Mienthe, unmollified, jumped to her feet and came over to stand behind him. Placing her hands on his shoulders, she glared at the Casmantian lord, looking young, small, unkempt with hard travel and, Tan thought, also quite courageous and resolute. He was distantly amused at his own appreciation of the young woman, grown more and more acute through the recent days. How foolish to allow himself to feel any attraction whatsoever toward Lord Bertaud’s cousin under these circumstances! Or, to be sure, under any circumstances.
“Of course you must stay with him, Lady Mienthe,” conceded Lord Beguchren, so gracefully that one was hardly aware he was making a concession. He gave Gereint Enseichen a glance that combined inquiry and command.
The tall mage unfolded himself from his chair with a slightly apologetic air, as though he knew he tended to loom and wished not to alarm anyone. Nevertheless, he alarmed Tan, who gripped the arms of his chair.
“Only if you’re certain,” Mienthe declared, color high in her face, glaring both at the mage and at the inscrutable Lord Beguchren beyond him.
Tan would in fact have been glad to refuse if refusal had been possible. But he was well aware that the Casmantian lord would not in fact allow defiance, and even more clearly aware that the disorder resulting from any attempt to stop this could not serve anyone. Least of all Mienthe. He reached up to lay his own hand over one of hers and concentrated on producing an expression of mild acceptance.
The mage took the one step necessary, reached out with one big hand, and touched Tan’s cheek with the tips of two fingers.
Tan had thought he’d prepared himself for the mage’s intrusion, but he found he had not begun to imagine what that intrusion would be like. No kind of preparation could have been sufficient. Gereint Enseichen sent his mind slicing through every mask Tan could put in his way, striking ruthlessly past every illusion of calm acceptance and through the shock and fury and terror beneath, laying open the privacy of mind that Tan cherished more than affection or honor or any other quality that he might have claimed to value more highly.
Tan would after all have fought this incursion, if he had been in any way able to fight it. He could not. Memories shifted rapidly before his mind’s eye, a confused blur of images and emotions, with anger and fear underlying them all, so that even memories of his childhood, of the house by the river, of his mother’s face became colored by dark flashes of rage. He cried out… would have cried out, but he had no voice. His first sight of Teramondian whirled by him, of the Fox’s court, of Istierinan… He had liked Istierinan on that first encounter, as nearly everyone liked him on first acquaintance, even those who did not approve of the dissolute face he showed the court; not many ever saw his other face…
He saw Istierinan’s study, all his traps and locks and codes defeated. The wild, reckless pleasure of that morning swept through him again… He had got past all the Linularinan spymaster’s defenses and now everything was open to him, defenseless, save for the trifling exercise of getting away again. The thought of Istierinan’s white-hot rage when he discovered Tan’s depredations made him laugh. He turned, took a small, thick book off a shelf.
He had not planned to take it. It had not caught his eye. He did not know why he had reached for it. He only found it in his hand as though it had come there by some odd chance of the day. He hardly paid it any mind even as he flipped it open, glanced down at a random page—
He was standing somewhere warm and close and not in any way Istierinan’s study. His throat felt raw; his eyes burned as though he had been working all night by the poor light of inadequate candles, writing out some complicated, tight-binding contract with a thousand codicils and appendices; his leg ached ferociously from hip to foot. He was violently angry.
Mienthe was clinging to his arm with both hands. Tan nearly struck her—he might have hit her, except the Casmantian mage grabbed his arm.
Turning in the mage’s grip, Tan hit him instead, hard, a twisting blow up under the ribs. It was the sort of blow a spy learned for those scuffles that might happen in the shadows, where no one involved had the least interest in the civilized rules of proper encounters.
Big the Casmantian mage might be, but he was not a brawler: He collapsed to one knee with a choking sound, his arms pressed against his stomach and side. Tan stared down at him. He felt strange: half satisfied and half appalled and entirely uncertain about what had just happened. The only thing he remembered with perfect clarity was hitting the mage. A powerful Casmantian court mage, it gradually occurred to him. In front of his friend, the even more powerful Lord Beguchren. And in front of Mienthe. Whom he’d possibly come near striking as well.
