Honor's Paradox-ARC

by P. C. Hodgell

  There. Five partial jars held together by his will, filled with as much of their contents as had survived. Now to return them to their rightful places on the shelves.

  Oh, bother. None of the containers were labeled and all had moved to fill any gap. Push some aside here, more there . . .

  “Well?” said a sharp voice. “Are you done yet?”

  His hand jerked. The shelves trembled, ripe for another disaster, and grew transparent. Kindrie hastily slotted the last jar into place. As he withdrew from the soul-image, its real life counterpart took shape around him, complete with his elderly patient glowering at him across the table. He released Index’s claw of a hand.

  “How do you feel?”

  The old scrollsman flexed arthritic fingers.

  “Better,” he said, almost with reluctance. “Not perfect, mind you, but better.”

  “I’m glad.” Kindrie rolled his shoulders to release the tension in them and ruefully regarded his own stinging fingertips. Metaphoric splinters were worse that real ones; the nerves remembered them far longer. “It’s hard to replace what the years have taken away.”

  “No cure for old age, eh? There should be. And for death.”

  Kindrie sighed. If he had completed his training as a healer at the Priests’ College, would he be better now or warped beyond redemption? Had it been selfish of him to flee? No. Lady Rawneth would have destroyed him even if her hieratic minions hadn’t.

  Index rose and started to putter around his shed, gathering the ingredients for alfalfa tea.

  “Not perfect,” he repeated over his shoulder, “but fair is fair. The scrollsman with the information that you want, Moyden by name, has gone on an ambassadorial mission to the Poison Courts. We may never see him again.”

  “Oh.”

  “However, I know something about the history of the Southern Wastes. Before we arrived on Rathillien, the natives say that in their place was a huge inland sea surrounded by rich civilizations. Then the climate changed from temperate to a desert, don’t ask me why or how. They say that even the stars shifted in the sky. Anyway, the sea was cut off from its freshwater sources, turned to salt, and dried up. The cities that clustered around it disappeared into the sand and their people fled. Only their outposts remained—Kothifir, Hurlen, and Urakarn, for example. All of this was some three thousand years ago, during the Fifth Age. By most accounts, Rathillien has had seven.”

  Kindrie blinked, trying to comprehend the scope of such vast changes, so baldly presented. If Index had been a singer, and more poetic, he would have suspected that the old man was taking advantage of the Lawful Lie.

  “I think,” he said, “that I should talk to Moyden when . . .”

  “If.”

  “If he returns.”

  “You do that. Tell him that you bartered with me and that I will repay him.” Index poured boiling water over his herbs and cradled the cup in gnarled fingers. “Ah,” he said, inhaling the fragrance. “Soul-images are all very well, but give me a fistful of dried leaves every time. You’re doing this for that gray sneak, aren’t you? Take my advice, boy: make sure that he pays you.”

  Kindrie stood up and executed a courteous if awkward bow. “All information, ultimately, is for my cousin. I don’t barter with her.”

  “Ah.” Index impatiently waved him away. “Beware that one: honorable as she seems, she has the darkling glamour.”

  As Kindrie climbed the shed’s stair and crossed Mount Alban’s cavernous entry hall, he dismissed Index’s warning and savored that word: cousin. Bastards had no kin. He was not a bastard. He had a family, small though it was, and moreover not one cousin but two. The thought warmed him as much as his blue woolen robe, a gift from Kirien and finer than he had ever owned before. Kin, and friends.

  Here was the central wooden stair rising in its square well up though the layers of the Scrollsmen’s College. Within the cliff face itself was a maze of apartments honeycombing the rock. Bits of conversation reached him as he climbed, scrollsmen and singers at their eternal bickering:

  “Facts are for small minds. You couldn’t find yours with both hands and a torch.”

  “How could I search with both hands and still hold a . . . wait a minute.”

  “Who borrowed my concordance to the law scrolls?”

  “I needed to look up a word that rhymes with ‘splendiferous.’ Why?”

  “Has anyone seen my experiment?”

