by Kari Cordis
Kindri didn’t seem to be the patient sort, though that had not been Androssan’s impression of her from the brief glimpse he’d had at the ’Meet. She didn’t wait more than a few moments before she leaned forward again, lithe as a crouching panther, and said, low and intense, “Give it to me…or on Mother’s grave I tell you I will take it.”
He gulped, paling, and then, to Androssan’s disbelief, slowly lifted trembling hands and removed the delicate crown of wrought gold off his head. For a second he stared at it, looking rather bewildered, then very slowly offered it to his daughter.
Face flaming into sudden, victorious, terrible beauty, she took it, unhesitatingly placing it on her silvery hair and staring at the old king with tears sparkling in her angry eyes. “If it had meant anything to you,” she whispered, “you never would have given it up.”
Androssan felt like he’d aged a hundred years. He couldn’t remember the last time his heart hadn’t been pounding. But this charming little drama wasn’t done yet. Nobody had said a word and Kindri just stood there, waiting, chin tilted proudly in the air, satiny hair tossing fitfully in the cold breeze. With a sudden realization, it came to Androssan that she was waiting on recognition. And he knew, without any deeper understanding of Cyrrhidean politics needed, that that meant Traive…the outcome of this family schism, the fate of the sovereignty, and the future of the Realm, were resting on the square shoulders of the Lord Regent of Cyrrh.
He didn’t know what kind of rules Cyrrh had about succession, but if there was anything in there about abdication under duress, they were doomed. Traive was rumored to be unswervingly loyal to the Skylord; and maybe just the fact that she was a woman was enough to disqualify her claim. The Border Realms were still deeply traditional…though it seemed her recent performance on gryphon-back should have been enough to allay any fears about being able to lead in battle.
No one moved. No one seemed hardly to breathe. Traive still had that clenched, unreadable expression on his face. The General thought the suspense was getting a little unbearable—Northerners preferred a faster pace to their dramas. Then, finally, something happened.
Traive, so gracefully that Androssan thought he was fainting, sank into a bow over his arm, and for the first time in the history of the Realms paid obeisance to his monarch with the word, “Skylady.”
CHAPTER 44
He came to slowly, not sure where he was or if he was even alive. The absence of light was so complete it was utterly disorienting. But then he became aware of the gentle pressure on his chest, the faint movement, and in a rush it all came back: the catastrophic collapse of the passageways, the end of the gods, the fight in the Hall of Sacrifices, everything. Slowly, Ari moved his arms closer around the life nestled against him. She had survived. The world might have ended, but Selah was still alive.
He had known, from the moment Rheine had revealed who he was and the role he was to play, that he was probably not going to survive this whole plot to ‘destabilize’ Zkag, as she’d so quaintly put it. But he had prayed with every ounce of his being that his friends might…and Selah. (What an, er, surprise to find out she was the Empress and could take care of herself rather well without him.) And now, for a few seconds out of his most ardent dreams, she lay quietly in his arms, their hearts inches from each other, their bodies curled protectively together.
It couldn’t last, of course, and in a very short time, she had murmured something and drew away from him, leaving a cold spot where her body had lain.
“Are you all right?” he asked thickly.
“Yes.”
He coughed, throat closing with the dust hanging in the air. It was still thick with it; maybe there hadn’t been that much time that had passed.
She moved completely away from him and he could hear her scrabbling amongst the rocks—it was very strange having no visual input at all. And then, wonder of wonders, she plucked just the right rock and a faint ray of light shot across the ruined passageway. They looked at each other in delight, faces blurry with the dimness and the heavy, clogged air. He rose to join her on the big pile of rubble and was brought up short in agony. His calf! Pain like the worst Charlie horse in the world shot up his leg. He bent quickly to rub it out and found a goose egg the size of an orange rising off the back of his leg.
She was at work, moving rocks with deft haste away from the roof, letting more and more light in, and he hobbled awkwardly to help.
“Where’s the light coming from?” he panted after a few minutes. They almost had enough rocks out of the way to push their bodies through.
