Gael removed his attention from Nathiar’s superlative mastery, focusing instead on the gong’s heart node. There glowed its soft green corona; there shone its more intense green mantle; and there blazed its dense green core. Within the core, the octahedral lines of force grew brighter as Nathiar poured more and more heat-producing energea into them.
But Gael’s full focus rested on neither Nathiar nor the metal growing ever more pliable within the crucible of magery. It was the slow transformation of the octahedral lattice that would tell Gael when he must act. First the edges of the octohedrons grew thicker, brighter. Then those edges developed a curve, and the vertices – each formed where three edges came together in a point – extruded a needle-like projection.
Gael shivered, despite the heat rolling off the gong.
The spiky configuration of the node’s lattice depicted by Olluvarde’s murals had seemed beautiful in the delicacy of its stone traceries. Hovering before Gael’s riveted gaze as energea, the lattice emanated menace. It almost sizzled, fierce with power. Gael had not been wrong in assessing this proceeding as perilous. Every aspect of it held danger. Should Nathiar drop the gong, the softened metal would splash under the impact, burning all it touched. Should Nathiar loose control of his magery, Belzetarn itself might melt down, as had that outpost under the death throes of the old magus Fuwan.
But now that Gael confronted the enkindled lattice of the gong’s heart node, he knew that it posed a greater risk than any other facet of this business. And Nathiar’s shunt for excess energea, still in its formative stages, was nowhere near complete yet.
Gael became aware of hoarse breathing nearby. Was he panting in terror?
No, he stood poised, ready to bombard the node’s lattice with precisely measured pulses of his own energea, drawn from the violet of his crown node, modulated through the blue of his throat node and the aqua of his thymus node, channeled down his arms – deliberately avoiding his own heart node – and out through his fingers.
It was Arnoll who stood beside him, on Gael’s left, breathing heavily, no doubt observing the gong’s heart node through his own inner sight, and rightfully alarmed by what he saw.
Gael could spare none of his attention to reassure the smith. His moment approached rapidly.
The octahedral lines of force thickened and brightened. The spikes growing from the vertices elongated. The entire configuration flashed searing gold.
Now!
Gael pulled from his crown node, pulsing the pull in smooth undulations, creating the perfect flow of oscillating violet energea along the arc from crown to throat, from throat to thymus, and down the arms.
Just as the violet sparks jumped from his fingertips, the golden spikes of the lodestone’s octahedron thrust outward as though they were pikes wielded by heavy infantry, aimed at the hearts of their enemies.
Gael yanked his concentration from his crown node, dropping unregarded the delicate cascade of violet sparks – intended to tease out a hazelnut-sized sphere of iron, with its energea lattice intact.
He grabbed frantically for his thymic energy instead.
No matter that he’d not harvested his droplet, no matter that the energetic shunt was yet unready. He had to act now, or they were all dead.
He was not fast enough.
A gout of flaring green erupted from somewhere to Gael’s left.
Traveling ahead of Gael’s blaze of aqua and blue, the glaring emerald torrent slammed into the aching gold at the heart of the gong, ripping it asunder in an engulfing explosion of black-edged lightning.
Gael cursed.
The tumult of energea coruscated blindingly and then subsided, revealing the heart node of the gong to be entirely transformed. An open lattice of scrolling gold had replaced the tightly packed octohedrons, and the light glowing from the new lattice shone gold, not green. The silver arcs radiating from the node quivered slightly, adjusting their points of attachment.
It was done. The gong had been subdued.
But not by Gael.
He heard a pattering, as of raindrops falling on a beach, and then the thud of something heavy, meaty. His inner sight closed as his eyelids sprang open.
Arnoll lay crumpled at Gael’s feet, skin gray and eyes starting.
Gael fell to his knees, reaching for Arnoll’s neck to check his pulse, pressing his palm to Arnoll’s chest, desperate for a heartbeat, then cupping Arnoll’s face between his hands, patting his cheek.
“Arnoll! Arnoll!”
There was no response, no heartbeat, no pulse, no life.
