It was an exaggeration, of course, but it felt as if he had been standing here for days beneath the carefully dispassionate gaze of these two young men in their blue and silver uniforms. He and Ulrich waited on a stretch of newly-cut road that was only a few leagues long, one of the tangible evidences of peace with Valdemar. These bits of roadway linked Karse and its former enemy, bridging the distance from a Karsite road to a Valdemaran one, and giving real traffic a place to cross. On the Karsite side was a gatehouse and a pair of guards where the old road joined the new one. On the Valdemaran side were facilities and guards nearly identical to their counterparts at the Karsite border-crossing behind him, except for the color and cut of the uniforms. The Valdemaran version seemed rather severe to Karal, accustomed as he was to the flowing scarlet and gold of the Karsite regulars, with the embroidered sashes of rank, feathered turbans, and brocaded vests. Plain tunics, plain breeches, only the tiniest bit of silver trim and braid... these men might have been mistaken for someone's lowest-rank servant, a stable sweeper or horseboy.
Like I was... even Father dressed more handsomely than these men do.
Karal's father had never worn such unadorned clothing in Karal's memory; the Chief Stableman of the Rising Sun Inn could boast beautifully embroidered garments from the hands of his loving wife and daughters. His pay might be meager enough, but he could put on a show fit to match anyone of his own station and even a little above. The clothing Karal had worn before the Sun-priests came for him had been plain enough, but he had been a stable sweeper, and anyway, he had only been nine. Not nearly a man, and in no way needing to prove his worth the way a man did.
I wish that there was some shade here. The sun that was so kind in the mountains, countering the chill of the breezes, was a burden here. His dark robes soaked it up and released none of the heat. But the situation was too new, too delicate, for any real amenities for the few who wished to cross from Valdemar to Karse. All brush and trees had been cut back from the road for a distance of twenty paces, so that the guards at either gatehouse had a clear view of anyone coming or going. Karal could understand that. This was not a job he would care to have, himself; the guards at the Karsite side were clearly nervous, and the ones here probably were as well. This was only the second time that he had seen a real Valdemaran up close, one of the Hellspawn themselves—
No, not Hellspawn. Her Holiness, the Son of the Sun, High Priest Solaris has said that was all a fiction created by corrupt priests. They are not Hellspawn, they never were. Just people, different from us, but people.
Hard to undo the thinking of a lifetime, though, and if it was hard for him, it must be incredibly difficult for people like the officers in the Army. How must that be, to go to sleep, only to wake up the next day and find that your demonic enemies had become, by Holiest decree, your allies? To learn that they were not demonic at all, and never had been?
To discover that a terrible war that had killed countless thousands over the course of generations should never have taken place and could have been ended at any time?
Karal sighed, and his master Ulrich dismounted from his mount, a placid and reliable mule. Ulrich was no horseman, and moreover, he was a most powerful Priest-mage. He might need to work magic at any time, and needed a riding beast that would stand stock still when the reins were dropped, no matter what strangeness it heard or saw. The mule—which Ulrich called "Honeybee," for she was sweet, but had a sting in her tail in the form of a powerful kick when annoyed—was older than Karal, and looked to live and carry her master for the same number of years. Karal liked her, trusting her good sense to bring Ulrich through any common peril. Storms didn't spook her, uncanny visitations could not make her bolt, she knew when to fight and when to flee, and she was surefooted and wise in the way of trails and tracks.
But she was boring to ride, and while he could not have wanted a better mount for his master, she was the last one he would have chosen for himself.
"Patience, Karal," Ulrich said in an undertone. "Our escort is probably on his way this very moment, and will be surprised to see us waiting. We are early—it is not even Sun-height yet. You may worry when it lacks but a mark or two before Sundescending."
Karal bowed his head in deference to his master's words. Ulrich was surely right, yet—
"It seems ill-mannered, sir, to have us cool our heels at the border-crossing, when you are the envoy from Her Holiness," he said doubtfully. "And to send only a single escort—it seems a deliberate slight to me. Should we not have many guards, perhaps a Court Official, or—"
Ulrich raised his hand to halt his young protege in mid-thought. "We are two, coming from the south, wearing the plain robes of some sort of priest," he pointed out. "If the Queen sent an escort of a score of her Guards, what would the obvious inference be? That we are envoys of Her Holiness, of course. There are perils along the way, not the least of which are those who will not believe that the war between our lands is over."
Ulrich waited patiently while Karal thought out the rest of the perils for himself. Mobs of angry border people, or even a single, clever madman could plan to kill old enemies; assassins hoping to eliminate the envoys and thus the alliance were a real possibility. Even mercenaries could try to slay the envoys, hoping to start up the war again and thus ensure continued employment. For that matter, the threat need not come from a citizen of Valdemar—it could come from someone from their own land, hoping to rekindle the flames of the "holy war against the Hellspawn."
Karal shook his head mournfully, and Ulrich just chuckled. "That, my son, is why I am envoy and you are a novice. I requested that we be met by but a single escort, though I also requested one who could be trusted completely. I fear that it takes years of being steeped in deception and infamy to recognize the possibility for both."