“There,” she said laconically, pointing through the hole they’d made. He had to lean his head down to get the right angle. On the other side of the cave-in, the passage ceiling had been fissured and was letting in light from the outside as if from another, dimly remembered world. In a few short minutes, after scrabbling their way through the hole, they were looking at it from the other side. It was far too narrow to allow passage, and the light filtering weakly down to them seemed to come from a long way away. The crack stretched away from them down the passageway’s roof, more a teasing glimpse of freedom than path of escape, but at least it was a source of light. They were still attached to their food and water, but the torches were buried under piles of rock. They had no way to light them anyway.
It didn’t even occur to them to not continue. The cave-in kept them from going back the way they’d come even if they wanted to, and there was certainly nothing in the immediate vicinity to make them want to settle down and starve to death. Food and water would run out before long, but hope is a funny, impractical thing.
When the light faded hours later, they rested, munching on distinctly dust-flavored buns and gritty raisins. Once past the cave-in, the passageway had continued almost indistinguishable from the one they’d been in, only the split in the ceiling overhead a reminder that things were definitely different on this side of the chamber of the gods.
“They’re really gone?” Ari asked, stewing over it. That had been a very revealing few minutes, in that chamber. Some of the things he’d heard defied belief. Some weren’t even decipherable. When she mumbled an affirmative, he said, “They’ve been just men…all along. All these centuries. Pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes.” It was inexplicable to him, men with such power, and then men with such power that had used it the way they had. All those Ages of War…
“Why hasn’t Il done something about this before now?” he asked suddenly. “How many centuries has it been clear that the gods weren’t going to play fair? How could He just let this go on?”
“He is much farther-sighted than we, Ari. It’s pretty ludicrous for us to try and condense even a couple days into a nice, pat little chunk of time we feel we understand, never mind millennia. In the end,” she said, “the ultimate answer to why He doesn’t destroy evil is because He wishes so desperately for everyone to come to know Him. Even the gods He bears no ill will, and had they repented and turned to Him even in their last moments…He would have welcomed them.” Her voice was sad, but he didn’t feel any sorrow at all. The Whiteblades were gone because of the gods.
“So He just lets evil go on and on and on…” Ari said. He couldn’t really believe that—the God that he had come to know, that was so full of love and forgiveness…how could it be the same One that let misery just drag on continuously?
“Well,” she said, “let us consider those beings that DO just get rid of people that aren’t perfect or don’t fit their idea of it. Hm. That would be humans. The gods, for instance.” Silence fell. He was still feeling rebellious. “Ari,” she said, low, persuasive, and well aware of his mood, “He is not a God that we can understand. He doesn’t fit into any of our preconceived notions like a nice, neat little story. His whole essence is about shocking us with His love, upending our lives with His glory, giving us more than we can possibly imagine or wish for…and taking away, and allowing pain and sorrow and suffering to hone the edges of our spirits. Were He a static,
comfortable sort of distant presence, how would we ever grow and stretch into greatness, yearn for holiness, know the deep, soaring joy of Truth?”
He chewed blackly at his dust-impregnated bread. Verrena was right. Il had turned his world upside down.
They walked all the next day with their eyes on the seam of rock overhead, hoping it would widen. Ari refused to think about this passageway ending in a blank wall or another cave in or going on into infinity while they ran out of sustenance—though his subconscious was doing a fine job with it. His dreams were rank with a helpless panic he refused to acknowledge awake.
When they stopped that night, his leg was aching almost unbearably. Selah ran an expert, soothing hand over the knot, shaking her head. “You’ve torn one of your major tendons pretty badly. It’s going to take a long time to heal.” She looked up at him in sympathy, standing close in the gloom, and it took everything in his power not to sweep her into his arms and permanently attach his lips to hers.
Clearing his throat, he backed against the nearby wall and sat down. She settled opposite him, unfortunately out of the thin light, rummaging in the rapidly collapsing sack for food.