“Appalled” began to win out over “satisfied” as his anger ebbed at last. Tan looked up cautiously.
Mienthe was standing several paces away, her hands over her mouth, staring at him. Lord Beguchren had one hand on her arm, having drawn her back out of Tan’s way. His expression was unreadable.
At Tan’s feet, the Casmantian mage began, with a pained noise and some difficulty, to climb back to his feet. Tan cautiously offered him a hand, more than half expecting a stinging rebuff. He knew he should offer an apology as well—he searched for suitably abject phrases, but his normal gift for facile speech seemed to have deserted him.
But the mage accepted his hand, levered himself upright, touched his side tenderly where Tan had hit him, and cast a distinctly amused glance toward Lord Beguchren. He said to Tan, “How very gratifying that must have been. All men so provoked should have such recourse. Though I’m grateful you did not have a knife to hand.”
Tan did not know what to say.
Gereint glanced once again at Lord Beguchren, turned back to Tan, and added, in a far more formal tone that nevertheless still held that unexpected note of humor, “Though my actions were unpardonable, may I ask you nevertheless to pardon them?”
Tan managed a stiff, reluctant nod.
The tall mage inclined his head in formal gratitude. Then he sighed, limped back to the grouping of chairs, lowered himself into one with a grunt, and stared into the fire for a long moment without speaking, presumably ordering his thoughts. Or the images and impressions he’d taken from Tan’s heart and mind.
Tan closed his eyes for a moment against a powerful urge to hit him again, possibly after finding a knife. It was the urge of a fool. A hot-hearted, intemperate fool. He tried to put it aside, dismiss the anger, assert a more reasoned calm. In the event, unable to force calmness on his heart or nerves, he settled for what he hoped was a composed expression. But he did manage to give Mienthe a brief smile that he hoped was reassuringly natural, and walk with an assumption of calm across to take his place in one of the other chairs. Mienthe followed, though hesitantly, and Lord Beguchren came to lean on the back of the fourth chair, regarding them all with bland patience.
Gereint Enseichen looked up at last. He turned first to Tan. “I give you my promise,” the mage said formally, “that I shall not speak to any man, nor for any urging, of anything I glimpsed in your heart. Can you trust me for that?”
As a rule, Tan did not trust anyone for anything. But if he’d had to wager on the big mage’s essential honesty, he would have felt reasonably confident of collecting his winnings. This helped a little. He produced a second nod, not with great goodwill, but a trifle less stiffly, and looked at the fire so that he would not have to look at anyone else.
“Possibly an overbroad promise, under the circumstances,” Lord Beguchren observed. His tone was unruffled, but with an almost imperceptible bite behind the calm.
“No. The little that I glimpsed of the book is not, ah, does not—” He lifted a hand in frustration at the limits of language.
“Lacks emotional context,” Tan said tonelessly. He did not look around, but kept his gaze fixed on the fire. There was a pleasant smell in the room from the mountain cedar in the fire. He tried to fix his mind on that.
“Yes, well put. Exactly.” The mage paused.
“You only glimpsed
a little?” That was Mienthe. She sounded disappointed and decidedly offended. “You did that, that—you did whatever that was to Tan, and you didn’t even see anything?”
“Even a fleeting glimpse may reveal a great truth,” Lord Beguchren said quietly.
“There was a book,” the big mage said slowly, and in a tone that suggested he was not certain even of this. “There was a book… or a working that looked like a book. Tan… the honored Tan…”
Tan said curtly, not lifting his gaze from the fire, “Now we are so well acquainted, I think we need not be overly concerned with formality.”
This produced an uncomfortable pause. Then Gereint Enseichen said, “Tan, then. Tan had, I think, something like an affinity for that book. I wonder whether any of the rest of us would have had that book fall into our hands, if we’d been in that room? I think not; I do think it unlikely.”
“I believe it is Andreikan Warichteier who discusses the various meanings of ‘affinity’ in magework and among the various natural gifts,” Lord Beguchren commented.