“Dear gods!” Gael choked.
He’d lost his friend. His closest friend. His dearest friend. The friend he trusted the most.
He pressed his ear to Arnoll’s unmoving chest, praying he was wrong, praying to hear a flutter of breath, the renewed rhythm of a beating heart.
Nothing.
He crouched there, head resting on Arnoll’s chest, the aching spear of loss piercing his own heart. The vague sense that Nathiar still suspended the gong above him, still continued the magery needed to finish the operation they’d begun, barely brushed Gael’s awareness as the gong moved away, the radiance it shed dimming and then quenched utterly as the hissing roar of steam arose from the cedar tub of water.
Gael ignored it all, embracing the dead body of one he could not bear to let go.
* * *
Nathiar came and knelt beside Gael as he sat on the smithy floor at Arnoll’s side.
The magus had doffed his smith’s apron and left the gong on the curved surface of the massive stone block to finish its slow air cooling after its swift water quenching. The dying glow from the forge spilled over the scene, far less fierce than when fed by the bellows, although its coals still exuded a gentle heat.
Nathiar brushed Arnoll’s staring eyes closed and let his hand rest on Gael’s shoulder.
Gael straightened his friend’s body, shifting him from his side onto his back, placing his arms crossed on his chest. A certain dignity lay on Arnoll’s face, as though he confronted . . . what? A magistrate’s final assessment? His god’s judgment? Something like that.
A stab of pain twinged in Gael’s breast.
Nathiar spoke. “He saved your life, you know.”
Gael shook his head, said lowly, “No. I forfeited his. If I’d just discussed the ‘why’ of our proceedings more –” His voice cracked on that ‘why.’ He shook his head again. “He’d picked up so much in the course of dealing with trolls, I tended to forget he wasn’t a magus trained, had never had the basic grounding you and I received.”
“Gael –” Was there a trace of exasperation in Nathiar’s voice? “This was no undertaking in which a basic understanding might have helped. You’ve said you were operating beyond your own knowledge and expertise. I assure you I was far beyond mine.”
“If he’d known to pull from the thymus node or above, or even from the root node, to avoid the heart node –”
“No,” interrupted Nathiar. His hand on Gael’s shoulder pressed harder. “Were you able to see the path of the energea within the final explosive conflagration?”
He hadn’t. If he had – if he’d been quicker, more alert, would he have been able to get there first? To save his friend?
Nathiar continued. “The outward explosion masked it, but there was an inward explosion as well, compressing in as violently as it exploded out. That inward blast swallowed down the gong’s heart node, swallowed down Arnoll’s heart node – and, Gael –”
Gael looked up to see Nathiar’s eyes narrowing.
The magus’ nostrils flared. “The implosion dragged the entirety of Arnoll’s energetic lattice down into it. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d aimed his energetic strike with the crown node itself” – an advanced technique barely within Gael’s purview – “his energea would have been ripped from him nonetheless.”
Gael became aware that his fists were clenched in his lap. He unclenched them, started to reach for Arnoll – as though he still might drag him
back from death – and then let his arms fall.
Arnoll had passed far beyond his reach.
“What happened with that pulsed violet energea of yours, there at the end?” asked Nathiar. “Were you able to subdivide the node before it exploded?”
Gael sighed heavily. “No,” he said dully, not caring. If he’d not taken time for that, if he’d been poised for the thymic strike against the gong’s node, he might have beaten Arnoll to it. Would it really be his own corpse lying on the smithy floor, if he had? He wasn’t sure he believed Nathiar.
The magus grunted and heaved to his feet. “I believe –” he bent to pluck something small from the layer of sand covering the flagstones “– I believe the node was subdivided, although not by you.” He handed a smooth teardrop of iron, about the size of a thumbnail, to Gael. “There are smaller splatters,” said the magus, “but this one alone holds an energetic lattice.”
Gael studied the metal teardrop bleakly. It remained very warm and strangely shiny, like polished silver. Gael found he didn’t really care whether it possessed a node or not. He just wished he’d done something different – anything different – whatever might have saved Arnoll. But Nathiar clearly expected Gael to care, so he opened his inner sight.
