The Mountain of Kept Memory

by Rachel Neumeier

  “Your Highness,” said Prince Gajdosik, his tone unreadable.

  Oressa turned to him. To her surprise, she was almost as afraid for him as for her brother. She wished there were living gods she could pray to for their safety. She said sharply, “You be careful too! If anything happens to you, I don’t want to have to tell Laasat!”

  “No,” said Gajdosik, and just looked at her for a long moment. He said at last, “Fortune favor you, Your Highness, and attend your efforts.”

  “All of ours, I hope!” said Oressa, and turned her horse away hastily before she could change her mind. She was sure they didn’t stand and watch her ride away, because that would be a stupid waste of time. She didn’t look back, either, because she didn’t want to see the distance between them widen.

  The main gates were heavy, made of the whole trunks of huge trees imported from northern Illian. The logs had been smoothed, polished, bound with brass, and magicked against breaking or burning. They were still in fine shape. The wall to the left of the gates had been magicked too, but not with the same care or strength, apparently, because it lay in shattered ruins for thirty feet. With a hole like that, there wasn’t much point in closing the gates, which stood wide open. There were soldiers watching people come and go—not many people. Admittedly, Oressa had never been down to the main gates at dusk in her life, but she suspected the presence of those soldiers inhibited normal Carastind traffic. Even from a distance, it was clear the soldiers were Tamaristan.

  “What would I do if I came back to Caras and saw soldiers like those at the gates and hadn’t had any advance warning?” Oressa asked Big Fellin.

  The man shrugged. “Depends how confident you are of the Kieba’s support and, you know, active goodwill.”

  Oressa thought about it. “Let’s say I’m pretty sure,” she decided at last.

  “Then if you want to ride straight up to them and demand to know what’s going on and who’s their lord and who told them to watch the gates, we could do that, Your Highness. That’d be reasonable—if we had the Kieba at our backs. Too bad we don’t have one of those spider things,” he added wistfully. “Then it’d be easy.”

  “If we had a spider thing, we wouldn’t need subterfuge.” Oressa wished very much they did have a spider thing and didn’t need subterfuge, but since they didn’t and did and the whole point was to get the soldiers to take her to the palace so she could create a huge misleading fuss, she added, “But we’ll pretend the rest of it is all true and ride straight up to them, just like you said. Remember we don’t know anything—but we’re confident the Kieba supports us. And remember we’re not supposed to fight. We’re supposed to get captured, although I guess if we can talk those men or Bherijda himself into surrendering, that’d be all right too.”

  All the men grinned, though Maki, the youngest, looked nervous, and Evad looked like he wished they could fight rather than meekly surrender.

  “All right,” said Oressa. She put on her most confident princess manner and nudged her horse into a fast trot, straight at the Tamaristan soldiers.

  And it should have worked. It was going to work—it was working: The soldiers were startled, wary of their apparent confidence, impressed by Oressa’s royal outrage when their captain dared lay a hand on her horse’s rein. Everything was fine. Until they actually came to the palace and were immediately escorted to the pink atrium, where her father, with an air of never having lost control of events for even a moment, received them.

  Prince Bherijda stood beside her father, like an ally or even a friend, but King Osir hadn’t changed at all. He looked exactly the same: cool and uninvolved and perfectly immovable. Seeing him now, Oressa found it almost incredible that she’d ever thought Gulien could take their father’s place in Caras or in this palace. She found herself believing that the age could turn and the Kieba vanish into time and that her father would still be right here, still compelling the world to work exactly the way he wanted it to by the sheer ruthless force of his will.

  Except that Prince Bherijda leaned casually on the back of her father’s chair, which no one ever did, and it was he who gestured for his soldiers to release Oressa’s men and stand back. Oressa didn’t know how he dared treat her father so dismissively, but then the Tamaristan prince did seem arrogant.

  Prince Bherijda was younger than she’d expected. He looked like he was only about her own age, twenty or so, though she knew he was several years older than that. He was dark, like Gajdosik, and like his brother, he had blue eyes, though his were a paler color. There was something about the angle of the cheekbones that was the same, but the resemblance wasn’t strong. Oressa decided at last that the difference lay more in how the two men presented themselves. Gajdosik was all brilliant energy; when he did something, he put everything he had into it.

