The Gates of Tagmeth (Chronicles of the Kencyrath Book 8)

by P. C. Hodgell

  Dinner was a sparser affair than at Falkirr. By early summer, last year’s harvest had almost run out and this year’s was yet to be gleaned. Still, the hall was bright and cheerful, except that Holly seemed preoccupied.

  Jame slept in Shadow Rock’s guest quarters, but uneasily, waking in the dark with a start. Jorin grumbled in protest and snuggled deeper into the blankets against the night’s chill. She lay there waiting for her heart to stop pounding, trying to remember the dream that had so disturbed her. Then she eased out of the bed to more sleepy protests from the ounce, wrapped herself in a cloak, and climbed barefoot to the top of the keep tower.

  Someone was there before her. She recognized Holly’s profile as he half-turned at the sound of her approach. They stood side by side in silence at the parapet, looking out across the dark water meadow, the river gleaming swift in its bed, the steep slope beyond, running up to black bulk of Wilden.

  As earlier, no lights showed there, nor any sign of life.

  “What’s going on?” Jame asked in a hushed voice. The breathless tension had returned, pressing down on her.

  Her dream: cold, dark, claustrophobic . . . let me out, let me out, let me out . . .

  Let whom out, from where?

  She sensed rather than saw Holly’s shrug.

  “I don’t know. Things have been strange ever since shortly after the Feast of Fools. As soon as the sun sets, everyone goes into hiding. Maybe Lady Rawneth has been conjuring again.”

  The Witch of Wilden, who had been responsible for the massacre of the Knorth ladies, including Aerulan and the matriarch Kinzi, and who had yet to pay their blood prices.

  Someday, thought Jame, making a silent promise to those long-dead kinswomen. Soon.

  The trickle of mist that still rose from the tower had gathered into a hazy cloud lit by a gibbous moon. The shape was vaguely disturbing.

  “It looks like a face,” said Holly, staring.

  So it did, with thinner, darker patches for eyes and a gaping mouth that seemed silently to scream in rage or fear, impossible to tell which. As the cloud rose above the encompassing walls of the valley, a breath of air elongated it. The forehead and eyes sheered off. The mouth stretched and tore. Soon it was gone, but still nothing moved below.

  “There was fog the night that Tori stayed here on his way back from Mount Alban,” said Holly. “It flowed down the streets of Wilden and pooled in the valley. Fingers of it reached as far as Shadow Rock. I thought I saw . . . but no: that was only a dream. It’s fading now.”

  Like her dream, thought Jame. Never mind. If it was important, she would remember later.

  VI

  THE NEXT DAY they set off again, and on the second night thereafter arrived at Tentir.

  It seemed strange to be back at the randon college, where Jame had spent such an eventful year. On the one hand, she felt as if she could walk back into her quarters in the Knorth barracks, back into her old life, but on the other hand all the cadets were now strangers who looked like children and eyed her askance. The instructors were largely the same, except that Corvine now followed her as a ten-commander rather than acting as a randon sergeant. The commandant this year was the Coman war-leader, who regarded her haughtily as if to say, “If I had been in charge when you were here, you would never have tricked me into letting you graduate.”

  That was probably true. She had been remarkably lucky to have had the Caineron Sheth Sharp-tongue as her superior officer, as much as that had at first looked like a disaster.

  After a tense dinner, she retired to the guest quarters in Old Tentir rather than to the Knorth compound, although Rue told her that the lordan’s apartment there had been unoccupied since her departure the previous summer.

  VII

  IN THE MORNING, the one-hundred command again crossed the river, back to its eastern bank and the River Road.

  Toward noon, another, faster cavalcade passed them, traveling north on the opposite New Road. By the device on their standard, a golden serpent devouring its young, they were Caineron. By the litter swinging perilously between a team of four high-stepping horses, they were escorting a Highborn lady. Which one became clear when Lyra leaned out between the curtains and waved furiously at them until someone pulled her back inside. Her father Caldane must have summoned her home. Jame wondered why.

  So far, Char had managed to keep up with the herd.