To keep his mind off her lips, he said with studied casualness, “One thing I don’t understand…”
“Just one?” she was smiling in the dark. He could feel it. He was sure he could feel every move she made.
“How did I get here?”
She chuckled. “The usual way, I assume. You grew up around animals, Ari, you know the way these things work.”
His face went scarlet in the dark. “No!” he said quickly, “I mean…what you said in there when you introduced me. What Rheine told me…”
“How you can be the offspring, many generations removed, of a disembodied man?” she said seriously, and sighed. “I’m not sure I have the answer. We know Raemon was an absolute lecher—his craving for that particular benefit of the flesh was well-documented. The gods had figured out how to hear thoughts, how to send power through inanimate stones, how to appear to anyone in the Realms—they had that desk with buttons in their chamber, though they had no legs to reach it or fingers to move the switches—so I assume Raemon could figure out how to get a woman to conceive with his child. For a short space of time, no more than a couple hundred years, he became fixated on the idea of having a son, a ‘demi-god’ he termed it. Who knows why. He was one of the vainest, most self-glorifying monsters I’ve ever had the displeasure of spending five hundred years with.”
“Well, the problem was that Raemon had changed the women of his people, ‘touched their wombs’ is how their language sums it up. Tarqinas didn’t have anything but multiple-infant births. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten children at a time became the norm. To the point that quadruplets became the sign of unhealthy breeding capacity and those women usually nobly offered up as sacrifice. So, Raemon’s offspring almost instantly became an out-of-control endeavor. I think he was picturing a single child to raise up, one that would have a son of his own, who would in turn bear a son, etc. Well, when his first try resulted in six children, four of which were boys, he was in a dilemma. He didn’t want four sons, and no girls at all, but one just couldn’t callously dispose of excess demi-gods if one wanted the rest of one’s society to honor such creatures. So he had to come up with an excuse and then killed off that whole batch—he had a bestial disregard for human life, which he was so good as to pass on to his people.” Her voice was wryly bitter. Ari missed the torch, missed being able to see her face and look into her eyes.
“Then he started over, carefully fixing it so that he produced just one boy. However. One of the girls from the first batch had been spirited away…by some fool priest who thought he could use a demi-god as a political tool. He carefully controlled her breeding, and for centuries the highest ranking priest—back then it was a priestess that served Raemon directly and all the men sort of fought among themselves for the other positions of power—kept this line going, kept track of all the individuals spawned from it. But boy did the ’Shard come alive when Raemon found out.”
“How did he not know?” Ari asked. “Wasn’t this all going on right under his nose?”
“In a sense,” she allowed. “Though he was pretty busy warring with the Realms, and to be honest, he doesn’t really pay that much attention to the Tarq. But he was forced to when one of the illegitimate individuals stumbled into one of these restricted access halls. I can only assume they were built when the gods walked as men…there’s no other reason for them to be here and only those with the blood of the gods can get into them. Well, the poor kid had no idea what he was doing; it was a complete accident. The Tarq didn’t even know this alternate web of passages existed. But the gods were convinced it was a plot by Raemon’s out-of-control people and forced him to do something about it. I feel he must have been alarmed at least a little himself,” Selah drawled. “You know now how effective most of their dealings with Raemon were; I’m pretty sure they couldn’t have persuaded him if he didn’t want to be.”
“Well, the official histories relate to us that ‘Raemon repented of his ways,’ a fluffy euphemism for the single-minded hunt for and extermination of well over a thousand people. He stayed away from human women after that, but somehow, the search for Gaermon, (which means ‘of the blood of Raemon’), went on and on and on and they kept finding one here and one there and another secreted away in Skoline, and another in the slave pits at Czagaroth…This went on for centuries. Personally, I suspect they became even more valuable as potential tools, so that those ambitious enough and hungry enough for power dared to hide one away now and then. It was a mess. Raemon became so infuriated at the inability to clear the whole thing up that it became a capital offense—meaning a trip straight to the altar of sacrifice—to be found hiding or protecting a Gaermon.”
“So my mother…” Ari said heavily. This was unreal.