Ulrich patted Honeybee's neck, and she sighed. Ulrich nodded at the mounts, at their own equipage. At the moment he and Karal were wearing only the plainest of their robes for travel. "As we are, with a single escort—yes, we are dressed well, and clearly Priests from a foreign land, but we could be from any foreign land. Unless we have the misfortune to come across someone who has seen a Sun-priest, we should meet with no one who will recognize our robes or our medals. Valdemar is awash with foreigners these days, many of them being escorted to Haven even as we. I think that we shall not draw undue attention to ourselves."
Karal did not answer his mentor, but in this case, he thought privately that, for once, Ulrich might be wrong. He took another covert look at the Valdemaran guards, compared the Sun-priest with them, and came up with an entirely different answer than Ulrich's.
They were both dressed with relative modesty, compared to the magnificent garments they would don once they were in the capital city and the Palace, but there were still a myriad of ways that anyone who had ever seen a Karsite would know who and what they were.
They both wore their Vkandis-medals on gold chains, first of all, round gold disks blazoned with a sun-in-glory—and how many people of moderate importance ever wore that much gold? For that matter, was there another sect that used that particular blazon? Their garments had a cut peculiar to Karse; certainly Karal had never seen any foreigner attending Her Holiness who wore anything like the Karsite costume. And if they were of moderate importance, why send an escort at all?
Oh, I suppose I worry too much. Ulrich is right; if what we have heard is true, there are foreigners arriving daily who are so outlandish that we shall not even attract a second glance.
Ulrich was certainly not particularly remarkable—many novices passed him by every day, thinking him a Priest of no particular importance. He was, in fact, utterly ordinary in looks and demeanor—of middling height, neither very young nor very old, neither handsome nor hideous, neither muscular nor a weakling. His gray hair and beard and perpetually mild expression belied the sharpness of his eyes, and his expression could change in a moment from bemused and kindly to implacable. These Valdemarans seemed to be of no particular physical
type; one of the guards was lean and brown, the other muscular and blond. Not so with the two Karsites, for both were typical of anyone from their land; Ulrich could easily have been Karal's hawk-faced father; they were two from the same mold, dark-haired, dark-eyed, sharp-featured.
Perhaps that was all to the good, too. Outsiders might assume that they were related. Better and better, in fact, since Karal doubted anyone outside Karse knew that the Sun-priests were not required to be celibate or chaste, though many of them swore such oaths for various reasons. So if he and Ulrich appeared to be father and son—it might be that no one would think they were priests of any kind.
Karal rubbed his temple; all this thinking was giving him a headache. Ulrich patted his shoulder with sympathy as the guards continued to ignore them.
"Don't worry about it too much, young one," the Sun-priest said, with a kindly gleam in his black eyes. "Try to get used to the new land first, before you devote any time to learning about intrigue and hidden dangers. There will be enough that is strange to you, I think, for some few days."
The Sun-priest—the Red-robe who was once one of the feared and deadly Black-robe priests of the Sunlord, a wielder of terrible power and commander of demons—looked back down the road they had come and sighed. "You have seen so many changes already in your short lifetime, I should think you will cope better with this new place than I. To you, this must seem like a grand new adventure."
Karal choked back a reply to that; little as he wanted to be sent off into this voluntary exile, he wanted still less to be sent home in disgrace. But he did not think of this as a "grand new adventure," nor any kind of an adventure; at heart, he was a homebody. His notion of a good life meant achieving some success as a scholar, perhaps finding a suitable partner among the ranks of the female Priests, growing older, wiser, and rich in children and grandchildren. Yes, he had seen changes aplenty since he had been taken from his own family at nine, and being subject to having his world turned upside down before he was twelve had not made him any readier for having it turn again at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, or now, at sixteen.
In fact, most of the time lately he was just plain bewildered, and there were moments when the stress was so great that he feared it was visible to anyone who looked at him.
Is there not some barbarian curse that wishes your life be interesting? If so, then he should find the barbarian who had visited such a curse on him and persuade him to remove it! He found excitement enough in books for anyone's lifetime.
At nine, he had been his father's apprentice; a horseboy and stable sweeper, and supremely content with his position and the world. He loved horses, loved everything about them, and looked forward to rising to take his father's job when he was old enough. He had three sisters, two older and one younger, to tease and torment as any small boy would, and a little brother who toddled after him at every opportunity with a look of adoration on his chubby face. There was always food enough on the table, and if it was plain fare, well, there were folk enough who had not even that, and he knew it even then. He had been happy as he was. He had not wanted any changes that he could not foresee.
By now he had seen enough of other families to know how idyllic, in many ways, his own had been. Both his parents were as ready to praise as to reprimand, and no matter what mischief he had been into, he could count on forgiveness following repentance. His Father was proud of him, and was teaching him everything he knew about horses and horseflesh. His world was full of things and people he loved; what more did any boy need?