  “You’re lucky,” he told Jame grudgingly when she sought him out in camp that night. “The cows are antsy, which keeps them moving. A lot of them lost newborn calves to the hailstorm and have since come back into season. When one does that, they all tend to.”

  “You really do know a lot about cattle, don’t you?” said Jame, regarding him curiously.

  He answered without looking at her. “I should. I grew up with them. If you must know, my father was your father’s head herdsman.” He paused to scrape off a boot on a rock. “When I qualified for Tentir, I swore I would never step in shit again. Huh.”

  Jame grinned. “Cow pies and horse apples. Manure happens.”

  VIII

  AT DUSK on the twenty-second they reached Mount Alban. Lights greeted them, spangling the upper reaches of the Scrollsmen’s College, which was built into a hollowed-out cliff face. The one-hundred command settled in at the cliff’s foot. Jame noted that they avoided the circle of stones that marked the foundations of the old hill fort. That was where Tori had met the Deep Weald wolver known as the Gnasher, Yce’s homicidal sire, and slain him. The Wolver Grimly could have told her what had happened, but he and Yce had both gone south to the Deep Weald to establish Yce as her father’s heir, and Harn remained with the rapidly diminishing Southern Host.

  Poor Tori, Jame thought, to be missing his best friends at such a time as this.

  As what?

  There it was again, that twinge of anxiety.

  “Most dreams mean nothing,” said Kindrie, when she told him later, “and most slip away by morning. Still, ‘let me out, let me out’? Are you sure it wasn’t your father speaking?”

  Kindrie knew that some fragment of Ganth was trapped in Torisen’s soul-image. When Tori had offered to bind his cousin, the Shanir healer had found himself being offered the bolt to the door that imprisoned that raging madness. Wisely, he had refused to take it.

  “I don’t think so,” said Jame.

  They had met in Mount Alban’s library, surrounded by niches full of priceless scrolls reaching from floor to ceiling. Night pressed against the windows, held at bay by a chandelier full of guttering candles. Molten wax dripped on Kindrie’s wild mop of white hair. He ignored it. The muted noise of the college rose from below.

  “I see you!”

  “No, you don’t!”

  A rush of ascending footsteps followed, and an elderly man burst into the library—a singer, judging by the intricate gold embroidery on the cuffs and collar of his belted robe.

  “Shhh . . .” he said, raising a gnarled finger to his chapped lips, and scrambled for cover behind the room’s largest desk.

  A pudgy, panting scrollsman burst into the room on his heels.

  “Which way did he go? Which way did he go?”

  When neither Jame nor Kindrie answered, the little scrollsman said “Tsk!” in disgust and rushed away, his robe flapping.

  The singer emerged from cover and slunk after him, pausing to give Jame and Kindrie a mischievous, gap-toothed grin.

  Jame remembered climbing the twisting ironwood stair that led through the college’s irregular levels. Scrollsmen had been tiptoeing across landings, peering into rooms and around corners. In their wake, there had been a scurry of singers seeking new hiding places.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  The answer came from the doorway as the Jaran Lordan Kirien entered the library.

  “The singers have hidden various scrolls throughout the college,” she said. “If a scrollsman catches a singer, he or she has to tell them where a specific manuscript is. It’s their somew
hat harebrained response to Caldane trying to destroy certain valuable scrolls this past spring. Index is beside himself.”

  So the old scrollsman would be, thought Jame; his reputation was based on his knowledge of where every scrap of parchment was.

  Candlelight caught the delicate bones of Kirien’s face as she emerged from the shadows, her profile as fine as any engraved on an antique coin. Although both a Highborn lady and a scrollswoman, she wore neither dress nor mask nor robe, but rather pants and a plain, belted jacket of good material. At first glance, one might have taken her for a handsome boy. She ignored Kindrie despite his involuntary step toward her.

  “We heard that you were coming,” she said to Jame, echoing Holly.

  “The entire Riverland seems to know,” said Jame ruefully.

  “Of course. Whatever you and your brother do is of interest to the rest of us.”

  She still hadn’t even glanced at Kindrie, who subsided, looking perplexed and unhappy.

  “I suppose Matriarch Trishien has kept you up to date.”

