That argument I felt as well, but Isla snorted contemptuously. “They aren’t here to defend themselves. Why should I trust anything you tell me?”
My attention was torn between Argoyne and the contest—between Isla’s grim hostility and my own uncertain intent. Glancing aside, I saw that the nerishi-qa had begun to spin, flinging out kicks and blows as if from the heart of a whirlwind. His balance and the stability of his qa on the uneven ground of the meadow seemed unnatural to me, almost inhuman. I could not have done what he did. Even at this distance, I feared to encounter such a master.
The young shin-te retreated steadily, dodging from side to side to foil the onslaught, occasionally diving beneath a kick to improve his position. If he discerned any opening in the assault—as I did not—he took no advantage of it.
But the Archemage had not faltered. He pointed at the White Lords before us. “They believe they’re in the right,” he answered. “In the right! As if being in the right has anything to do with knowledge. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ have to do with how knowledge is used, not with knowledge itself.”
Every word he uttered seemed to whet his fury. His tone was as sharp as my fang. I felt its edge against my heart, although Isla held him helpless. My masters might have spoken as he did.
“I tell you on my soul,” he rasped bitterly, “if there were fifty mages of my kind in the world, I would not have formed an alliance with them against the White Lords. I don’t want the White Lords dead. I don’t even want them hurt.” He strained at Isla’s grasp to express his ire. “But I will not stand by while my knowledge and my life are erased as if they never existed.”
She opened her mouth to voice an objection, but he overrode her. “That is not a claim your White Lords can make,” he insisted. His vehemence seemed to flay at the air. “They do wish me dead. They wish my knowledge destroyed. Because they believe they’re in the right.
“Oh, they’re as pure as sunlight,” he raged, “and just as cruel. Do you think they care about Vesselege? You delude yourself. They could have ended this war whenever they chose.” His voice rose to a shout against the pressure of her arm. “They could have stopped! But then I would have been able to keep my life and my power. All the land would have seen that I attacked no one except in my own defense. And that,” he cried, “they can’t tolerate because they are in the right.”
Then he subsided to bitterness. “They’re so pure that they’re prepared to see the whole kingdom laid waste to prove it. As if ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have anything to do with war.”
At the edge of my sight, I saw the shin-te fall under a vicious wheel of blows. At once, kicks like adzes hacked at him among the grass and flowers. Several he blocked, but one caught him a glancing blow at the point of his hip. As he regained his feet, I saw a small twitch of pain on his cheek. His stance suggested a subtle weakness in that hip—a hurt that slowed and hindered him.
My heart went out to him, alone among his enemies, but I could not help him there. The meadow might have been leagues or days distant. I could do nothing until I found my way through the maze of Argoyne’s self-justification and Isla’s hate.
Troubled, she looked to me. Apparently she desired some response. She had not been swayed—not as I had—but the Archemage had touched a nerve of uncertainty in her, which she did not know how to relieve.
I took hope from her glance. “Heed him,” I urged her softly. “Would the mashu-te be enriched if there were no nahia? If every master of the shin-te were slain? If the nerishi-qa ceased to exist? Light must have darkness, Isla. Without contention, the Fatal Arts would have no purpose. Therefore the shin-te teach ‘acceptance of that which opposes us.’”
When I saw my words strike home in her, I turned toward the mage. Deliberately I toyed with my fang so that he could see it in my hands and know that I, too, might choose to kill him. Studying the blade, I asked, “What is Goris Miniter’s place in this?”
Black Argoyne coughed an obscenity. “The tyranny of the pure is easily manipulated. Miniter knows he’ll never truly rule this land if he can’t rule the mages. And he doesn’t have the power to do that directly. Not without drowning Vesselege in blood. When he was done, he wouldn’t have anyone left to rule. So he’s playing on the purity of the White Lords. Using it to make them do what he wants. They think he serves them because he knows they’re in the right. The truth is, they serve him because he knows how to lie.”
Isla tightened her hold. “And you don’t?”
He groaned his distress and exasperation. “Of course I know how. But I’m too tired to bother. I don’t want to rule anybody. Right now the only thing I want is to keep myself and my knowledge alive.”
When she eased her pressure, he added, “I’ll tell you how you can recognize the truth. If my champion wins”—again he indicated the image before us—“if that poor young man finds some way to defeat the enemy of everything he believes— Those self-righteous fanatics won’t stand for it. They’ll intervene. They’ll strike him down themselves. They’ll accept their own ruin to prevent me from surviving.”
Darkly, he muttered, “And I still expect treachery from Goris Miniter.”
Isla seemed to think that she had found the flaw in his self-justification. As if she were pouncing, she demanded, “‘Accept their own ruin’? What good will it do them to strike the shin-te, if they’re destroyed in the process?”
“Oh, ‘destroyed.’” Argoyne made a dismissive gesture. “They won’t be destroyed. Fewer than half of them took part in the oath of this contest—the oath which seals them to its outcome. The ones who swore will die. The rest said they would abide the result, but that’s only because they think their champion can’t lose. If he does, the War will go on as before. They’ll say I betrayed the challenge. As long as Miniter stands by them, no one will question their story.”
