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

by P. C. Hodgell

  Then he thrust her away, or maybe she did him, and he stalked off. There went a bad enemy.

  Then, when Tiggeri had at last broken camp and gone, she turned, reluctantly, to deal with Killy.

  VI

  DAMSON AND CHAR had taken him to her quarters and there he waited under their watchful eyes.

  “I made a mistake,” he burst out, as soon as Jame entered the room. “Anyone can do that.”

  Jame sat on the edge of the table, folded her arms, and considered him. “Oh, it was a mistake all right, blurting out Tagmeth’s greatest secret. So loudly, too, in such company. Did you mean for Tiggeri to hear you?”

  Killy laughed. “Am I that big a fool?”

  “It seems to me that you must be, one way or another.”

  Now he was growing angry. While generally a handsome boy, a pout made him look both sulky and weak. “You don’t give me enough credit. You never have. Trinity, half of the time you can’t even remember my name! I should have been promoted to ten-commander. Like that show-off Dar. Like silly Mint. Like you.” And here he sneered at Damson. “But we all know that you favor your freaks.”

  “The word,” said Jame, “is Shanir.”

  She was watching Killy closely now, prey to a sudden suspicion. “You don’t think much of anyone, do you?”

  “I think as I find. Even of you, lady. Why does everyone believe that you’re so special? Your lord brother doesn’t. He only sent you here to get you out of the way.”

  Char stirred, but Jame quieted him with a glance.

  “Do you think that he wants me to fail?”

  “Of course! What else? This place is a farce. It always has been.”

  “You would like very much to prove that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. No. After all, how could I?”

  “Oh, a trick here, a prank there . . . Some of them were almost funny, not that I enjoyed falling off a roof, or almost getting hit in the head by a rock, or nearly drowning in Gothregor’s water meadow—although, come to think of it, that last was before Tagmeth. Then someone told a Caineron scout first that Must was here, and then that she was dead, leaving a child. We’ve had a dozen or more injuries over that, some serious. But Tiggeri didn’t know you were the spy, did he? Otherwise, he would have listened.”

  “No one remembers me!” Killy burst out, and it was clear that this was resentment, not denial. “It wasn’t like that. You don’t understand. When the Highlord hears how you’ve mismanaged this keep, he will thank me.”

  Jame wondered if Killy’s thinking was always this muddled or if Damson was playing games with his mind. The former, probably.

  “Then you had better go and tell him,” she said.

  The boy looked startled. “You’re throwing me out?”

  “That does seem best, all around, doesn’t it? Take the gray gelding, the cranky one, and leave. Now. When you get to Gothregor, tell my brother what you like, but only him.”

  Killy left, trying to swagger, but none too steady on his feet. Char went with him to be sure that he took the right horse, one that most people would be glad to see go. The same could be said for its rider.

  “I always thought that he was a fool,” said Damson. “The question is: Can he still do us harm?”

  “‘Us.’ I like that.” Jame sighed. “He can’t say anything that I haven’t already reported—assuming that Tori has kept up on his correspondence—but there are different ways to tell any story.”

  Damson shrugged. “It will be as it may, then. How long until you attend the High Council meeting at Gothregor?”

  “God’s claws. Twenty-six days.”

  Chapter XV

  Meanwhile

  Winter 90

  I

  STEWARD ROWAN dawdled over her bowl of porridge, reluctant to start the morning.

  Bake-master Nutley entered Gothregor’s mess hall bearing a loaf of new bread. This he placed on the table and then sat down opposite her presenting, as it were, his bosom as he did so. He had taken to wearing a bodice to show off his new cleavage and was growing a fine, black beard. The contrast was . . . interesting.

  “You look glum,” he said, offering her a slice.

  She took it wondering, as usual, how he could tell. Thanks to her branded forehead, her expression seldom changed. It even hurt to smile, not that she felt much like it at the moment.

  “I have a hard day ahead.”

  “How so? The ovens are drawing well and we have enough to eat, if barely and nothing fancy. If it weren’t for having to plan a feast for the High Council, I would be happy.”

  “We can’t feed them?”