  Bherijda wasn’t like that at all. He was shorter and plumper than his brother, but that wasn’t why he looked languid and uninvolved. That was all deliberate affectation. He wore a cloisonné scorpion medallion, green and black, pinned at his throat. Oressa recognized that. But he also wore some kind of amulet on a chain around his neck: a flat, round medallion of gray crystal as broad as a man’s hand. Runes sparkled on its face, as though light was shining out from inside it. Oressa had no idea what that was, except she was immediately sure it was a thing of power, a fragment of some dead god’s tool. She could tell Bherijda was proud of it by the way he lifted a hand to trace its runes when he noticed her looking at it. She was immediately afraid of it.

  Prince Bherijda stroked his thumb across his medallion again and smiled at Oressa, and that wasn’t real either. He smiled like he was hiding horrible thoughts behind his smile. Gajdosik only ever smiled when he really was amused or pleased about something. Bherijda’s smile was a lie straight through. Oressa hated him instantly.

  “So this is your lovely daughter,” Bherijda murmured. “One gathers she has been visiting the neighbors.”

  The Tamaristan prince spoke Esse very well, with even less of an accent than Gajdosik, but Oressa loathed his voice—too smooth and too nice. Ignoring him, she said to her father, pretending to be confused rather than frightened, “I guess a Tamaristan ally might be useful, but I don’t know whether the Kieba will like it—”

  “The Kieba has declared herself my enemy,” Oressa’s father said flatly. “Fortunately, this is not an insupportable difficulty.” He wasn’t wearing an amulet or medallion or anything: Oressa looked for one, thinking of the artifact the Kieba wanted, but she could see nothing. Her father wasn’t even wearing any rings or anything like that. But then he said that about being the Kieba’s enemy. She was sure he was. She was sure he meant to use Bherijda against the Kieba somehow, even if the Tamaristan prince wasn’t smart enough to realize it.

  Oressa longed to say Prince Gajdosik didn’t think he’d meet any insupportable difficulties either and look what happened to him, but of course she couldn’t. She meekly lowered her gaze. She felt like she’d never even left the palace or gone to the Kieba’s mountain. She felt like nothing of that had ever happened, and her father was exactly the same, and she was, and the only thing that mattered was appeasing him and slipping out of his sight.

  But that wasn’t what she was supposed to do at all.

  She started to say something about the Kieba and about Gulien, she hardly knew what, something plausible, only Kelian moved first. He took one step forward, toward Oressa’s father, dropped to one knee, and said, “Sire, I fear your daughter has fallen in with dangerous factions. She’s deceiving you. It’s not her fault, I’m sure. Prince Gajdosik has magicked both Princess Oressa and your son, and he’s bringing up a force of men from the harbor right now, meaning to destroy Prince Bherijda and overthrow you, sire. I think Gajdosik means to murder Prince Gulien and marry Oressa by force—”

  “What are you saying?” cried Oressa, outraged and horrified. She had never thought Kelian was an idiot, and now he came out with this?

  “What, indeed?” murmured her father
, his tone rather blank. He stared at Oressa.

  Prince Bherijda, straightening out of his indolent pose, snapped his finger for his soldiers to secure her few men. Oressa gestured for them not to fight. They had never meant to fight. They hadn’t prepared for battle, and besides, Bherijda’s men had taken all their swords. None of her men had more than a boot knife, and now, when she longed for a way out, there was no way.

  “We must apprehend my brother!” said Bherijda.

  Kelian said urgently, “Prince Gulien is with him, and they’re carrying scorpion banners and the eagle banners of the Garamanaji—”

  “Did you hear?” Bherijda snapped, speaking to an officer of his, a tough-looking man who straightened to attention and waited for orders. Decisiveness was a trait Bherijda unfortunately but very clearly shared with his brother, because he said, without a trace of his previous indolence, “I want my brother alive. Is that clear? Not the men; kill them all, but don’t on any account harm Gajdosik! He will surrender if you promise to spare his men—make any threats, any promises, but take him safely. Is that clear?”