  “D’you mean the purple thing with black spots? It went that way.”

  The voices faded behind him as he reached the three levels on top of the cliff, devoted to public spaces and the Director’s quarters. Over these was the observation deck. The level rays of the setting sun met Kindrie as he emerged from the stairwell and half blinded him. Two figures stood silhouetted against the glare.

  “Kindrie,” said one warmly, in Kirien’s voice.

  “My lady.”

  She laughed. “Such formality.”

  The other figure by contrast radiated the cold of the unburnt dead. Kindrie braced himself.

  “Singer Ashe,” he said, with an awkward bob of the head.

  “I was about to send for you,” said the Jaran Lordan. “I have news.”

  She indicated a seat on the ledge between herself and Ashe. Kindrie self-consciously perched on her far side, putting her between himself and the haunt singer. Beyond Kirien’s clean-cut profile, a wry smile quirked Ashe’s thin lips away from yellow teeth within the shadow of her hood.

  Kirien held up a fragile piece of linen dotted with knot stitches. “Getting this translated—and you were right: the stitches do constitute a code—has proved surprisingly hard. We have several former Jaran ladies turned scrollswomen at Mount Alban, but none wanted to violate an apparent secret of the Women’s World. Finally I sent a transcript to my great-great-aunt Trishien.”

  “The Jaran Matriarch.”

  “Yes. She wasn’t eager to translate it either, until she read it for herself. She asks where you got it.”

  Kirien’s writing pad was out, her hand moving across it in her spiky script as she recorded their conversation for the matriarch’s benefit. Kindrie imagined Trishien’s own ink-stained fingers jerking across a page as she received Kirien’s message.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Aunt Trishien? Back in the Women’s Halls at Gothregor. Torisen has let all the ladies return, to my surprise. They haven’t been exactly tactful in their past dealings with him. I hear that Adiraina even tried to slip him an aphrodisiac.”

  “What?”

  Kirien laughed at his startled expression. “Oh, not for herself. But I repeat: where did you get this?”

  “It was in the bottom of a knapsack that Jame gave me to carry . . . something else.”

  Kindrie hadn’t yet mentioned the contract to anyone, fearing the next question: Who was your father? He himself hadn’t gotten used to the idea of Gerridon as his sire—Trinity, who could? He, Jame, and Torisen were all children born of legend and nightmare. What others would say about their lineage hardly bore thinking about.

  “I don’t believe my cousin remembered that the cloth was there,” he added. “Where she got it, I don’t know.”

  Kirien scrawled Kindrie’s answer, then paused, waiting for a reply. It was several minutes in coming. Then her hand moved again in even, rounded letters.

  “ ‘The knot code is a close-kept secret of the Women’s World,’ ” she read. “ ‘We use it to communicate, sisterkin to kin. I wouldn’t betray it, except that the Knorth girl should know what this note says. This appears to be a fragment of a letter from Kinzi Keen-eyed to Adiraina stitched on the night of the Massacre.’ ”

  Ashe began, harsh-tongued, to chant:

  “Down in a dark hall desperate footsteps

  Seek out the safety of shadows and silence.

  Beautiful Aerulan, Brenwyr’s beloved

  Clutches a child’s hand, white-cheeked with fear.

  Above, at the doorway already cold
r />   Kinzi lies killed among cascades of crimson.

  Sweet pale blooms promise protection

  Concealment and comfort for cold Tieri.

  A woven hanging hides her behind it,

  Moon-garden entrance guarded by grace.

  Aerulan invites assassins to her arms:

  Her death distracts them from Tieri’s trail.

  Cut down like corn the women of Knorth.

  Ashes blew black from blazing pyres.

  Knorth’s men, maddened made for the hills

  Drinking full deep of destruction’s draught.

  Under her home’s halls Tieri lay hidden

  Last Knorth woman left all alone.”

  Kindrie shivered.

  The sun had set, leaving the sky on fire—streaks of orange, smoldering red, yellow like a throttled shriek, a silent holocaust on high. Ever since the volcanic eruption the previous year, the evening sky had been ominously spectacular.