  He made a face. “There’s enough for our simple tastes, but they should sup on gruel garnished with mast? If this isn’t an elaborate meal, word will spread that we’re at famine’s door. That won’t be good for our prestige.”

  He didn’t need to stress the importance of putting on a show.

  Throughout the Riverland it had been an edgy, discontented winter with short rations due to a poor harvest and the Central Lands raising prices to ruinous heights. There were rumors that agents of the Seven Kings had haunted the Riverland since autumn, trying to bargain with the other lords for troops. Wisely, none had come near Gothregor since their expulsion the previous spring. If Torisen hadn’t decreed that no one strike any deals until after the High Council meeting, the more self-indulgent lords might already have signed away their Kendar for a handful of luxuries. Lord Caineron in particular must be lusting for his usual treats, although he was one of the few rich enough to buy what he wanted, if he could bring himself to pay the price. The poorer houses had no such choice. That the Kencyrath should have come so nearly to this. . . Rowan felt her world shiver around her, and trembled with it. So much depended on Torisen.

  “You’re frowning,” said Nutley.

  “How can you tell?” Rowan bit into her bread. “This is crunchy. Mast?”

  “Only for the swine, dear lady. For you, hazelnuts.”

  The bake-master would tease her all morning if she let him. It was a game that they played, all the more piquant because he knew that she would never betray her lord’s secrets, nor would he want her to. Still, he was also bound to Torisen and could sense that all was not well.

  “You’re going to see him now, aren’t you?”

  Rowan reminded herself that Nut was prescient that way and, despite herself, she sighed.

  “Then go,” he said, suddenly serious. “All of our souls go with you.”

  He fluttered his beard at her and departed, bosom bouncing.

  Rowan left the mess hall into a crisp, white morning. Usually the snow had gone by now except for sporadic bursts. This year it continued to clog the inner ward and to drift down, lazily, from a milky sky. It would be a late spring, the older Kendar said. A few of the eldest hinted that somehow the Merikit were to blame, but no one took them seriously.

  Here was the old Knorth keep, its flanks long since repaired after the freak storm the previous spring. Here was the first-story death-banner hall. Perhaps the tapestries there spoke to Torisen. They only glowered at Rowan as if to demand, “Have you done your duty?” The second dark floor was still set up with glass kilns in the eastern corner towers. The great hall above blazed with jeweled light through the stained glass window that, although incomplete, was already Marc’s masterpiece. The fused work stood like translucent iron, while sections of the transitional cullet had fallen to the winter blasts, admitting blades of cold air. Rowan wondered if Marc would ever finish or if the Knorth Lordan was his work now.

  Voices sounded down from the northwest tower, where Torisen kept his meager quarters.

  “Where is my other boot?”

  “On your foot.”

  “Oh.”

  It was going to be one of those mornings.

  Rowan climbed and knocked. Burr opened the door, his bulk filling it from post to post like a wall. Then he saw who the visitor was and stood aside.

  “Did he get any
sleep last night?” Rowan murmured to him as she passed.

  “No. He pretended, but I wasn’t fooled, not with all of that coughing.”

  “If you’re discussing me,” said Torisen in the room beyond, “talk louder.”

  Rowan stepped into the disordered study. It had always been a mess, despite Burr’s best efforts, but these days it also stank of mold and rot and sickness. Parchment crumpled in heaps on the table. Scattered clothes turned green at the seams. The boot in Torisen’s hand looked about to fall apart.

  So did the Highlord himself. He was more haggard than Rowan had ever seen him, his face gaunt with dark shadows under his eyes. His untidy hair, streaked with white, needed trimming almost every day now, as did his nails. Surely that wasn’t natural, thought Rowan, but neither was Blackie. He hadn’t been, in more subtle ways, ever since she had first met him as a boy, some twenty years before. He was normally so quiet that one forgot how ancient and strange the blood was that ran in his veins, how devious its course had been over the past millennia.

  “I can’t find anything,” he now said, plaintively. “Where is . . . oh.”

  He began to cough again, a wet, tearing sound. For nearly three seasons now since the tainted harvest the illness had come and gone—impossible, it seemed, to shake off. Was hay-cough finally developing into lung-rot? Others at Gothregor had died of that, but only in early days. Just the same. . .

