped in the center, borne by a bird. “This came in under Senana’s seal,” he said, reading as he walked. “It says that should Adaon n’Arai l’Ivrel become an irritant, pack him off without hesitation, but ... uh ...” He lifted his eyes from the message and blinked. “... under no circumstances send him back.”
Dabrena rubbed her face. “Give him a meal, Loris, and find him some copying to do. We’ll discuss assignments later.”
Loris frowned. “I should accompany you and the—”
“Selen can record. We are fewer now, there’s no need for two scribes, and I know you have work to do.”
It came out like a dismissal. That wasn’t how things worked here. But he knew she was tired. He handed the scroll and his own sedgeweave leaf to Selen—all right, that was a bit petulant, the equivalent of saying “Fine then, you compile the report”—and moved to follow the small crowd that was dispersing down the passageway. There were fewer dead these days—now and then someone succumbed to old age, or some field injury they could not heal, or what used to be called magesickness, poisoning from improper handling of certain pigments—but holding folk remembered when the dead lined the corridors, and stopped whatever they were doing to show respect.
Dabrena made a gesture of encouragement to the scholar with her chin. “You follow him,” she said, and added a nod, as if he had failed to understand that he was free to go.
“I’ll follow you,” he affirmed cheerfully.
She couldn’t be bothered. Taking Kara by the hand, she led Pelkin to the nearest maphall, the scholar at their heels. Kara kept turning to look at him, and twice Dabrena’s grip saved her from a fall. Once she giggled, and Dabrena looked back to see the quick-smoothed innocence of someone who had just made a face.
“My name is Kara,” she said over her shoulder as they entered the hall. “Kara n’Dabrena l’Tohvar.”
Dabrena herself nearly tripped. Kara resolutely refused to speak to strangers. It was one reason Dabrena was loath to take her home to the Fingers. All her relatives would be strangers.
Inside, the low hubbub of banter fell silent and the scene went as still as a picture in an illuminated codex. Someone froze with a chalk sketch in her outstretched hand; someone searching through a large volume let it fall open with a thump, ignoring whatever spread it revealed.
Carry a dead man through the corridors, and people moved to follow, somber but long past shock. Lead the Ennead’s head reckoner into a hall of onetime warders, and the world ground to a halt.
“Good morning,” Pelkin said, and bowed to them. The noon bells [146] rang, as if the holding itself were bent on correcting him.
The hall emptied, although there was good light at noontime and they generally worked through till supper.
“What did you say to the dead man when you gave him to the spirits?” the scholar asked Kara.
Frowning, distracted, Dabrena said to Pelkin, “They were warders, take no notice of them. Here, let me show you .
..”
“His name was Eldrisil,” Kara said to the scholar as Dabrena led her to the table by the far wall, under the high window, where sunlight never fell directly to bleach the enormous, sectioned representation of Eiden’s body assembled there, leaf by leaf.
“You were a warder, too,” Pelkin said, “and I abandoned you as surely as I did them.” He smiled at the impressive cartographical assemblage, and for a moment Dabrena saw another face under his face, a familiar one from long ago, and felt a pang she didn’t understand. It reminded her of a light so bright it would have bleached these leaves of ink as no sunshine could.
“Did you wish Eldrisil a smooth journey to the spirits?” the scholar said, and Dabrena turned, sensing a shift in his voice. He was on one knee in front of Kara, and Kara leaned forward, her free hand cupped over her mouth, to whisper an answer in his ear.
Leave my daughter alone! was making its way from Dabrena’s mind to her mouth as the scholar said, “Ah. That’s a fine journey wish, young Kara,” and stood up to examine the map. What Dabrena found herself saying was “How did you get her to do that?”
“Why don’t you ask Kara?” he said, looking sidelong at Dabrena, then back at the map.
The child’s stubborn face gave a clear answer. Then she pressed between them so she could see the map, too.
“She has to have some secrets from you,” the scholar said, peering closely at the long, smooth rivers veining the Low Arm.
“That’s the River Koe,” Kara said, pointing with a care not to touch the sedgeweave. “Up here it splits off into the River Loge, which runs down into Maur Aulem.”
He has no idea what he’s saying. Dabrena watched her daughter happily gloss the unlabeled map for this man she had met scant moments before. He might have just explained to Dabrena something she had agonised over for moons. Kara had to have some secrets ... if she couldn’t have secret chambers to play in, quiet places for private time alone or with special friends, she would make secret chambers in her mind, and Dabrena could never go there.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 18