Springwar

by Tom Deitz

  “There’s also one crucial decision you have to make,” Rann broke in. “One that we can’t really advise you on.”

  “And that is?”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “Whether to bind you to all three gems at once, or one at a time.”

  Gynn gnawed his lip and looked at Avall. “You’re bound to two, but in sequence, correct?”

  Avall nodded. “But others can use them even so. In fact, we thought of binding all three of these to one or the other of us, but we weren’t sure whether that might cause some problem in the long run.”

  Gynn chuckled grimly. “This is learn as you go, isn’t it? This is the kind of thing that’ll be in the histories a thousand years from now: what we did, how it turned out. I’m not sure if I like making history, though.”

  “No,” Merryn and Avall chorused as one, in that eerie way twins had. “Adventures are much better to read about than to live.”

  “But we can either work with what we know,” Gynn retorted, “or we—I—can expand our knowledge in some small way. Fact,” he continued, “we don’t know if the gems you’ve found aren’t all there’ll ever be. Therefore, this may be the only chance in the history of the world to try to bind three stones at once. I’d be a fool to try it, but I might be a worse fool not to.”

  “‘Knowledge outlives Kings,’” Lykkon quoted.

  “Thank you for reminding me,” Gynn replied dryly. “At any rate, my life hinges on the next few days—or even hands. I might die sooner this way, but that death will certainly be more interesting.”

  At some unspoken sign, Strynn spread the gems on the table. They glittered in the firelight, as if in anticipation.

  “You know some of this,” Avall said. “You cut yourself, you … feed the gems blood. After that—you wait to see what happens.”

  Gynn shrugged resignedly. And accepted the knife Strynn passed him.

  They think they know what I risk, Gynn told himself. They have no idea. Not my life as it is now, but my life as it is for all time to come. Gynn syn Argen-el, who saved Eron or lost it.

  Or who made it greater than it ever was before. And all for a little pain, a little risk. A day from now I will be someone else.

  They were waiting for him to take that risk, too. Eyes watched him. Young eyes that had still seen so much. Faces—minds—bodies—that had suffered more than he ever had at that age. He’d only had to survive the plague.

  Sparing his comrades a wry smile, Gynn used the point of his knife to array the gems in a neat line, a hand’s length apart. Then, steeling himself, he grasped the blade in his left hand, and with his right pulled it smartly down. Merryn had edged that blade, so it was sharp beyond believing. He saw the blood before he felt the pain, but by then he’d swapped the hilt to the other hand, and was repeating the ritual to bloody his right. He’d been conditioned since birth to seek patterns—symmetries. This was one of them. Another breath, and he returned the dagger to Strynn, who wiped it on the tablecloth, and slid it into its sheath. A pause, and he reached for the two outside gems, taking one in each hand.

  And saw the God.

  Or was the God.

  Was everything. Avall had said that the first effect he’d had from the gem was a sense of being energized. Coupled with that had come an attenuated time sense, along with a much tighter focus of concentration.

  This was like that, only more so. Time slowed down at once. At the same time, his senses expanded, and he realized that for this moment he had all the time in the world—time to examine everything in the room in the most minute detail. He could count the threads in the table cover by eye—by texture if he ran his fingers across them. By the sound his nails would make as they brushed that surface. Or all three at once. And he could feel the … powers of the universe, he supposed, as though his body had grown a second set of nerves that responded solely to the unseen.

  His companions were no longer mere solid bodies seated close by, but complexities of systems, large and small, some of which he could touch with parts of himself that he hadn’t known existed. He’d shared minds with Avall before—and in that, had shared his body. But that had required touch. This didn’t. He saw Avall and the others, and then he saw Avall’s mind. He saw fear and wonder, and a dreadful slowness he realized numbly was Avall’s mind frozen in time relative to his own. But that mind was open, trusting, wondering. He couldn’t resist, and slipped in there, ignoring those things he had no right to know, but moving unerringly toward anything that spoke of the gems. And there, for the first time, he saw Avall’s whole memory of what it had been like to enter the Overworld. Not as a set of words or images, but as a pattern in his thoughts. Along with it, he saw how that pattern joined with Avall’s mind itself, like a webwork of invisible scaffolding binding earth and sky. And more important, he saw how that connection was made.

