The Mountain of Kept Memory

by Rachel Neumeier

  Oressa made a scornful sound, not looking up. “He’ll probably decide he loves having us quiet and contained and keep us chained up until he dies of old age and you succeed him. The Tamaristans used to do that to their heirs. Did you know that? You probably did.”

  Gulien gave her a curious look, then glanced at Gajdosik, no doubt guessing where she had learned this tidbit. He said mildly, “Not a custom that worked out very well.”

  “I’m sure Father will believe that if he does it, it’ll be different. Anyway, improper how? I have my own room, don’t I? Unless it’s Gajdosik’s injured dignity that worries you.”

  “There are worse places to be chained,” Gajdosik said dryly. He lounged in his chair, feet up on a small table and crossed at the ankles, head tilted back against the cushions, eyes mostly closed. He would have managed to look comfortable, except that he was also ashen pale. There were dark shadows under his eyes and lines at the corners of his mouth that Oressa was almost sure hadn’t been there even a day ago. She didn’t know whether she was seeing the effect of weariness or pain or grief or defeat, but she knew she was glad he wasn’t chained in the dungeons beneath the palace, in his brother’s power.

  “Father wouldn’t have brought me here unless he thought I wouldn’t be safe in my rooms,” Oressa added. “And he wouldn’t have imprisoned Prince Gajdosik here unless he thought he wouldn’t be safe in the dungeons, and he wouldn’t have chained you at all unless he thought you wouldn’t be safe anywhere else in the palace. Though I expect he’s also just furious. It’s a good punishment, especially if he wants to demonstrate his authority to you and everyone else, and especially if he doesn’t want you doing anything or talking to anyone. But,” she added, raising her voice slightly to stop her brother from interrupting her, “what I think is, punishment or not, he wouldn’t have chained us all here together in his own apartment if he had enough men to guard us all separately.”

  Gulien clearly hadn’t yet thought past his outrage and hurt pride to reach this obvious conclusion. He thought about it now. He said, “But it’s not Bherijda he’s afraid of—”

  “Maybe it is, though. He humiliated Bherijda.” That had been extremely satisfying, and Oressa paused for a heartbeat to savor the memory. Then she finished. “And now maybe he’s afraid of what Bherijda might do to get back at him.”

  “King Osir has something my brother wants,” said Gajdosik, not moving or opening his eyes. “Parianasaku’s Capture, I presume. Plainly my brother believes your father can be persuaded to serve his ambition. But not, obviously, forced.”

  “No one can force Father to do anything,” Oressa agreed. “But Father wants something from Bherijda, too, obviously, and plainly he can’t force Bherijda to give it to him or do it for him, either, or he would. If they have each proven to the other that they must join together to attack the Kieba, that would explain everything.”

  “Father wouldn’t . . . ,” Gulien began, but his voice trailed off before he finished his sentence.

  Oressa lifted her eyebrows at him. “Wouldn’t destroy the Kieba and then use his artifact to make all the endless plagues his personal weapons? Of course he would.”

  Gulien shook his head stubbornly but said nothing.

  She had always known her brother wanted to admire their father, that he wanted—even needed—their father to be a good man as well as a strong king. That was just part of Gulien’s wanting everybody to be better than they were. That was a good thing about Gulien. Except in this one area. Because he just never would see the truth about their father.

  Oressa had paused in her attempts to break the wire. She resumed bending the wire back and forth, though now she was thinking about the Kieba and her father and Bherijda and wondering how much time any of them had to do anything. Not that she could think of anything they could do, even if she could get free of Bherijda’s pretty chain. The wire was getting easier to bend, though. Maybe it would break before the next age dawned.

  Though she did not stop working with the wire, she said slowly, “Bherijda can’t just take Parian-whoever’s artifact. It’s something that was given to the Madalin kings, and nobody can take it away, not even the Kieba herself, certainly not Bherijda. But he wants Father to give it to him, or use it for him. And, you know, one of the ways he might try to make him is with a hostage. I wonder . . . I wonder how sorry he is now that he let Father take us away from him?”

