by Tom Deitz
Pannin laughed out loud. “Eddyn has no friends! Not that would dare the Deep with him. Whatever sent Rrath with him—if they are together—was a product of Rrath’s own agenda.”
“Or,” Crim broke in pointedly, “Priest-Clan’s.”
Nyss’s glare could’ve melted the rime on the windows. “If you can explain to me what interest Priest-Clan would have in Eddyn or Avall, I’d be glad to hear it.”
No one answered.
Crim cleared her throat ominously. “Speaking of secrets, I, too, have a secret—one that was brought to my attention around midnight last night, and which I now lay before you.” And with that, she reached behind her chair and retrieved something she’d concealed there, beneath a pall of black velvet. A pause to sweep them all with a searching glance, and she placed it on the rail before her. Eyebrows rose curiously, followed by six very audible gasps, as she removed the drape to reveal what had once been perhaps the most beautiful war helm ever seen in Eron.
Once.
Now it was a ruin: the panels dented and twisted, strapwork popped loose, and a series of intricate cast-bronze inlays smashed and flattened beyond repair. One of the earpieces had been ripped free as well, and the nose guard was pushed in. Brayl and Pannin were on their feet at once, dashing forward, emotions at war in their faces.
“Blasphemy!” Brayl choked.
“What are you doing with this,” Pannin demanded in turn.
Crim regarded them calmly, as the others gathered behind them. “By blasphemy, I assume you mean the destruction of what was clearly a masterwork such as few of any generation have seen.”
Pannin glared at her. “That, and the fact that if it’s what I think it is, it should not have been revealed even to this council without its maker’s permission.”
“Not even Strynn’s,” Sipt agreed. “Surely she didn’t—”
“No,” Crim assured him, turning her gaze to Brayl. “This was found in one of the ground-level storerooms by a cleaning crew on a routine sweep. It was inside an empty barrel, which, by our good luck, they had cause to move. I had it brought straight here. Strynn doesn’t know about it … yet.”
Sipt’s face was grim as death. “But surely she knows it’s missing. Or do you think—You’re not saying you think she did it.”
Crim shook her head. “Perhaps I should, but I don’t. Nor do I think Avall or Rann did this wretched thing.”
Pannin nodded slowly. “It would’ve been Avall’s right, as craftsman, to do what he wanted with it. But there’s no reason he’d hide it; he’d simply melt it down.”
“But Eddyn—” Ayll began.
Brayl glared at him, then likewise nodded—sadly. “It would make sense, of a sort: Eddyn gains access to this helm, destroys it in a fit of jealous rage, then realizes what he’s done and flees the hold.”
“One more incentive,” Sipt added.
“That little fool!” Brayl growled, as much to himself as anyone. “He’s already a rapist. Now he’s—apparently—destroyed a masterwork. There’s no way anyone can forgive this, if it’s proven. He’ll be lucky to get off with exile.”
Nyss stroked her chin. “But why didn’t Strynn report it stolen?”
Crim regarded her levelly. “That, my friend, is a very good question, to which the only answer I can supply is that she didn’t want anyone to know, because she also didn’t want anyone to know Avall was missing.”
Mystel’s eyes grew huge. “But that implies Avall and Rann left because of something even more important than the destruction of a masterwork. But what could be bigger than that? I—”
Brayl’s face went suddenly hard. He rounded on Crim furiously. “You led us on!” he spat. “You had the helm all along—something you still have no right to see, even as it is—and yet you pretended you knew nothing about it. And you accuse us of harboring secrets!”
“I suspect everyone,” Crim replied simply. “I thought one of you might let something slip. No one did,” she added.
A gong sounded somewhere in the hold: token that the sun was now a hand above the horizon.
“And now we’re out of time,” Crim grumbled, “but perhaps we should consider this the first of many meetings.” She gave the word as much implicit threat as she could muster. “Meanwhile, I’d suggest all of you find out whatever you can. Brayl, you and Pannin keep Strynn under close observation and report anything that doesn’t violate clan security to me. The rest of you … Well, I said it before. I don’t like secrets.”