  And could therefore be remade, over and over. Endlessly.

  But he also saw that no words existed to explain those things. Whatever communication occurred had to take place at a level that had not, heretofore, existed. Nor could Avall perceive the pattern—because he was within it, as one could not perceive the shape of the world while immersed within the sea.

  Almost he lost himself, as he stared in awe. And then slowly, oh so slowly, came a rolling growl of something he only dimly recognized as words. They were like tides, so slowly did they ebb into his ears. Yet still he heard them. “Try … the … other …,” they proclaimed.

  Gynn hesitated. Other what? And then knew. The gem. But he was so perfectly balanced, with a gem in either hand, and the power they contained flowing perfectly. And though he knew he could prime them, he feared to upset that oh-so-perfect balance.

  But then his precise new reflexes thrust rational thought aside and took total command of his body, so that it was with exactly enough force and direction that he slammed his forehead down atop the third gem hard enough to break skin. Hard enough to feed that stone the blood it needed to awaken all those wonders.

  Reality promptly swung into even sharper focus. Order imposed itself on chaos, as left and right merged and mingled, and his mind became one again. But it wasn’t safe, he also realized. There was too much power at work here, unless that power had some focus. And what must that focus be? What did he want most strongly?

  He wanted to save the land, and for that he must wield the power of the gems. But that power was too great without a structure. Yet he had a structure—had seen one—lodged in Avall’s memory. He needed only to duplicate that.

  Which he couldn’t do, because he had no time in real time for such things. But which Avall could manage, if he could see the pattern.

  But what was that pattern?

  There were several, actually. Yet it seemed that the one that would do most good in the context in which their conscious minds were accustomed to working was one that would feed the power of the gem to his nervous system most effectively.

  He couldn’t explain the pattern—but he could show it. And so he dived into Avall’s memory, and set that pattern there. Not in a place where words or images could find it, analyze it, and set it forth. But deeper: down where instinct lived. Where one simply did art, not described it.

  And that was all he could do, he realized, as his body let it be known that far too much of him was not accustomed to such stress.

  Slowly, oh so slowly, he raised his head, and with that, energy flowed out of him, then shifted to a new balance.

  He opened his hands and saw the gems drift down like stately drops of crimson rain to the snowfield that was the tablecloth. They glittered as they fell, their inner facets winking at him, one after another, as though they were tiny gods each sharing a secret with him. Maybe they were. Maybe instead of The Eightfold God, he had met The Eight-million-fold. A languid rush of air was his companions breathing, and then the gems struck the fabric. The noise was like soft thunder.

  Reality shattered, then realigned. If he tried, he could assess the world at a normal pace. And w
hile part of him danced through his own brain, as though through a Lore hall and a gallery of wonders all at once, a denser, duller part was aware of his companions spinning around in place, to stare at Tryffon standing in the doorway, his face hard with concern.

  Gynn heard the words that nested around the major ones and softened the blow, but the ones that registered most forcefully were contained in two sentences: “The river will be back in its banks tomorrow” and “Barrax’s army is moving.”

  Gynn nodded a slow reply. But the person he spoke to was Avall. “You know what to do now, without knowing.”

  “I’m cold,” Avall replied numbly. And then, quite suddenly, was asleep.

  Gynn stared at the hand-high phial before him. It glimmered in the darkness, its iridescent glaze reflecting the light of the single candle that was the sole illumination in his tent. He was naked—not only because he’d just had the bath that was prescribed for Sovereigns on the eve of battle, but because he was about to petition the God. For the phial held water from Fate’s Well.

  Gynn paused with his hand extended. Did he truly want to do this? He was tempting Fate already—twice over.