  “King Osir surprised him, I imagine,” murmured Gajdosik. He had closed his eyes. But his voice, though quiet, was edged with something hard and aggressive.

  “If they fear each other,” Gulien began, and then stopped and said instead, “Oressa, what are you doing?”

  Oressa had finally broken the copper wire off the manacle, with a stifled hiss of triumph. Now, having slipped the wire into the manacle’s lock, she was discovering that it really wasn’t stiff enough to even feel anything properly, much less move the internal tumblers. “Nothing, probably,” she admitted, probing gently. “I was never very good at this. And this wire isn’t really . . .” She hissed again, this time in annoyance. She drew the wire out of the lock, bent it in half, and began to twist it to make a shorter, stiffer tool. It might be too thick that way, but the other way was hopeless.

  “Oressa—” Her brother stopped.

  “What?” Oressa looked up and found not only Gulien but even Gajdosik staring at her from their respective chairs. “I need something to do with my hands,” she said defensively. She slipped her wire back into the tiny lock, closed her eyes, and began to feel again, delicately, for the internal shape of the lock and the slotted tumblers.

  “What do you think we might do if you got that chain off?” asked Gulien. “I don’t imagine it would do any good to find Kelian and try to persuade him to bring over the guard to our just and noble cause.”

  Oressa opened her eyes again so she could glare at her brother. “I’ve already said I’m sorry about Kelian! I will always be sorry about Kelian! I swear, Gulien, I thought he was loyal and I thought he was quick-witted—”

  “I think possibly he is,” said Gulien.

  Oressa paused, staring at her brother. After a moment, she said, “Oh.”

  “He is, of course, loyal to your father the king,” Gajdosik said. His lifted eyebrows made this a question.

  “He lied to us,” Oressa explained. “But Gulien thinks he lied to Father as well. Or why all that nonsense about romance and magic, that’s what Gulien’s wondering. He thinks Kelian is too smart to believe any of that, which would mean he’s not Father’s man at all. But whose, then?” she added doubtfully. “Bherijda’s? Or I guess he might belong to Maranajdis, or one of the other Garamanaji princes.”

  “Whosever the man may be, I assure you, he is not mine,” Gajdosik said, his tone extremely dry.

  “But you did have agents in Caras,” said Gulien. “If one Tamaristan prince could have agents here, why not two? Why not Bherijda? Especially if he meant all along to come to Carastind and challenge the Kieba. It would explain everything—unless I’m missing something?” he asked Oressa.

  “No,” she said slowly. “No. It fits. It’s possible. Everyone has spies, of course, and getting a man into the palace guard, anybody would be glad to manage that. I bet it was Bherijda.” She was getting angrier and angrier as she thought about it. “We should have suspected Kelian. A man with no family or friends in the city? I mean, of course Erren checked his references, but Erren was always the sort to round off corners when he could get away with it, and Kelian seemed like such a find! Everybody liked him! I should have suspected him. But I actually believed that all those letters he sent north were written to his mother! Such a dutiful son! I’m sure!” She was disgusted and outraged, and she couldn’t even get up and stamp her foot because Gajdosik was watching and he would think it was childish. She said, trying with only moderate success to flatten her tone and not shout, “I’m going to—I—I don’t know, but he’d better not come near me next time I’m out on the roof o
r I’ll push him off.”

  Gulien chuckled, though she wasn’t actually joking. But he also cautioned her, “It may not be true, you know. Maybe he really was writing to his mother. Maybe he really did believe Gajdosik used some kind of artifact to bewitch us both. But it’s something to keep in mind, at least. And if Kelian might be a Tamaristan agent, who else might be? So, again, Oressa—what do you have in mind to do, if you get free?”

  Oressa began to work the wire inside the lock again, shutting her eyes to make the task easier. “Well, I suppose Paulin isn’t a traitor—but I don’t trust him not to be Father’s man. So we can’t trust him, either. And if we can’t trust anyone here, then we need to go somewhere else.”

  “North,” said Gajdosik.

  Oressa nodded.