“And you?” Ayll inquired archly.
Crim managed a sly smile. “I will hear what you all have to say three days hence. After that … let’s just say that it’s well past time that I offered my condolences to the … widow.” And with that, she rose and gestured them all into the antechamber.
“It’s too bad,” Pannin murmured to Ayll as they moved toward the door, “that torture is illegal.”
Crim caught that comment and had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. She agreed. But she’d start her interrogation at a more rarefied level entirely.
In spite of the fact that he was her courtesy escort, Nyss found it hard to match paces with Sipt as they made their way down one stone corridor after another, first through Gem-Hold’s attics, then through the living quarters. They didn’t speak, though Sipt’s jaw twitched once or twice, which made Nyss wonder what he might be provoked into revealing under certain circumstances, with particular stimuli.
In any event, she was grateful when they made one last turn, which put them in the common room outside Priest-Clan’s suite. Its sigil glittered in the floor, worked in colored marble. Wood-paneled passages teed off to either side, and a light well brought indirect illumination from the rapidly rising sun.
She bowed her thanks and stole away, approaching her suite alone. The lock required two keys, for more reasons than personal security. Nor did she linger in her chambers longer than required to divest herself of cloak and hood, and to retrieve three black tiles, each a hand square, from a secret compartment in one of her bedposts. Thus equipped, she made her way into the bath, knelt, and pressed three other black tiles in one corner simultaneously. Each promptly lowered a finger’s width. A deep breath, and she dropped the remaining tiles into the resultant recesses and pressed them down in turn.
Something clicked, and she rose to watch a section of the wall slide back, then aside, revealing a passage barely wider than her shoulders, lit by a lone glow-globe. She entered boldly, pausing only to confirm that the panel had closed behind her, then moved on—straight at first, then up a tightly coiled stair that made her wish she’d chosen house-hose and a short tunic instead of her robes of office.
Soon enough she found herself on the landing of another, better-lit corridor, paved with alternating bands of colored marble. She stepped on certain colors in sequence as she marched along, which would send word of her approach ahead. And was not surprised when the blank wall at the end of the corridor drew back to reveal an antechamber no more than a span square, but as luxuriously decorated as any she’d ever seen, where richness of materials was concerned. The door beyond opened into a room two spans to a side, lit only by a glass-brick wall fronting a light well that bathed the chamber in soft radiance.
A figure sat before it, enthroned in a limestone chair, hooded, cloaked, and with a mouth-mask raised, so that only eyes showed. Thus arrayed, it was impossible to determine the person’s age or sex. Twin mugs of cauf steamed on a low table to the figure’s right, one of which the host took in a gloved hand and raised in salute.
Nyss did the same. This was ritual. A pause for one sip—the sip of trust—and Nyss spoke without prompting. “They know.”
“Ah, but what do they know?” the figure replied in a buzzy voice, courtesy of a metal screen affixed to the mask.
“They are questioning why Rrath would dare the Deep with Eddyn. They do not believe his friendship with Eddyn sufficient. And that implies some agenda of his own—which as much as implicates Priest-Clan.�
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“Can we stand the scrutiny?”
Nyss gnawed her lip for a moment before replying. “The surface can stand it,” she said at last, “because the surface doesn’t know the heart, and can therefore only speculate, not lie.”
“And the heart?”
“The heart must continue,” Nyss intoned the ritual words, almost as a sigh. “But it would be best if questions and eyes were directed … away from the heart.”
The figure remained silent. “Is there other word?”
Nyss shook her head. “No, and we should’ve heard from Those Outside by now.”
“There’s been time,” the figure acknowledged.
Nyss nodded solemnly. “There should have at least been messages, and none have come, either from the hold itself or those sent onward.”
“Which would imply a … failure.”
Another nod. “The question, then, is whose?”
The figure sighed in turn and took another sip. “The question, Nyss, is who, at this moment, commands the gem?”