  “You should send for Kindrie,” said Rowan, not for the first time.

  “He told me to stay away from my people. And I have. And he was right. Bo recovered. No one else is sick anymore, are they? Not seriously, anyway. Just me. Maybe I should call him back.”

  Rowan deliberately didn’t look at Burr. This capitulation was sudden and unexpected.

  “I’ll write a note for you, then, shall I?” she said, glad to hear that her voice was as flat as her expression.

  “Do that. Do that.” His eyes glazed and his head tilted as if he were listening to someone or something else, far away. “Don’t tell her that,” he murmured. “I didn’t run away. I escaped, with the permission of all our Kendar. They knew you would kill me, sooner or later. Anar said . . . Anar said he would take the blame, if there was any. But then . . . then he said, ‘I was wrong. Nothing outweighs a lord’s authority. Take back the responsibility, child. It burns me. It burns. Set me free. Free us all.’ We tried. Kindrie tried. With the pyric rune. But what shame to have bought my freedom with their suffering. My fault. My fault.”

  Rowan felt creeping horror. Almost, she could also hear a distant, mocking hiss:

  “Yessss. Your fault. And he didn’t give you leave to go, did he, whatever your precious Kendar said. Coward. Disowned. You, who have the nerve to call yourself Highlord.”

  Laughter disintegrated into a wail, to the thud of fists against wood.

  “Oh, let me out, you misbegotten bastard, let me out!”

  The madness of Ganth Gray-Lord had been contagious, but Torisen wasn’t mad, just . . . preoccupied, or so Rowan told herself over and over again. When he fixed his mind to something he could keep focus. Usually.

  Even so, why should he feel such guilt?

  Rapid footsteps sounded on the stair. Rowan had barely turned when a young man burst into the study.

  “Let me go!” he cried as she and Burr seized him by the arms. “I have to talk to him! You can’t stop me!”

  “We have so far,” said Rowan. “Be off with you.”

  But Torisen had heard, and his wandering attention sharpened. “You’re . . . er . . . Killy, aren’t you? One of my sister’s folk.”

  “Never hers. Only yours.”

  “You were assigned to Tagmeth. What are you doing here?”

  “Hinting that he knows great secrets,” said Rowan, disgust in her voice, “to whoever will listen, which is few. I won’t say that this boy lies, only that he is either deluded or has misunderstood.”

  Killy sputtered in protest. Torisen raised a hand—the one not holding a boot—and the Kendar stopped, goggling, as if he had run head-first into a stone wall. There was that too: a new sharpness that sometimes emerged like a lightning strike from Torisen’s general distraction.

  “Tell me.”

  “Your sister has betrayed you.”

  “How so?”

  This cool reception to so dramatic a charge seemed to flummox the young Kendar.

  “S-she hasn’t told you all that’s gone on at Tagmeth. Those gates to other lands—she hasn’t mentioned them, has she?”

  Torisen frowned. “I believe that she has, not that I entirely understood. I . . . don’t seem to be thinking clearly these days. Then, too, wherever Jame goes, improbable things happen. It’s hard to keep up. I expect that, when she arrives for the Council meeting, she will explain.”

  “She’s taken in Caineron and Randir yondri. They expect her to bind them. She hasn’t yet, but she will, at the expense of loyal Knorth.”

  “That would be more serious, if she should do anything so improper. Still, fugitives . . .”

  Killy began to wax desperate. “One of them was Lord Caineron’s half-breed daughter. She died—good riddance—but her brother Tiggeri came looking for her and attacked us. There were casualties on both sides, and now there’s that bastard baby . . .”

  Torisen gestured vaguely toward the table piled high with parchments. “There’s a message here somewhere. I keep meaning to read it.”

  Killy looked as if he wanted to shake him, but didn’t dare approach. “What will Lord Caineron say when he hears that we are sheltering his runaways, even his half-breed grandson? I tried to tell Tiggeri but somehow the words stuck in my throat. That freak Damson was responsible, I’ll swear it!”