  Kirien touched a pocket distorted by the slate on which she and her great-aunt communicated by far-writing.

  “Aunt Trishien is worried,” she said. “The Highlord’s behavior lately has been . . . mystifying. My impression is that he is trying to act properly, but under great stress and no, I haven’t any idea what is wrong.”

  A scrawny old man bustled into the library and thrust a rolled parchment into Kirien’s hands.

  “Hello, Index,” said Jame.

  The ancient scrollsman glared at her.

  “Here again, are you?” he spat. “So, what falls apart or down this time, eh? Or maybe a nice fire . . . no.” His gaze wandered up the shelves of frighteningly flammable parchment. “Don’t you dare.”

  Not waiting for an answer, he scurried out again.

  Kirien returned the parchment to its niche.

  “No,” she said to the singer who arrived on Index’s heels. “This was fairly returned and so is out of the game. Really,” she added to Jame as the singer departed, disappointed, “it’s like dealing with a houseful of children. Still, I will miss them when I become Lady Jedrak.”

  “Wasn’t that the name of the former lord, your great-great-grandfather?”

  “So we have called every leader of our house since the Fall, as a sort of joke. It’s High Kens for ‘servant,’ or, more loosely, ‘one who has no time to read.’ I suppose that we’ve always tried to distance ourselves from the burden of leadership. ‘The Jedrak,’ we say, sometimes. My great-uncle can’t wait to become simple Kedan again.”

  “Will you have to leave Mount Alban?”

  “Not altogether. After all, Valantir is just across the river. But the head of a house has other responsibilities than scholarship, which is why no one else wants the job.”

  Jame thought ruefully about her own duties as the Knorth Lordan, which in the past she had barely met.

  Perhaps thinking along similar lines, Kindrie twisted a handful of his blue robe nervously. “I should have gone with Cousin Torisen back to Gothregor,” he said. “I’ve stayed here too long.”

  Kirien regarded him for the first time, with exasperation. “D’you really think you can help him? Aunt Trishien had the right of it: First, he has to help himself.”

  “Nonetheless . . .”

  “Then go! What good d’you think you’re doing here?”

  With that, she turned and stormed out.

  Kindrie looked helplessly at Jame.

  Jame shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

  IX

  FOR ONCE, Jame didn’t partake of a keep’s hospitality, despite invitations both from the Director of Mount Alban and from Jedrak, Lord of Valantir until Kirien came of age.

  Instead, she ate with her one-hundred command and then, after dinner, walked into the ring of ancient hill fort stones. It was eerily quiet there, muffling the sounds of the nearby camp. A mist had risen from the river, but it didn’t intrude within the circle. Rather, set aglow by the light of campfires, it traced the outside of the old keep as it had once been, walls, windows, doors, as if looking at the inside of an invisible mould. All had fallen long before the Kencyrath had arrived on this world, giving way to the border forts of Hathir which had cannibalized the older ruins.

  Then Hathir and its rival west bank empire, Bashti, had ceded the Riverland to the Kencyrath.

  Movement caught Jame’s eye, a bright something scurrying along the floor of the phantom, glowing hall where it met the wall. Long tail, quivering whiskers, big ears—a mouse, or rather the ghost of one. It sat up and seemed to peer at her. Dead these four thousand years. Perhaps to it she was the specter of a future which neither it nor its many times great-grandchildren would live to see.

  Turning up her collar against the night chill, Jame stepped out between the standing stones. No light shone behind her as the ruins sank back into shadow, leaving only the smudged fires of the camp ahead. Something tapped her upturned face and trickled down her cheeks like tears. It had begun to rain.

  X

  THE NEXT DAY an overcast sky drizzled and drifting clouds cut off the upper slopes of the surrounding Snowthorns while the Silver smoked in its bed.

  The one-hundred command plodded on. To the Kendar this was a minor inconvenience, given the well-made River Road on which they trod, but the horses, dogs, and cattle walked with heads listlessly bowed. If they could have grumbled out loud, they would have.

  The day after was worse.

  A damp mist settled in the valley, as dense, almost, as wet white feathers. Soon one could see no more than a dozen feet in any direction, and the column closed ranks to keep in touch with each other.