CHAPTER I:
EMERGING
(WESTERN ERON: NEAR WOODSTOCK STATION–DEEP WINTER: DAY XXXV–MORNING)
Dawn had turned the snow pink. As pink as the tongue of the raccoon that licked rime from its fur, where flakes had sifted into its tree-trunk den during the daylong blizzard. It yawned sleepily, yet something suggested that the air had shifted toward warmth and light, if only briefly, and that this was a good time for foraging. Heaving its compact body out of the rough bark shell, it dropped into snow already frozen hard in only half a night.
A step. Another. A pause.
Something else was awake out here. Something that took no care for the noise it made. Something big, by the sound of it, and coming from that snowbank at the foot of the slope, the one with the peculiarly steep pitch and the overhang that made a cave beneath. The one from which … smoke was issuing. The raccoon danced back, alarmed. A shift of wind brought that stench more strongly, and with it came others: burned fish and something worse.
The noises increased: scrabblings, the rasp of tearing wood, and angry, guttural cries. A vertical line appeared in the cave’s back wall. A hand thrust through, then an arm, as a much larger beast struggled through that slit. It was covered with fur in no pattern that made sense, and had a pale, thin, and very flat face, with big eyes and too little nose to matter.
It stank, too. Of sweat and dirt and death.
The raccoon returned to its den. This was no time for hunting.
Eddyn thought briefly of barring the door behind him and abandoning Rrath in the boathouse where the two of them had sheltered since that blizzard had come ripping out of the east two twilights ago, piling snow atop snow, up past the windows to the eaves—which was what happened when one built in hollows. Fortunately, the structure was sound, and the snow itself provided insulation, which was also fortunate, because there was little left to burn beyond the boats drawn up outside, and Eddyn didn’t want to touch them.
Leaving Rrath, however …
That was a hard call. Companionship could mean survival when one was outdoors in Deep Winter. On the other hand, he wouldn’t be here if not for the Priest. Too, Rrath’s motives and actions were ambiguous at best, and while his fondness for Eddyn was real—and his hatred of Avall—he’d also shown no compunction about betraying Eddyn to the ghost priests, and drugging him to achieve that goal. In short, he was either very naive or very complex, but easy to underestimate regardless—which made him dangerous.
But Eddyn was stronger. And now that he controlled Rrath’s cache of sedatives, he had that advantage as well. A day’s worth of arguing coupled with a fair dose of intimidation as recently as breakfast had made that amply clear.
He hoped.
In any event, Rrath seemed cowed right now, judging from the way he was lurking back there in the gloom beside the single unburned table. “Is it… safe?” the Priest called tentatively.
Eddyn slogged farther onto the porch. The snow only reached to mid-calf. “You tell me; you’re the weather-witch.”
Rrath joined him. “I have to be outside to do that,” he murmured. His breath ghosted into the air as he tugged his hood closer around his face and reached back to snare their skis. He yanked at the door, but it was stuck.
Masking a surge of impatience, Eddyn jerked it closed. Eronese conditioning, if not Eronese Law, said that one should always leave a shelter as one found it. Someone else might need this place. Some fool.
“I could’ve managed,” Rrath muttered.
Eddyn nearly hit him. Forced confinement with someone he had little cause to like had worn his always-volatile temper dangerously thin. “I’m sure you could,” he growled as he stomped into the waist-high snow drifted around the porch. A pair of strides put him into knee-deep powder atop a hard-packed base. The river glittered a dozen spans beyond, totally iced over save for one narrow channel, courtesy of the steam venting upstream. Pines lined the gorge to every side: dark against the white.
“I was afraid you were going to—”
“I nearly did,” Eddyn snapped. “Don’t make me regret it.”
Rrath glared at him, but his guileless features and youth made him easy to dismiss. “I think we’re even,” he dared at last.
Eddyn grunted. “Until we reach Tir-Eron.”
“Assuming we do.”
Eddyn dipped his head to the right, where an impressive escarpment glowered, easily six spans high. Snow softened scorched walls at its summit: the ruins of Woodstock Station, now abandoned. “Might as well get to it.”