To my surprise, I found that I believed him. I was nahia, disinclined by nature and training to trust men and women who predicted the actions of others. But Isla had taught me that those who prized their own scruples did not think as I did.
Belief tempted her as well. That was made plain by the doubt which darkened her gaze, the way her teeth gnawed the inside of her cheek. Where the nahia studied habits of mind, the mashu-te served convictions. Was she not prepared to sacrifice her life to gain Argoyne’s defeat? Then would the White Lords not do the same? If they were certain of their own purity, as the Archemage insisted?
However, her uncertainty led her to questions which I would not have considered important.
“So that young shin-te is your only hope,” she snarled in his ear. “If you’re telling the truth. You can’t betray the oath of this contest, and you won’t try, even though you assume your enemies will attempt treachery.” Word by word, she tightened her arm on his neck until he again began to gape for air. “So tell me why you’ve done everything you can to weaken him. Explain why you’re trying to make sure he loses.”
His eyes bulged wildly. “That’s madness,” he gasped. “I’ve done no such—”
She clenched his throat. “You took his memory! You prevented any of us from learning anything from all those tests!”
“Isla,” I put in sharply, “let him breathe.”
The glare she turned toward me had the force of a kick. Still she eased her arms again, granting the Archemage air.
“Do you think it’s easy,” he panted quickly, “bringing people back from death?” With both hands he pulled against her grasp. “Do you think all I have to do is wave my arms and wish? You don’t know what you’re asking.
“If you reanimate a corpse, what you get is a walking corpse. A body without a mind. But restoring the mind— Ah, that’s hard. Dreams, memory, reason, layer by layer, you have to bring it all back, or the corpse isn’t fully alive. And hardest of all to bring back is the spirit, the”—he muttered a curse—“you don’t have words for it. It’s qa, b
ut it isn’t—not the way you think about it.” Squirming against Isla’s insistence, he tried to explain. “It’s the resilience and hunger that makes people want to go on living in the face of death. When you reanimate a corpse, if you restore the memory of death, and don’t restore the spirit that refuses to accept it, what you get is a madman.
“I’ve been fighting a war here.” Sorrow mounted in his tone as he spoke. His plight might have been the same as the young shin-te master’s. “The whole time while I tested you, I’ve been fighting for my life. And I’ve been losing. When I brought you back from death, all of you, I didn’t have the time or the power to do everything. So I chose to keep you sane. Instead of making you whole. You’re all useless as warriors without qa. So I held back memory instead.”
I could see—as Argoyne could not—that he baffled her. Her anger could not accommodate his account of himself. Frightened by uncertainty, she demanded, “Then why did you restore our memories when you were done with us? Why did you bother?”
“I hoped,” he admitted, “that if you were whole you might find some way to help me. But even if you didn’t—even if you hated me too much to try—” He sighed, sagging within his robes. “I couldn’t bear to leave you that way. You didn’t ask to serve me. And nobody deserves to be crippled like that. To be alive without memory or spirit—” He shrugged weakly. “You’d be better off dead.”
At another time, I might have contested this assertion. Whole or crippled, I did not wish for death. I knew it too well, and the knowledge had done me great hurt. For the present, however, I left Argoyne’s belief unchallenged. Where Isla suffered confusion, I felt only urgency. I did not know how long the young man could endure his opponent’s assault—or how long Goris Miniter would abide the uncertainty of his own fate.
Hampered by the pain in his hip, the shin-te was forced to counter-attack. He could no longer afford to await openings which he would then ignore. If he failed to drive the nerishi-qa back, he was finished.
His weakened stance gave rise to an awkwardness which began to impede his blocks and parries. Blows which he had once deflected with ease now threatened him. His hands seemed to stagger as he warded strike after strike away. Lessened in grace and speed, he appeared helpless to save himself when his ribs were left exposed to a slashing kick. Only the concentration of his qa betrayed his intent.
As the kick arrived like the sweep of a mace, he flipped his legs from under him and dived backward below it. The strength of the blow and the momentum of his own fall he used to spear the fingers of one hand into the pit of his opponent’s groin. At the same time, he swept his other arm around the nerishi-qa’s leg and rolled so that he bore it beneath him to the grass.
Before the White Lords’ champion could wrench free, or scissor another kick, the shin-te cut with his elbow deep into the nerves at the back of the nerishi-qa’s thigh.
When the nerishi-qa regained his feet, his jaws were clenched on a pain to match the shin-te’s, and his own stance hinted at weakness. A new respect disturbed the arrogance of his gaze.
The time had come. Deliberately I made my choice.
“If Goris Miniter means treachery,” I asked the Archemage, “what form will it take?”
Argoyne shrugged. The question did not appear to interest him.
I indicated the image before us. “Are you able to show other scenes? Can you spare the power?”
“As long as my champion is still alive.”
Containing my exasperation, I pursued, “Can you reveal our surroundings?” At once, however, a more useful question occurred to me. “Can you detect movement within the keep?”
The mage snorted. “There isn’t any. We’re alone.” His tone suggested that he had been deserted long ago.