  Toward late afternoon on the twenty-fourth of Summer, they paused just short of Restormir on the opposite bank. There was no question about seeking hospitality in the Caineron fortress. Once enclosed by it, Jame doubted she would ever willingly be released, such was Lord Caldane’s hatred of her. She smiled, remembering their first clash at the Cataracts. He had thought she was a typical Highborn girl, another Lyra Lack-wit. She had slipped him a potion found in the Builders’ city in the Anarchies. It had given him the hiccups, and with each “hic” he had risen farther into the sky. Kendar were often afflicted with height-sickness. So too was Lord Caineron. The sight of her ever since had threatened to launch him again.

  “Go ahead,” she told a scout. “Tell me what you see.”

  The rider was soon back, emerging suddenly out of the fog.

  “There’s what might be a Caineron one-thousand command blocking the road,” she reported. “I eased through the edge of their ranks, but the bulk of us won’t get past them without a fight.”

  Jame glanced back at what she could see of her one hundred. Fighting was not an option, even if they weren’t so heavily outnumbered, not without risking an internecine war.

  “Stay here,” she told Brier, and rode forward.

  The mist hovered around her, muffling the sound of Bel’s hooves, making it seem as if they were moved in place. Then the hoofbeats doubled. Jame first saw four white socks approaching, then the bulk of a stocky chestnut gelding. Gorbel sat on it like a sack of potatoes. They drew up head to tail.

  “Don’t tell me,” said Jame. “You heard that I was coming. I didn’t know you were back in the Riverland.”

  Gorbel harrumphed. With his bulging brow, small eyes, and long, down-turned slash of a mouth, he looked more than ever like a dyspeptic bullfrog.

  “My father doesn’t know what to do with me,” he said. “He only made me his lordan and sent me to Tentir because you were there and I was the only son of the right age. We Caineron weren’t to be left behind, oh no.”

  “Well, you showed him, didn’t you?”

  Gorbel gave a sound that was half croak, half mirthless chuckle. “Too right I proved myself, at least to the Randon. Now Father can’t demote me without insulting them. Sounds rather like your own situation, doesn’t it?”

  It did.r />
  “So,” said Jame. “Here we are. Now what?”

  “Father claims Tagmeth. His great-granduncle did a lot to restore it, oh, a hundred years ago or so, before my grandfather started gathering all Caineron back into Restormir. No more cadet branches striking off by themselves. Kithorn was the last, and look what happened to it. I won’t say the recall was a good idea. We’re wickedly crowded. But that’s what he did and my father holds by it.”

  “Tagmeth isn’t on your side of the Silver,” Jame pointed out. “For that matter, neither are you.”

  “Strictly speaking, the old keep is on an island in the middle of the river. And we Caineron go where we please, here about. D’you want to make something of that?”

  Any other Caineron would have been belligerent; Gorbel simply wanted to know her intentions. They had had a strange relationship ever since their days at Tentir, with grudging mutual respect but also the awareness that any change of politics could turn them into mortal enemies.

  Jame considered her situation, wishing she had asked more questions at Mount Alban. Surely some scholar there would know the rules governing such matters, as there had been during the dispute between Wilden and Shadow Rock.

  “I suppose it depends on who holds Tagmeth,” she said.

  Gorbel gave a volcanic sneeze that made his horse jump.

  “Damp,” he said morosely, wiping his nose on his sleeve, leaving a slimy smear. “And cold. Kothifir suited me better.”

  “I never liked the heat. Besides, I’m dressed for this climate.”

  Gorbel was not. His ornate court coat, crimson stitched with swirls of gold, might have served in the over-heated banquet hall which he had just departed, judging from the fresh stains down the front.

  “Sorry to tear you away from dinner,” Jame said.

  “More like from a twenty-course breakfast that never ends. Most days are like that at Restormir, what with all of my brothers crowding in to vie for notice, huh, even that fool Tiggeri who thinks he’s so funny. They all believe that my days as lordan are numbered. Everything is a dead bore, and there sits Father in the midst of it, goading everyone on, as sleek and fat as King Krothen.”