“Warichteier has one discussion of the subject,” Gereint agreed. “And I believe Entechsan Terichsekiun developed a theory of affinity and similarity, though not in exactly this context. I don’t know of any philosopher who described a marked affinity between a piece of legistwork and a legist—but I’m not as familiar with Linularinan philosophers as I should be.”
Tan shook his head. He asked after a moment, managing a more natural tone than he had expected, “We knew there was a book; that’s no great revelation. Did you manage to glimpse anything at all in the book?” He hesitated, almost believing he might remember—but no. There was nothing. He rubbed his forehead, frowning.
“A word. A line perhaps.” The Casmantian mage frowned as well. “I couldn’t read it.”
Tan dropped his hand and gave the mage a cold stare. “Of course you cannot read Terheien as well as you speak it. We might have considered that earlier.”
“Ah,” said the mage, with a quick gesture of apology. “No, in fact that should not signify in such an exercise—not so long as you understood what you read.”
“You are not a legist,” Lord Beguchren murmured.
Everyone looked at him.
“Gereint is not a legist,” the small, elegant Casmantian lord repeated. “That was legistwork and nothing, perhaps, meant for other eyes. What does the legist gift encompass?” He paused, looking expectantly at Tan.
“Law,” Tan said, since it was clearly expected of him, though everyone knew this. “Especially written law. Contract law. You do have legists in Casmantium.”
“Yes,” agreed Lord Beguchren. “Not as Linularinum has, however. You look very Linularinan yourself, you know. You are Feierabianden by conviction, perhaps, rather than by birth?”
“Does it signify?” Tan snapped.
Mienthe said quickly, “There’s thorough mixing of blood along the river, you know, Lord Beguchren. Especially in the Delta.”
“Yes,” the Casmantian lord repeated. His expression was unreadable, but a subtle intensity had come into his voice. He tapped the arm of his chair very gently. “You are a very strongly gifted legist,” he said to Tan. It wasn’t a question. “The legist gift has to do, as you say, with written law, contract law. They say one should count one’s fingers after signing a Linularinan contract—”
“And the fingers of your children and grandchildren in the next generations. So they do.” Tan was not pleased to have that old censorious line recalled. He said, “In Linularinum, tight contracts are admired; in Feierabiand, and Casmantium as well, no doubt, signatories frequently have more concern with how contracts can be broken than with how they may most advantageously be kept.”
“Even the most ambitious Casmantian merchant would probably say, ‘How they might be most honorably kept,’ ” Lord Beguchren said. “But then, Casmantium is not a nation of legists.” Perhaps fortunately, he held up a hand to forestall Tan’s first, intemperate response. He said patiently, “What I am trying to say, perhaps with less grace than I might, is that a mage, most especially a Casmantian mage, is not likely to immediately grasp the more complicated elements of legist-magic. What was in that book was law—written law—contract law, and well set about with the strongest possible legist-magic. I doubt whether Mariddeier Kohorrian would provoke Iaor Safiad over any specific contract, however important. I greatly doubt whether Istierinan Hamoddian would so vehemently pursue a confidential agent who stole from him long after the stolen information had been passed on, if the only other item stolen were a specific piece of legal work, no matter how elegant.”
“Well?” Mienthe asked. “So it was some sort of important magic Tan took. We knew that already! But meant to do what? We still don’t know! We haven’t gotten anywhere!”
A terrible binding, Tan thought. An immensely strong legal binding, something the kings of Linularinum needed to bind their courts or their country to order. Or something else, something worse. Something that would undoubtedly do terrible things to any careless legist strong enough, and unfortunate enough, to accidentally lay his hand on it. Particularly a legist who had deliberately deceived and betrayed the Linularinan king and court.
“Indeed, this remains an excellent question,” said Lord Beguchren at last, still very softly. “To discover what Linularinum has lost and we might have gained… Gereint. Do you suppose you might find, somewhere in this house, a decent quill and a book of blank paper?”
Gereint shook his head. “My lord, forgive me; I have evidently not been clear. I believe that very book, as well as the writing it contained, is an integral part of the work.” He looked at Tan. “I feel certain—please tell me plainly if I am mistaken—but I feel certain that you cannot possibly write out any part of that work save you have the book itself to write it in.”