  “If you were about to say something that Jame didn’t want Tiggeri to hear, can you wonder? You were assigned to my sister. It doesn’t sound as if you’ve been particularly loyal.”

  “You can’t want her to succeed! It-it’s preposterous, obscene. What would your ancestors say? Your father . . .”

  Torisen’s eyes flashed silver, and everything around him jolted back an inch. “Leave Ganth out of this. I am Highlord now, not he, whatever he thinks to the contrary. Go away.”

  “But, but, but . . .”

  “Oh, be quiet.”

  Killy seemed to gag on his own tongue.

  “You heard him,” said Rowan, taking the boy by the shoulders and thrusting him out the door so that he nearly fell headfirst down the steps. “Go.”

  “Best to keep a watch on that one,” Burr muttered to Rowan. “He sounds unhinged.”

  Meanwhile, Torisen had slumped back into the chair, his eyes clouding. He ran the long fingers of one hand through his disheveled hair and, distractedly, tugged at it.

  “Now, where is my other. . .” He looked down at his foot. “Oh.”

  And another fit of coughing seized him.

  It was hopeless, Rowan thought with despair. If he didn’t sort himself out before the High Council meeting, the other lords were going to eat him alive.

  Chapter XVI

  The High Council

  Winter 95—100

  I

  “I SHOULD GO WITH YOU.”

  “No. You’re needed here. In case Tiggeri comes back.”

  Jame tightened Bel’s girth, adjusted the stirrup, and swung into the saddle with a creaking of leather. Brier glowered up at her. Clearly, it still came hard to see her lady ride off into potential danger without her, but, since their misadventures in the Western Lands, she had at least learned how to control herself. Mostly.

  Jame grinned down at her. “If it helps, think of me as strong and cruel. Keep an eye on Jorin, please, and be sure to check on Girt’s people at the oasis.”

  “Huh. Are you at least going to travel by the folds in the land?”

  “I’ve already told you. That route nearly always happens by accident, and it’s never the same twice. There are no maps.”

  Besides, in her pocket was Sheth Sharp-tongue’s laco
nic message, received the previous day by post rider: Join me at Restormir. As odd as it seemed, who was she to refuse the Commandant?

  With Rue at her side, she rode out to the lower meadow where Damson’s ten-command waited for her, along with seven heavily laden packhorses.

  They traveled all that day on the River Road, with Bel showing no inclination to veer. That both reassured and worried Jame. She trusted the Commandant, of course, but by this route they would pass both the Caineron stronghold and Wilden, neither well inclined toward her. For that matter, had it been wise to take a ten-command of second-year cadets led, no less, by the problematic Damson? What, had she hoped that other randon would go easy on children? Where did the randon stand now anyway?

  Tack jingled. Hooves rang on stone.

  Snow still lay under bare boughs, but the sloping, rocky fields were naked except for tangles of dead grass. A few fat white flakes drifted down from a clear sky. Spring, indeed, was late this year. Nonetheless, eagles and black swans soared overhead, northward bound, shrieking or whistling, as was their wont. They, at least, trusted that the year would eventually turn. Jame devoutly hoped that it would. She was tired of being cold.

  At midafternoon they came over a rise, and there lay Restormir, more or less at their feet. It was a huge fortress, made up of a compound for each of Caldane’s seven established sons and an eighth, the largest, for Caldane himself. Overshadowing all of these was the island tower keep known as the Crown, where Caldane’s family lived. On top of the Crown was a garden and set in it, a white dot at this distance, was Cattila’s stone cottage.

  Even as Jame’s gaze fell on it, the earth shivered. Horses threw up their heads and tried to bolt, but Bel spoke to them and they quieted, if with nervous, rolling eyes.

  “What d’you make of that?” asked Damson.

  “The Caineron Matriarch has been ill most of this year, and she’s an old friend of the Earth Wife. Perhaps she’s taken a turn for the worse.”

  Was Lyra up there with her, Jame wondered, and, if so, how was the girl coping? Tiggeri had said that the old woman had virtually been stripped of attendants. Nursing the dying was no easy chore, especially for one as young and inexperienced as Lyra.