  Oressa’s father stood up slowly. Though he should have appeared powerless in this room filled with Bherijda’s soldiers, he nevertheless drew all eyes. He said in a cool, level voice, “If my son is harmed in this, Prince Bherijda, I’ll have your brother’s head for it.”

  Bherijda gave him an astonished look but said smoothly, “Of course we shall take all possible care,” and added to his men, “See to that as well.” Then he smiled at Oressa and said, “And see Her Highness to her rooms. I’m sure she is exhausted if she’s had to deal with my brother.”

  Oressa gritted her teeth, trying to decide if Bherijda had meant that the way it sounded.

  “Her Highness claims she knows all the secret doors in the palace and swears she can get out of any room in which she’s imprisoned,” Kelian put in quickly.

  “Secret doors?” said Prince Bherijda, his eyebrows rising.

  “Does she?” murmured her father, gazing at Oressa with sharpening interest.

  Oressa said nothing. There did not seem to be anything left to say.

  CHAPTER 18

  The dusty streets of Caras, crowded on both sides by the rickety frames of market stalls and by the blank whitewashed plaster walls of shops, seemed at once familiar and strange to Gulien. The colorful awnings of the shops had all been taken down; the market stalls stood forsaken and quiet; even the public fountain at the edge of the Crescent bathhouse was deserted. Or not quite deserted, Gulien saw: An old man had come to the fountain with a clay jug, but he had withdrawn softly into the recessed doorway of the bathhouse at their approach.

  It should have been a young woman at the fountain, not an old man. It was girls and young women who fetched water for their families, lingered at the fountains to meet their friends, and bought sesame cakes and sweet ices and brittle amaranth candy from the venders who crowded about to take advantage of their custom. Today there were no young women, no venders calling their wares. Only one old man and a grim silence.

  “They do think we’re your brother’s men,” Gulien said to Prince Gajdosik. He had not thought the hastily made scorpion banners looked very convincing. The man who had made them had not had very much green cloth to work with; each long banner was a different shade, and one banner had been pieced together out of three different kinds of cloth. The black scorpions looked hardly more persuasive: neither painted nor embroidered, but simply cut out of black cloth and pinned onto the banners. The pins glittered in the sunlight, to Gulien’s unvoiced dismay. No real banner would be stuck through with metal pins.

  But Prince Gajdosik had seemed satisfied. “People see what they believe they should see,” he had said, and as they had found their way through a broken place in the wall, he had gestured the standard-bearers to take their places with those false scorpions.

  Now the Tamaristan prince answered only, “So long as Bherijda thinks so too, for just long enough.”

  “And as long as we’re not ambushed by my own people,” Gulien agreed. Privately he was almost disappointed that the people of Caras did not try to hinder the Tamaristan invaders—though he had to acknowledge that their king’s apparent acquiescence to this invasion must be disheartening.

  He did not believe for one moment that his father had actually yielded Caras to any Tamaristan prince. But that his father would go to considerable lengths to make Prince Bherijda believe that he had—he could believe that. Osir Madalin would like nothing more than to arrange things so that in the end Bherijda, no matter his advantages of conventional arms or magical artifacts, would find himself utterly outmaneuvered and defeated. Then Osir would calmly go about restoring Caras and erasing all signs that any upstart Tamaristan princes had ever interfered with his city or his country. Gulien believed that.

  After that his father would take whatever artifact he had captured from Prince Bherijda—this Tonkaïan’s Resolve—and go on to pursue a war with the Kieba, a war that would lead to utter disaster for him if he lost and possibly to worse disaster for the entire world if he won. Gulien believed that too.

  He almost remembered Bherijda’s artifact, a fragmentary and discomfiting memory of sun-shot power that left earth and trees and stones and people slumping slowly into formless gray ash, bitter ash that blew away on a cold wind. Tonkaïan’s Resolve. Tonkaïan had been one of the shadowed goddesses, beautiful and terrible. Her aspect had been destruction-and-remaking. Part of Gulien seemed to half remember this fragment of her power, wicked and dangerous, that spawned plagues of dissolution. It had been part of something greater once, something that had been used for creation rather than merely destruction, but now it was only a fragment and could not be used for any good purpose.