  “And find your men, and recruit them to our banner, whichever banner we decide is ours, and ride back to Caras and fight Bherijda to the bitter end,” said Gulien. “And what about Father? Send him an ultimatum insisting he choose Bherijda’s side or ours?”

  “If we have a side,” muttered Gajdosik. He sounded tired.

  “Well, both Bherijda and our father are the Kieba’s enemies,” Oressa pointed out. “So she ought to be on our side.”

  “It’s a risk. Another risk. I would like,” Gulien said, with some intensity, “to free myself and you from these dead-gods-damned chains, even if for no other purpose than to stay right here and see what can be done once both Father and Bherijda are out of the city. We need to clear out the rest of the scorpion soldiers—and Bherijda’s magisters—”

  “Oh yes,” agreed Oressa. She looked at her brother with respect. She hadn’t expected him to be willing to defy their father again, at least not so directly and forcefully.

  “Then if—when Father returns—he’ll see—”

  “What?” Now she glared at him. “A demonstration of filial loyalty? As if he’d be impressed!”

  “Oressa, truly, you don’t know Father as well as you think you do—”

  Oressa made an unladylike sound.

  “Oressa,” Gulien said, this time in a tired, resigned tone that made her pause and look at him. He saw that he had her attention and said slowly, as though feeling for words that might make her actually listen, “Great-Grandfather killed our grandfather, you know.”

  Oressa stared at him, momentarily forgetting her efforts with the wire and the lock. “What?” And then, with instant suspicion, “Who told you that? Father?”

  “He killed our grandfather and Uncle Mikel,” said Gulien, ignoring this. “That’s how Father became heir. Oh, Great-Grandfather didn’t have them deliberately put to death. It was almost worse, in a way. He was just so . . . so ineffectual. Estenda set up this whole series of stupid little provocations, and Great-Grandfather just tried and tried to conciliate the merchant-princes. They got more aggressive and he kept trying to appease them, and of course the merchant-princes took all his efforts as weakness, so everything he did only made everything worse, until at last—”

  “The Little War,” Oressa said, frowning as she suddenly put things together. She had always known their grandfather had died in the Little War with Estenda. And their father’s brother Mikel, too. But that was all so long ago. She hadn’t even been born yet. She hadn’t, she realized now, ever really thought of Grandfather Gerrel or Uncle Mikel as real people. She scowled at Gulien. He hadn’t been born then, either.

  “Father doesn’t talk about it,” Gulien said. “But Lord Paulin told me a little, and once you know what to look for, you can put the story together from the archives. Anyway, I just thought . . . I wanted you to know. Because I think that’s why Father feels he has to, I don’t know. Control everything. Get everything to happen just the way he wants. Because he just doesn’t trust anybody else to do things right. Anyway—” He gave her an oddly anxious look. “I don’t suppose it matters now.”

  Oressa stared at him for a long moment. “You’re right!” she said at last. “It doesn’t matter now. Anyway, I don’t care!” But she wasn’t sure whether this was the truth or not. She transferred her glare to the lock in her hand, because at least she knew exactly what she thought about that. “I’ll never get this dead-gods-damned—” But then she checked herself just as her brother said in a pained tone, “Don’t swear, Oressa!” She had finally felt the wire slip neatly past the first tumbler. She scooped up and forward and a little around and lifted the second tumbler as well, and she held the wire steady, bent, closed her teeth gently around the manacle directly beside the lock, and pulled sideways.

  The manacle snapped open.

  Oressa looked up. “Well,” she said, in her most blasé of-course-I-did-it tone, “yours should be easier. They’re so much bigger.”

  But they weren’t. The iron chains might be big and heavy and the manacles sized to match, but the actual locks weren’t much bigger than the one on Oressa’s little chain. Besides that, the tumblers were much stiffer and harder to catch and lift than the ones in her manacle. She only bent her wire, trying to shift the first tumbler in Gulien’s manacle, and when she broke another wire off the manacle and twisted it around the first to stiffen it, the wire was too big.

  “Oressa,” Gulien said. “Oressa, it’s all right. Of course it’s hard to do, or they wouldn’t use them in the dungeon cells, would they?”