The node within the iron glowed gold and displayed the same open scrolls of gold that Gael had observed within the changed node now inhabiting the gong’s central boss.
Gael frowned. “It’s a troll node, isn’t it?” he said.
Over his years in Belzetarn, when Gael checked the energea of prisoners brought to the citadel, he didn’t bother to examine the fine structures within the nodes. A simple note of their location was enough to declare the captive human or troll. But the deep structures were different in the afflicted and the unafflicted. Human nodes possessed the tightly packed octohedrons that the gong’s node had possessed until a short time ago. Troll nodes, created when their moorings were ripped, adopted a more open configuration.
Gael glanced up at Nathiar. “I see it,” he said, his voice still leaden.
“Do you want it?” asked Nathiar. “Because if you do not, I do.”
Gael started to shake his head and hand the teardrop back to the magus, then checked himself. He didn’t want the damn thing. But Keir would. He knew she would. And Keir . . . still mattered. Even in the wake of Arnoll’s death.
He wanted to say nothing mattered. He felt nothing mattered. But the same inner knowing that told him to get a fresh sheet of parchment when his tallying grew cramped at the bottom margin, that insisted he get a good night’s sleep before he tackled a ticklish calculation, told him now that his choices would yet yield consequences – poor or good, depending on his decisions. He could not abdicate responsibility, no matter how powerfully his grief urged it.
“I do want it,” he told Nathiar.
“Then it is yours,” said Nathiar. The magus reached down a hand to Gael. “Up with you, my dear Gael.” His voice was kind, despite his resumption of his usual cadences.
Gael allowed himself to be pulled to his feet.
“I hope you know how to put the smithy to bed, my dear fellow,” said Nathiar, “because I do not!”
Gael hunched his shoulders.
Nathiar was right, of course. There was work to be done. And Gael would do it. But it felt wrong. It felt like everything should just stop.
“You’ll go for a physician?” he asked the magus.
Nathiar nodded, met Gael’s gaze for a long moment, and turned away.
He took a step, then turned back. “I am so very sorry for your loss,” he said. “For our loss. Arnoll was the best of all of us.”
Gael swallowed down the tightness in his throat. “He was my friend.”
“Yes,” said the magus, and then strode away toward the Regenen Stair.
Gael picked up one of the long-handled rakes beside the forge and began scattering the coals within it, dismantling the mound that concentrated the heat.
* * *
Arnoll lay on a low bier amidst the herbs and flowers of the hospital’s courtyard garden. The spiky purple blooms of thistle nodded on their long stems beside the smith’s left cheek, while the yellow petals of buttercups tapped the toes of his boots. The drone of contented bees murmured in the sunlit space, and the green scent of crushed sage threaded the warm air. The physicians had tidied him, but Gael had insisted he retain his smith’s garb. Arnoll’s rank of opteon entitled him to ornate robes, such as those the castellanum wore, or even a warrior’s equipage.
Gael had declined such flourishes for his friend. A smith’s calling bore more honor by far than the legionaries who killed on the field of battle, the officers who commanded them, or the elite who ruled them.
Gael stood alone by the bier under the noontide sun, grateful for the moment of solitude.
He’d seen all tidy in the smithy, stationed the guard Uwen beside the still-cooling gong, and followed the hospital scullions carrying Arnoll on their litter.
Looking down at his friend – clothed in fresh tunic, trews, and apron; gray hair combed and rebraided; features composed – Gael perceived the same dignity and nobility of character he’d noted in the smithy. There was no better troll in all Belzetarn. No, in all the north. No, Gael would venture farther even than that. There was no better man.
“I should be lying there,” Gael muttered. He’d not believed Nathiar’s assessment in the smithy, but he believed it now. If he’d beaten Arnoll to the strike that defanged the gong’s curse, it would have been him lying on this bier in the hospital herb garden. It should have been. Arnoll had preserved Gael’s life upon Gael’s entrance into Belzetarn. Now he’d done so again. Gael wished it were the other way round – that he’d saved Arnoll. Arnoll was the better of them.