“But the birkits—”
“Even birkits go to ground in blizzards,” Eddyn retorted. “The fact remains: Either the gem is up there, or it’s in the Ri-Eron. And while I doubt that Rann or that woman who was with them had the thing, we’d be crazy not to check.”
Rrath’s eyes flashed challenge for one wild reckless moment, before their fire faded. “Apparently,” he spat, “my choice is whether I’m killed by birkits, you, or my own clan.”
Eddyn’s face was like frozen stone. “That’s a fair assessment.” And with that, he started up the timbered slope.
Eddyn knew what they would find long before they peered over what had been the way station’s outer palisade, but he motioned Rrath to caution anyway.
The tracks told it all: two fresh sets of ski trails from the station to the riverside, ending just out of sight of the boathouse, then footprints going back up, but angling away from the station. Birkit spoor in indeterminate number accompanied both sets, all several hands old.
So Rann and the woman had survived. They’d evidently risen early, skied down to the river to search for Avall’s body, and, not finding it, had struck out overland, back into the Wild and heading west. Which made sense, given that both were wounded, and the woman would surely have a permanent shelter fairly close by. More to the point, they hadn’t pressed on to Tir-Eron. By the look of the sky, he and Rrath shouldn’t, either.
“Best I can tell,” Rrath murmured, “Rann and the woman left at first light.”
Eddyn peered over the blackened wood of the outer palisade. A courtyard lay beyond, clogged with drifted snow from which more blackened timbers rose—the remains of the station proper. And a wellhead. A messy maze of prints, human and birkit, already melting in the fickle morning light. The air was sharp and crisp, but without the deadly bite of the last few days. Eddyn didn’t trust it.
Scowling, he began to skirt the wall, targeting what had once been a gate a dozen strides to the right. “We could follow,” he observed, “but we’ve already argued that to death.”
“Indeed,” Rrath dared. “Of course, two days ago I could’ve told which way the gem had gone.”
Eddyn didn’t hear him, having slipped through the gate and entered the compound proper.
Eddyn flung a snow-caked white cloak over the frozen body he’d found sprawled atop a millstone, revealing a tan-green tangle of entrails where its abdomen had been. Fig
hting back an urge to vomit, he stalked off to the shelter of an arched alcove, facing into the sun. It was almost warm there; snowmelt ran in trickles across the blackened pavement, carrying soot with it, for the fire was barely four days old. They’d been poking and prodding through the ruins for almost half a hand.
It was strange, though, that neither that body—nor the three they’d found stripped to their small clothes in the cellar—had been savaged. They showed claw marks, true, and deep gouges from the fangs that had killed every one of their companions. But the big predators hadn’t lingered to avail themselves of fresh, hot-blooded prey.
Which made no sense.
Not that anything else did, either.
When, Eddyn wondered idly, had reality come unraveled?
Rrath joined him, handing him a mug of something that steamed. Eddyn took the drink in a gloved hand and sniffed it suspiciously, then glanced uphill, toward where the ghost priests’ camp had been. That, too, barely seemed real.
“So,” Rrath ventured primly. “What do you make of the situation, since you seem to have claimed leadership?”
Eddyn stared across the snowy court, noting how blue the shadows looked against the white; how green the needles seemed on the trees. Recalling how red the ghost priests’ blood had been when it splashed across the snow.
Shaking his head to clear it, he rose, squinting at the sun, which was approaching noon. “There should still be a fair bit of food around, fire or not. Best we stock up on rations, then head downriver, in case Avall’s body has washed up. Not that I expect it to,” he added.
Rrath gnawed his lip. “Or … we could just stay here in the Wild. We could find another station and weather the winter there, and …”
“We could not!” Eddyn huffed. “There’s living and there’s being alive. You’re letting fear rule you, and that’ll get you killed. Except that it might get me killed, too, and that I won’t risk. No, we’ll press on to Tir-Eron and hope to catch up with Avall on the way—if he’s still alive. In either case, I can tell Tyrill what I know and let her handle the rest.” And maybe buy forgiveness, he added to himself.