  The wound was one way. But he truly had thought it might heal, and by the time he was certain it wouldn’t, affairs were moving swiftly toward war. And since that war would, indeed, have been long in planning before his injury, blame for it could not rest on his indiscretion. As for stepping down now … Ritual gave him some leeway, but it finally boiled down to choice. He could abandon his kingdom in its time of need, and thereby placate the letter of the Law. Or he could give his country everything he had to give, and hope that the Law—and The Eight—would forgive him. Especially if what he placed on Fate’s altar was his own life.

  He’d been fortunate so far. Rumor of his deficiency was still confined to the Council, or to High Clan, at best. And High Clan were increasingly dubious about the existence of The Eight anyway. The northern gorges were still blissfully isolated, unless the couriers he’d sent with the war report had gossiped, which he didn’t think they’d do. As for the other two, one had already fallen and the other been busy evacuating itself when rumor, if any, had gone south.

  At bottom, few knew, fewer would have told, and by the time rumor became widespread among the troops, the battle for South Gorge would be over.

  Maybe then he’d drink from Fate’s Well. As for the other—what he’d done just now with the gems—that was temptation of another kind. Maybe it was compensation: a risk to his self in exchange for the risk he was forcing on the land, in case The Eight were not pleased with his failure to abdicate.

  He shrugged and ran a finger down the side of the phial. It all came down to choices, didn’t it? And he’d made one choice, which might go against the Law, and now another in recompense. It was balance, he supposed. It always was. Then again The Eight had long since named him the King of Balance. And maybe that was enough.

  Sparing one final wistful glance at the phial, he returned it to the portable altar in which it was housed.

  If Fate wanted his attention, Fate would tell him. But for now, it seemed, Fate spoke mostly through Avall.

  CHAPTER XXVIII:

  THE HERMIT OF PRIESTS’ GORGE

  (ERON: TIR-ERON-SUNBIRTH: DAY VIII—EARLY MORNING)

  Rrath had fallen into a crack.

  Two cracks, actually. There was the literal crack in a slab of stone into which he’d just stumbled, as he made his way through the rocky wilderness that comprised the extreme south end of the rugged spur gorge that housed Priest-Clan’s main precincts. That crack had cost him no more than a scraped ankle, a bloody elbow, and a certain amount of dignity—that latter gone to waste, since no one had seen him anyway, nor would have, the way the rocks were piled around here, ornamented with clumps of hardy plants the same color as his robe, and the whole wreathed often as not with puffs of steam billowing from vents in the main gorge lower down.

  The other crack was figurative. He’d regained consciousness at precisely the best moment to effect a disappearance. Exactly when no one was concerned with him.

  Not with the elite of his clan imprisoned in the Hall of Clans, including his mentor, Nyllol, who’d introduced him to the Ninth Face. Mentor indeed! he snorted, as he picked himself up and assessed his skinny self for damage. Nyllol had used him ruthlessly, playing on his combination of ambition and naïveté to effect certain ends that were not Rrath’s own. But Nyllol wasn’t accessible now. And he doubted anyone else had energy to spare locating a young man who’d escaped from the infirmary. Not when he was eking out an existence where no one would think to look—or dare.

  Nor did he want to be found.

  Not by his clan, for his clan contained a secret inner clan, and he had no way of knowing who was which. If the Ninth Face got hold of him, he’d never have peace again. There was no end of the things they could do to control him, and Rrath had had enough of being controlled. And if they even suspected he was no longer loyal to them, he would die quickly and invisibly, with no chance whatever of survival.

  But the King was gone, so there was no way to beg royal protection in exchange for information. As for the remaining powers in the gorge—well, it was mostly Argen and Ferr, and the people he’d hurt most grievously were of those lines. Eellon might listen, but that would be all. And Eddyn—

  He didn’t want to think about Eddyn—wherever he was. Eddyn who’d maybe been his friend and then tried to kill him, not once but many times. With cause, perhaps, for the first—but Rrath figured that only made them even.