“She found out that she was…” Selah said, in a much gentler voice. “Most of them weren’t told, since the idea was to use them. You didn’t want them getting ideas about themselves. But she discovered it when she was sold to a Skoliner—the Tarq that sold her insisted on keeping the young she was still nursing, though the new owner wanted them all. She was pretty strong-willed, according to what Rheine found out, leaving her batch of children to pursue a very slim hope of sanctuary for just one, the eldest.”
“I have brothers and sisters?” he cried. He wasn’t sure he was happy about that, given the lifestyle of the average Tarq. What would they talk about?
But Selah was quiet for several seconds, and he realized he was being stupid. They would not have let them live. “Rheine thinks she ran—which is a crime punishable by death in Swamp Town—because she knew she was found out. That the Sheelmen were coming for her.”
Silence fell. Images ran in tortured circles through his head, his imagination insisting on providing him with pictures of things he’d never wanted to know. He came from inhuman stock.
“Was Perraneaus really under Raemon’s spell?” he asked quietly, remembering another confusing little tidbit from their chat with the gods and wanting to change the subject.
“Mm. It was most fortuitous, that earthquake. We’d never been able to get our hands on the Coffer, and to have it right there, and then the confusion available to actually destroy it…I think Kai saw me do it, though.” Her voice was pensive in the thick dark.
“But if Perraneus wasn’t still…uh, entranced by the time of the Kingsmeet,” Ari said quickly, hardly wanting her to be dwelling on thoughts of Kai just now, “then why did he make his predictions anyway?”
A rich moment of silence fell. “There are other powers than Il’s in the world,” she said quietly into it, her voice velvety strong, “and though all are lesser and seek to destroy those who use them, the power is real enough. Perraneus truly foresaw the future—though everyone misconstrued Raemon as the wielder of the destruction to come—and he gave his life to warn the Realms.”
He thought of
the oily light of Raemon’s triele, of his own fear of that darkness coming to invade his own being, seize control of him.
“I thought I would go mad,” he admitted into the silence. “When I found out—I thought to be a Tarq meant I’d lose my mind…turn into a man-killing monster.” He felt a little foolish, a little uncertain about saying the words out loud, but why not? At this stage of the game, why not?
When she chortled at him, he looked up surprised and half-offended, which was immediately swept away by a feeling of such buoyant normalcy that he wanted to laugh.
“People who are going mad don’t usually worry about the trip, Ari,” she said. “You were dealing with an enormous psychological shock…a temporary upset which has been mistaken by many for a permanent state. As with everything that focuses us inwards, the relief is found outwards.”
That would have made no sense to the Ari wandering in turmoil through the jungles of Cyrrh, but it did now. Verrena’s words came drifting back to him. “I had to look up,” he muttered, lying down wearily. Heartsore for the Followers, leg pounding out a rhythm of pain, his inner body was still at such peace as he never knew could be.
“The Imperial 45th is here, your Majesty.”
Kane waved his hand absently, not even looking up from the sandtable. “Put them over by Finnansterne, where the action’s the lightest, and tell them they’ve saved the day,” he rumbled, voice rough from the smoky air. The Sheelmen had had good success so far with setting the Daphenian plains on fire—repeatedly. Most of the Knights bore some evidence of this, running around with singed beards or blackened armor and smelling like a campfire.
The King of the Eastern Seas grabbed a gorgeously carved pewter figurine from the supply at hand, adding it to the battle plan laid out before him in the sand. It was painted like a Northern infantryman, and he forgot about it as soon as his fingers left it. Imperial troops weren’t the most resolute creatures ever to grace the Realms, which they made up for with their vast and unbreachable sense of self-satisfaction, but for decency’s sake every soldier headed to die should be told he was a hero while doing it. Androssan could have sent a whole half regiment and it wouldn’t have made any difference. Kane’d heard the western flank was as hard-pressed as he was, but that was hard to imagine—the numbers it would take to keep up that kind of pressure on both flanks…well, the thought was enough to curl your beard.