But Arnoll was dead.
And Gael was alive.
He hated that. And hated almost as much that Arnoll’s legacy would be utterly forgotten. If only he could be buried with all honor in the crypts of Hadorgol, the story of the unswerving protection he granted to those he perceived as vulnerable engraved on a tablet beside the niche where his sarcophagus lay. But it was neither possible nor the way of trolls. Arnoll would receive a funeral pyre, honor enough in Belzetarn. Gael lay the bouquet of white roses the physicians had allowed him to pluck from their gardens on Arnoll’s breast.
Unlike Gael, Arnoll had found a way to an unbroken loyalty, perhaps because he assumed the mantle of protector, but accepted that some would lie outside his ability to protect. Arnoll had committed fully to the well-being of his immediate neighbors – the scullions and decanens under him in his smithy, his fellow opteons at the other forges and their underlings, then spiraling outward to include the denizens of Belzetarn and all the trolls under Carbraes – but no further.
Gael doubted he could ever achieve the integrity of his friend, but surely he could spend the rest of his life trying to. It remained the only real way – beyond funerary rites and empty ritual – to honor Arnoll, the only true way to continue his legacy.
“Whenever I must choose between the lesser of two evils, I will think of you, and seek a third way,” he vowed.
He bent to kiss Arnoll’s brow, and turned away.
Passing through the hospital, he thanked Medicus Piar for the opportunity to make his farewell to Arnoll in private.
Traversing the artisans’ yard, on his way to the bailey gatehouse and the brig – to Keir – he was snagged by one of the regenen’s many messenger boys.
“My lord Secretarius,” panted the boy. “The lord Regenen requires you to attend upon him instantly!”
* * *
Gael’s heart clenched within him when the messenger led the way through the tower’s entrance gate – all three of its portculli retracted into the ceiling vault – to the adjacent melee gallery. The scene awaiting him was all too familiar.
A Ghriana prisoner knelt before Carbraes, the two of them – regenen and captive – illuminated by shafts of sunlight from the upper southern embras
ures. A cluster of warriors lurked in the shadows cloaking the edges of the space.
A few details differed from the last time. This Ghriana warrior was older, his physique burly with the muscles that only full maturity brought, his wooly hair grizzled gray. Nor did he droop, but glared Carbraes full in the face. This prisoner carried no false hope. He knew his death approached, and he defied it even as he accepted it.
Just behind Carbraes stood Uwen and another legionary of the Peregrine opteogint, each supporting one end of a pike from which the gong of Olluvarde hung on makeshift leather straps. The gleaming disk shone more silver than before.
Carbraes was quick to spot movement on his periphery, as always. The instant Gael stepped from the entrance passage into the greater space, the regenen turned to survey him.
Gael quickened his stride. The regenen did not look to be in a patient mood. The relaxed alertness of his stance possessed an edge of tension, and his face – Gael saw as he drew nearer – bore an uncharacteristic sternness.
Gael bowed. “My lord Regenen.”
Carbraes nodded, his gaze sharp. He gestured to the Ghriana, who knelt and glared. “Assess him,” he ordered curtly.
So. The first test of Gael’s oath to Arnoll’s memory was upon him already. So soon. So immediately. Would it ever be thus in a troll citadel?
Arnoll would have deemed the Ghriana man outside his protection, but Gael could not. He did not see an enemy, but a hero, a man brave enough to court the gravest risk in defense of his people, his home, his family. Gael could not participate in his destruction. He would not.
Carbraes might order the man’s execution. Likely he would. But it could not flow from Gael’s word.
“I cannot assess him, my lord Regenen,” Gael said.
Twin lines appeared between Carbraes’ eyebrows. “How is this? Have your endeavors at the forge so weakened your magery?”
There was a tempting excuse, but Gael would not take it.
“My apologies for my imprecision, my lord. I will not assess him,” Gael corrected himself.
“You will not?” said Carbraes, his voice grim. “Have you forgotten who you serve?”
The Tally Master Page 41