  Frowning, Gulien pressed the tips of his fingers against his eyes for a moment, trying to remember. All he could see was the red darkness behind his eyelids. He had never read Tonkaïan’s name in any of his books. He was almost sure he hadn’t. That wasn’t his memory. It was the other memory, the memory embedded in the kephalos, shattered images and knife-sharp splinters of urgent emotion carried out of the past. They came to him more compellingly now that he marched through Caras at the head of a foreign—largely foreign—troop, his own men and Gajdosik’s at his back. He almost seemed to be somewhere else, someone else. He felt as though the familiar city somehow echoed with the voices of the dead.

  Maybe Bherijda’s artifact called up those voices. Maybe Tonkaïan’s Resolve preserved the voices of everyone it destroyed, held them forever in crystalline memory. . . . He could almost envision what that might be like. He shuddered.

  “Forgotten gods,” Gajdosik swore suddenly. “We can’t get through this! Which way should we go now?”

  Gulien looked around, blinking, embarrassed to find he had let his wits wander. He tried to drag his attention out of the fragmentary past and back to the immediate present. They had come, he saw, to Camian’s Way, a good, broad road that should have led straight to the palace. But Gajdosik was right: No one could get through Camian’s Way here. The whole width of the street, for as far as Gulien could see—admittedly not very far, through all the clutter—was blocked with overturned wagons, immense barrels and kegs, and broken stone hauled from the breached wall or perhaps from the shattered wing of the palace. Enough men working hard could clear the way, given enough time and given peace to work. But the brightly painted houses and dun-colored apartment buildings and whitewashed shops along this part of the street were tall and thick walled, with narrow windows to keep out the heat. There were no windows at street level, and furtive movement at the higher windows suggested that no Tamaristan company could count on peacefully clearing that tangled barricade out of their way.

  Gulien found himself rather more cheered than otherwise by this evidence of his people’s disinclination to accept the invader’s presence in their city, even if it was inconvenient just at the moment. He thought, briefly, of striding forward and calling out his name, shouting
up to those watchers in the windows to tell them who he was and gain their support. But no. There would be no way to stop his name going forward and out, carried by brave men who thought they could rally to him and take back their city. Then Prince Bherijda would be forewarned of their coming. He shook his head. There were tools that could have worked here, tools that could clear the street in moments. Tonkaïan’s Resolve, of course and, all gods dead and forgotten, he did not want to think of that artifact waking in Caras. But other tools, not so dangerous. Gulien almost knew what they were, almost remembered the names of the gods who had made them or used them.

  “Gulien!” snapped Gajdosik. “Which way should we go?”

  “Oh—” Gulien flinched and looked around. “Yes, back that way a quarter mile and we can cut around toward the Pengolian Square. That’s far too wide to barricade. From there we can take Culver’s Lane, or even go straight through the park. That might be better—”

  “We’re taking too cursed much time as it is,” muttered Gajdosik. “Yes, I remember the King’s Park from the maps. It’s got its own wall, isn’t that so? Well, we’ll see how that looks when we get there.” And he lifted a hand to signal the retreat.

  A thrown rock, rough-edged and heavy enough to kill a man, smashed down a handbreadth away as Gulien turned, and a pottery jug followed it as he stepped quickly sideways. Prince Gajdosik ducked and cursed. Gulien, also ducking, resisted the urge to wave approval of the thrower’s spirit, if not his aim. But he was glad the people in those buildings didn’t have crossbows.

  The King’s Park did indeed have its own surrounding wall, separating its fountains and raked sand and gravel pathways from the rest of the city. Its wall was intact, which turned out to be awkward, as they met another Tamaristan company—a real Tamaristan company of arquebusiers—just as they reached the park, so that they had to decide what to do: keep up their own pretense or fight right there, with their backs against the park’s wall and no way to break away if the fighting went badly. The other company was right across Pengolian Square, so they were a fair distance away, but to Gulien the difference between the real scorpion banners and their own makeshift banners was immediately and glaringly obvious.