  Fear and ignorance were his friends, he concluded, as he started down the path, sparing a glance at the glowering sky. Ignorance, because few even among his own clan knew what was kept prisoned in the upper reaches of Priest-Clan’s gorge. And fewer, he suspected, actually thought about those prisoners. Which was just as well, with Nyllol incarcerated, since Nyllol had maintained charge of them.

  Maintained for the last half year, rather. Before that, they’d been in Rrath’s care, under Nyllol’s supervision.

  Those prisoners.

  Those things everyone else feared.

  Not that he didn’t fear them as well, but he had so much else to fear that they, in their predictability, were comforting by contrast. They were also the lone powerful things he, in some wise, controlled.

  The beasts in the clan menagerie.

  The geens.

  The route he followed to their enclosure was a mirror of the one he’d taken half a year gone by when Nyllol had asked him about his observations of the geens, and whether they were intelligent, and then followed those queries with more probing ones about how he felt about knowledge and power.

  That path had taken him up from the hold proper, through a sort of rock garden, to a saddle in the rocks, beyond which, in the most steep-sided, dead-end canyon in all of Eron Gorge, lay the geens’ enclosure. But teeing off that saddle to the left was a tunnel that opened into another canyon, where the goats on which the geens were fed, were kept. Beyond that was wilderness. And caves, in one of which he’d chosen to dwell, with a few supplies filched from uninhabited suites under cover of night. As for food, he had vegetables and grain stolen from the stores intended for the goats, and goat-flesh itself, when he dared cook it, which he did at night on the smallest fires he could manage. He hadn’t spent a warm night in what seemed like forever. But spring was upon them now, and with it …

  Change.

  Somewhere.

  Not here.

  Now was all he cared about. Eating, drinking, sleeping. Perhaps he was a little mad. Certainly he lived mostly in now. For the rest—he no longer cared.

  Except about the geens.

  The trail that was not a trail had leveled off into the upper pasture of the goat corral, and he hesitated beside a spur of rock before continuing. No one was about, save the usual herd of worn-out old bills and nannies. The crippled, the blind, the sterile. Too old to eat, too useless to milk or shear for wool. Like him, he supposed. Ali
ve, but with no part in the world any longer.

  One ambled up to nibble the hem of his tunic when he paused too long. He batted it absently, noting as he always did its odd, square-pupiled eyes. Wondering if that affected how it saw the world. Perhaps he had odd-pupiled eyes now. Certainly the world he saw wasn’t the one he’d seen a year gone by.

  In any event, he didn’t want to linger—not in the daylight. Someone was still feeding the goats—and the geens—after all. Probably some terrified half-boy like he’d been when he’d found his way to Priest-Hold: an orphan, because the whole generation ahead of him had died of the plague.

  He didn’t want that child—whoever it was—to see him. Then he’d have to kill it, and that would draw attention.

  With that in mind, he skirted left, through the shadows that lined the canyon and so came to the near end of the tunnel. He didn’t enter it, however, but eased farther left, where a half-hewn stair snaked up the slope beside it, ending a dozen spans above his head. He climbed it nimbly, agile for one who had been ill so long. Nor was he even slightly winded when he reached the top. He crouched there briefly, feeling more breezes beating at his body than were typical in the closer quarters at his back. They brought scents, too: smoke, and the sulfur stench of the steam from the hot springs that heated the gorge. And, ever so slightly, baking bread. Unfortunately, that made his mouth water and his stomach growl, and so he scurried left again, down the slope of the rock dome, to where he could look down on the geens’ enclosure.

  It was maybe two shots long and half of one wide, with a stream along one side and enough spotty growth to provide needed cover for the reptiles. Also enough cover to support a modest population of small animals that supplemented the geens’ diet of derelict goat.

  On which one of the beasts was feeding now, a haunch grasped in one knotty forearm. It nibbled at it absently, exactly like a man gnawing a roast fowl’s leg.