Tan turned this idea over in his mind. He saw… he thought he saw… at least he thought it was possible that he saw a faint glimmer of how to do that sort of work. One would make a book that was not precisely a book, or not only a book; one would write in it with quills that were not ordinary quills, cut with special care to pick up precisely the right kind of ink… One would take this book and write in it using words that were not ordinary words, language that was not everyday language, the sort of language that could not be spoken, for it was meant only for the eye and hand and mind of another legist…
“But it’s true I’m not a legist. Perhaps my understanding is not correct,” said Gereint.
“No,” Tan said absently, and then glanced up. “No,” he repeated with more decision. “No, I think your understanding is without fault. I think only a legist could make a book like that, and only if he knew precisely what work he wished that book to encompass. And I suspect Istierinan made this thing, or at least I think he believes he can make it over, if once he reclaims both that book and me.”
“But,” Mienthe said, looking from the mage to Lord Beguchren in some distress, her hands clasped urgently in her lap, “but the book, we don’t have it with us. It’s in Tiefenauer!”
“Then Istierinan Hamoddian has undoubtedly reclaimed it, and lacks only our friend, here”—Lord Beguchren nodded toward Tan—“to reclaim the work entire.”
“Oh,” said Mienthe quickly. “No, I don’t think he does have it, unless he could find it by—by magic, you know. I hid the book in my room. I don’t think Istierinan will find it. Not even my maid has ever found my hiding place, and you know how maids find everything.” Then the young woman ruined this confident assertion by adding, with sudden doubt, “I think.”
The corners of Lord Beguchren’s eyes crinkled with humor, and Gereint Enseichen tilted back his head and laughed out loud.
But Tan had never felt less like laughing.
There was a quiet rap on the door, and a servant—no, a guardsman—entered. The man ducked his head in apology and said to Lord Beguchren, “Begging your pardon, my lord, but the Arobern bids me inform you that a Linularinan agent has been captured. He
requests you will come.” The man’s eyes went to Mienthe. “He asks whether his honored guests will be pleased to come as well.”
Mienthe was not surprised to find that there had indeed been several Linularinan agents behind herself and Tan in the pass, but even though she was not surprised, she was still horrified. They had been so close behind—she could not help but think, What if we had not been able to get around the mule wagons? What if we had decided to stay the night in the guest house? What if we hadn’t woken early this morning?
The Arobern’s guardsmen thought there had been three agents altogether. Two, it seemed, had been killed. But the third man had been properly and thoroughly apprehended. Once his advisers and guests were ready, the Arobern signaled his guardsmen and they brought their prisoner forward and flung him down before the Arobern, on his knees on the cold stone floor.
The man caught his balance, his bound hands flat against the floor, and then straightened his back and lifted his head. He was very obviously Linularinan: He had not only the sharp face, with narrow eyes and angular cheekbones and a long nose; the straight light brown hair, and the graceful hands with rings on his long fingers; but also, despite his current position, the indefinable air of superiority.
He did not fight the guardsmen, but flung back his head, glaring up and to both sides and then focusing on the king—no, not on the king, but beyond him, on Tan. Tan returned only a bland look, but the Arobern scowled.
The man abruptly transferred his glare to the king and snapped, “You have no idea what you have there! You can have no idea, or you’d immediately repudiate him and give him into my hands!”
The Arobern said, his deep voice as mild as he could make it, “Maybe. Maybe that’s right. So tell me what he is, and maybe I will give him to you, yes?”
Tan raised one eyebrow and smiled, very slightly. It was the most extraordinarily insulting smile. Mienthe wondered how he did that, and whether she might be able to learn how.
The captive swelled with outrage, but he did not fling himself forward or rant wildly. He glowered, at Tan and at the Arobern, and then, craning his head around, at Gereint Enseichen. “You should know I speak the truth!” he said to the tall mage.
Law of the Broken Earth: The Griffin Mage Trilogy: Book Three Page 28