There was only one cloud in all their lives—the annual Feast of the Children, when parents were ordered to bring their children to the Temple to be inspected by the Sun-priests. The examinations began when a child was five, and ended when he was thirteen. The Feast always brought suppressed terror to every parent in the town, but it was especially hard on Karal's father and mother, for both of them had had siblings who were taken away by the Priests, and were subsequently burned for the heresy of harboring "witch-powers." There was always the fear that one of their children might be taken—and worse still, might be given to the Fires. Even those who were not thrown to the Fires never saw their homes and families again, for that was the way of the Sun-priests. So it had "always" been.
For four years, the Priests had passed Karal over, and his father and mother had begun to lose a little of their fear, at least for his sake, if not for the sake of his younger siblings. Even he began to feel a cocky certainty that the Feast would never mean more to him than an occasion to claim a double handful of spun-sugar Vkandis Flames from the Priest's servants when the inspection was over.
But then, the year he was nine, his world and his certainty shattered.
A new Priest came to the Feast; a new Priest in black robes, rather than red, a Priest who watched him with narrowed eyes—
—and claimed him for the Sunlord.
One moment he had been standing with the others in a neat line—the next, a heavy hand came down on his shoulder, and two servants seized him before he could react, ushering him into the Temple, pushing him past the altar into the rooms beyond, where the townsfolk were never permitted, only those belonging to the Temple.
He didn't remember much of that day, or even of the following week, which might have been due to shock, or to the potion the Priest gave him to drink when he launched into hysterical tantrums. He had been the only child chosen from his town, and there was no one else he knew to share his ordeal and his exile. He vaguely remembered a long ride inside a dark wagon, which paused now and again so that another blank-eyed, stranger-child could join him on the bench. No spun-sugar for him or for them; only a bitter cup, a long period of shadow-haunted daze, and then the awakening in a strange and hostile place—the so-called Children's Cloister, where he and the others would live and study until they were accepted as novices or given duties as Servants.
Or until someone said they had witch-powers. He shuddered, cold creeping over him for a moment, as if the sun had lost its power to warm him.
In time, Karal came to accept what he could not change. He was told that he would never see his family again; that he was reborn into a new and greater family, the Kin of Vkandis.
They allowed him time to rebel, one chance to attempt to run away. This was unsuccessful, as were all such attempts as far as he ever learned. A terrible creature of flame caught him at the gate, and chased him back to the Cloister. He never made a second attempt, though he heard that others did; he resigned himself to his fate.
Then began the lessons, hour after hour of them.
Most of the children did not master much more than the barest skills of reading and writing; those were sent, at ten, to become Servants. Some, a fraction of the rest, were taken off by the Priests for "special training" that had nothing to do with scholarly pursuits.
Some few of those were given to the Flames, later, as witches. Karal and the rest were required to attend the burnings, and he was told that the ashes were returned to their families as a mark of the disgrace to their bloodline. The three burnings he had witnessed still gave him nightmares.
For some reason, Karal did well in scholastic pursuits and did not again attract the attention of those who meted out "special training." He found a pure pleasure in learning that was as great as his pleasure in anything he had ever experienced. He soon outstripped most of the others who had originally been "collected for Vkandis" with him. This gained him admission to another group of young pupils—the offspring of nobles and the well-to-do, sent as their parents' tithe to Vkandis, children who had the advantage of tutoring from an early age. These had never before been forced to share teachers or quarters with those of the lower classes... they resented this new development in their lives, and needed someone to take their displeasure out on.
And that had opened him to a new series of torments—not overt, but covert. He pleased his teachers, and the young nobles could not cause him trouble in his classes, but outside those classes, he was fair game for any p
rank they could invent that would not call down the wrath of their Keeper on them.
He shook his head, driving away the unpleasant memories for now. None of that mattered, then or now. I have to remember that. What mattered was that he had graduated into the ranks of the novices with high honors, despite the opposition of the other students, and when the time came to be taken by a mentor, he was selected by that same Black-robed Priest who had singled him out at the Feast of the Children.
Only now he knew what those ebony robes meant. His new mentor was a Priest-mage, a user of magic in Vkandis' name, and a summoner of demons.
He would have been terrified, if Ulrich hadn't immediately shown his kindly nature. And every morning since that day, he had offered up a paean of gratitude with his other prayers that it had been Ulrich who had chosen him. His Master had rank enough that not one of his fellow novices dared to torment him further, though they could, and did, shut him out socially.
Not that he cared. His Master was a scholar, and set him scholarly tasks that suited his nature. When his Master learned of his background and his love of horses, he suggested he find himself a mount early enough that the horses and mules were not all picked over. Ulrich made certain he had time out, every day, to spend at least a mark or two with his beloved gelding, Trenor. For a week or two, everything was well; he thought for certain that the future was again predictable.
He had already suffered two upheavals in his life—being torn from his family and being shoved, will-he, nill-he, into the ranks of those born far, far above his station. Now he suffered the third, but this time, the entire Kin of Vkandis "suffered" along with him.
Vkandis—the God Himself—selected a woman to be the Son of the Sun, in a fashion that brooked no denial of the validity of her claim to the position. That woman, High Priest Solaris, proceeded to set the entire established hierarchy on its side, declaring things that had been established orthodoxy for generations to be perversions of Vkandis' Word and Will.
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