“What’s the point, Asper?” Isla did not look at me. Disturbed by Argoyne’s answers, she kept her gaze on the young shin-te while she wrestled with her hate. “The contest is there, not here.”
“But if the King means treachery,” I retorted, “it will be done here.” With every passing moment, my urgency grew. “He cannot interfere with the White Lords’ champion.
“Can you do it?” I demanded of the Archemage.
He lifted his hands to show that he was helpless without his scrolls.
“Isla,” I instructed the woman who had saved me from despair, “release him.”
She turned to me hotly. “Have you lost your mind? As soon as you let him touch his scrolls, he’ll put us back in that cell.” She secured her grip. “He’ll turn us to dust. We’ll be dead before you can blink.”
“No,” Argoyne and I said together.
“Do you ‘assume,’” she shouted, “that you can trust him?”
“No!” I yelled in return. “I assume that the man who troubled to make us whole again after we had failed him has no interest in our deaths!”
She faltered. The simplicity of her loathing for the Archemage did not sustain her. He had challenged too many of her beliefs—as I had as well. “Treachery” was not a threat which the mashu-te suffered lightly.
“Asper—” she breathed, warning me.
With an effort of will, she removed her arms from Argoyne’s neck.
Instantly his hands plunged among his scrolls, scrambling for the one he sought. When he found it, he slapped it open before him. “Movement?” he croaked as if she had damaged his throat. “Movement?”
Without transition, a new scene—smaller, and apparently more distant—appeared beside the meadow and the contest. The image showed a stone passage, featureless apart from the mage’s eternal lamps and the doors on either hand, and entirely empty.
Empty except for the brief flutter of a black robe at the corner of the corridor.
“By the Seven Hells,” Argoyne muttered, “you’re right. Conniving bastard!” He meant the King of Vesselege. “They’re already inside. I can feel”—he paused momentarily, then announced—“six of them.”
From his scroll and his power, he produced other scenes, all of passages within the keep, all empty—and all defined by glimpses of stealth.
Somehow the intruders eluded more direct observation.
Ro-uke.
I did not hesitate. I had made my choice. As I left the table, running, I called to Isla, “Guard the door! We must have one of them alive!”
“Alive?” She did not appear to understand me. “Alive?”
“We must have evidence!”
If the nerishi-qa did not study honor as well as killing, I did not know how to combat them. I had seen the young shin-te slain once. I did not expect him to triumph now.
From the doorway I flung myself into the outer corridor.
_______
Six of them— If they were allowed to reach Argoyne’s chamber, they might slay him, regardless of his defenses. Theirs was the Art of Assassination. And their weapons were many.
An hour ago, I would have applauded the Dark Lord’s death. But now I did not mean to see the Mage War decided by treachery.
I wished for other weapons myself. My fang’s range was limited. But first I required a vantage from which I could watch over the Archemage without hazarding him. I could not seek out the ro-uke—I had recognized none of the corridors revealed in Argoyne’s images. Therefore I must await his attackers.
A quick circuit of the passage showed only one stair rising to this level from below. That was fortuitous. I might be able to hold one stair against six ro-uke—although I doubted it—if they came at me singly, and did not take me by surprise.
Already, however, I had made a false assumption. And assumptions of all kinds were fatal. Because the scenes which Argoyne had opened in the air appeared distant, I had believed that the ro-uke were likewise distant.
As I hastened down the stair to select my point of vantage, a trident bit into my shoulder, tearing at my flesh with such force that I was throw
n to the wall.
My fall became a tumble on the edged stone. I could not yet feel the pain of my wound, but only the shock of impact and the hard stairs. Later, if I lived, I would chide myself for a fool. Now, while I plunged downward, I reached out with my qa, measuring the trident’s path toward me, gauging the location of my enemy.
When I struck the floor, he was no more than four paces from me, charging with his ro-uke katana upraised to sever the skull from my spine. Masked in black from head to foot, and voluminously robed to both conceal and contain his weapons, he might have been a long scrap of shadow cast by a torch held in an unsteady hand.
But the illumination in Argoyne the Black’s keep shone without wavering, as endless and unmoved as stone.
Within two strides, the ro-uke folded at the knees and pitched onto his face with my dagger buried in the base of his throat. His sword slithered from his grasp, skidding its steel across the floor.
Now the pain of my shoulder came to me, and I knew at once that the points of the trident carried poison.
How swiftly the toxin would act I could not guess. And there were five more assassins to be considered. I did what I could, however. Retrieving my fang, and snatching up the katana, I ducked behind the foundation of the stair. There I pulled back my torn robe to examine my wound.
Some poisons were swift—others, slow. Some might be endured by a concentration of qa and will. To others I was immune. But the nature of this toxin had not yet revealed itself. Gripping my courage, I dug my fang into the wound until my shoulder bled heavily. Perhaps the worst of the poison would be flushed away.
Past its stone foundation, I saw no one approach the stair. No one advanced at my back. No sound carried from above, where—or so I prayed—Isla guarded Argoyne’s door. After a moment spent to quiet my heart and my fear, I risked leaving the stair in order to peer beyond the corner of the corridor behind me.
My fang I again secreted within my robe. The sword I bore before me, ready for use.
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