  “There’s probably a magic on the locks,” Gajdosik put in. “We make them so, in Tamarist. Princess, don’t cry—”

  “I’m not crying!” Oressa rubbed her hands angrily across her eyes, flinching as she accidently touched the welt across her cheek. It hurt, once she thought about it, and she was stiff from bending over Gulien’s manacle, and she was desperately tired, and she had a headache, and she longed for own room and her own bed and Nasia to bring her hot brandied milk and warm pillows, and she was not crying. “Anyway,” she said in a muffled voice, “it’s my fault. I thought Kelian was so wonderful, and I decided I had to go to the gates myself and Kelian should go with me, and I should have got away to warn you only I couldn’t. All your men were killed, weren’t they? After everything else they came through, your own brother killed them—”

  “None of us guessed about Kelian!” her brother said, and Gajdosik said very quietly, “After all we came through, my own brother would have killed me, except for you.”

  Oressa rubbed her eyes, sniffed, straightened her shoulders, and said with dignity, “And I was not crying, either.”

  “Of course not,” Gulien agreed firmly. He and Gajdosik didn’t look at each other, which Oressa appreciated.

  “Anyway,” Oressa said. She took her long chain with its empty manacle back into the other room so that Kedmes or a casual guard or even her father might think she was just not in the sitting room, rather than realizing she was gone. How much longer could it be before a guardsman or servant came in? She wondered if somebody would tell Nasia where she was, if maybe Nasia would come here herself, bent on performing her duties even under these circumstances. She wished Nasia would come and bring her clean clothing and run her a bath with scented soap . . . but not really. No. No, really, she wished she was away from here, that all three of them were away, and safe, and the Kieba was doing something to solve all their problems.

  But it was perfectly obvious that no one was going to solve their problems except them. So she had better hurry. Only this was such a feminine room, it made her think there might be women’s things in one of the drawers of the dressing table. She opened one drawer and then another, and found a clutter of embroidery things in the second drawer, including a pair of embroidery needles. If she weren’t a fool, she’d have thought to look there first, but at least she’d thought of it now.

  Gulien’s manacle didn’t want to yield even to a good, stiff needle. Oressa jabbed one of the needles against the floor to bend its tip into a tiny hook and then, working with her eyes closed, managed to catch the first tumbler with one needle and hold it with the second. Then the other tumbler, which was very stiff and hard to mo
ve, but she got it at last. Gulien jerked the manacle open so forcefully that she lost both needles, then apologized and helped her find them.

  “It can’t be much longer before— Oh, here, Oressa!” The second embroidery needle had flown under one of the other chairs, but he had found it at last by patting his way across the rug beneath the chairs. He dropped the needle into Oressa’s palm and said again, “It can’t be long now before someone comes.”

  Oressa was perfectly well aware of this. She’d wanted to get Gulien free if she could. He’d hated the chain so much. She was very glad she’d gotten his manacle open. But now she almost wished she’d worked on Gajdosik’s first. He was the one in actual danger, and here he was, still chained up like a dog. And when she knelt beside his chair and began to work on the lock of his manacle, she found it even stiffer and harder to work with than Gulien’s. Gajdosik showed no overt sign of impatience, but he gripped the other arm of his chair so tightly his knuckles were white.

  Oressa promised him, “I’ll get it—” But she hissed under her breath as the first tumbler started to move under her probing needle, but slipped.

  In the hall outside the sitting room, booted footsteps suddenly echoed: Somebody had come into the hallway, and whoever he was, he was coming toward the sitting room.

  Oressa jumped to her feet, took a nervous step toward the window, hesitated, started toward the other room instead, hesitated again—the footsteps went on by without pausing. She felt for a moment like she might faint right where she stood.

  “Oressa—” Gulien reached for her hand.

  Oressa took a step back, shaking her head. “I need to get out—I need to get away. The man could come back any time. Anybody could come at any time, and then what?” She looked again at the window.

  “Oressa!” Gulien said sharply. “You cannot possibly go north on your own.”