  Kindrie became aware that Ashe was regarding him closely. The sunset gave the exposed quadrant of the singer’s face almost a rosy glow, but cast into deeper relief the ravages of death. He bit back an instinctive response to use the pyric rune. Where Ashe walked, among the living or among the dead, was her choice. Whether the Jaran were wise to condone it was another matter.

  “You saw her . . . didn’t you? Your mother. In the Moon Garden.”

  Her harsh, halting voice scraped on his nerves, as did the memory. That thing of woven death banner cords, animated by hunger, swaying toward him—

  “. . . come . . . mine . . .”

  —mouthing that awful, mindless summons back to the threadbare womb, to fill the aching void within.

  Did I create that with my birth? Am I to blame?

  So many years wondering what his mother had looked like, at last to see her like that.

  “What . . . did you feel?”

  Horror, pity, grief. And then the flood had come, washing her poor fragments away.

  “Could I have saved her? Was there anything left to save?”

  “Very little. Even with a name . . . the neglected soul wears thin. I have seen her pass . . . in the Grayland . . . no more than a flaw on the wind. Let her go.”

  Kirien’s hand continued to move as Trishien translated the note for her. “ ‘Can it really be twelve years since Gerraint died? You . . .’ that would be Adiraina . . . ‘have been impatient with me for not having told . . .’ The note is full of holes. This is one of them. And part of it has been ripped off. ‘. . . virtually nothing of what happened in the death banner hall before so much of it burned.’ ”

  Kindrie scrambled to catch up. “She’s referring to the night that Gerraint died and Ganth became Highlord?”

  “Yes, twelve years before the Massacre, as Kinzi says. We’ve had so many disasters that it does get confusing. Trinity, listen to this:

  “ ‘You have laughed at rumors that Greshan was seen walking the halls of Gothregor when he was five days dead.

  “ ‘Well, I saw him too. In my precious Moon Garden. With that bitch of Wilden, Rawneth. She led him in by the secret door behind the tapestry and there, under my very window, made love to him.

  “ ‘Except it wasn’t Greshan.

  “ ‘I knew that the moment I saw him, and I didn’t warn her. Oh, Adiraina . . . I let her damn herself. Then he changed—into whom, I don’t know. I couldn’t see his face, but Rawneth did. She gaped like a trout, then burst out laughing, half in hysteria, half, I swear, in triumph. What face could he have shown her to cause that?’ ”

  The three looked at each other.

  “Rawneth made love to someone in the Moon Garden who at first appeared to be Greshan,” Kirien repeated.

  “But that was the price of Tieri’s contract,” Kindrie blurted out. “That Gerraint should get his precious son back.” Then he felt the blood that had rushed from his face flood back. Oh, his wretched tongue.

  “What contract?” asked Kirien. “With whom? For what?”

  Her expression softened. She could have demanded the truth from him, that being her Shanir trait, but she took pity. “Never mind. Tell us when you’re ready. The point is, Rawneth’s lover altered his appearance. Only darkling changers do that, as far as I know, unless we include the Whinno-hir, the wolvers, and half a dozen other oddities. But we don’t know whom he changed into. Kinzi says that she didn’t know either, but that Rawneth was at first surprised, then pleased. How very strange.”

  Her hand moved again in Trishien’s smooth script.

  “Another break. Then, ‘It has been three months since Lord Randir died and four since the Randir Lordan disappeared. My spies tell me that Rawneth contracted the Shadow Guild to assassinate him.’ Another break. ‘Now she insists that Ganth confirm her own son, Kenan, as the new lord of Wilden.

  “ ‘And here we come to the heart of the matter.

  “ ‘Rawneth went back to Wilden that same night, contracted with a Highborn of her own house, and some nine months later gave birth to Kenan. But who is Kenan’s father—the Randir noble or the thing in the garden? Without knowing, how can I advise Ganth to accept or reject his claim? And so I have summoned Rawneth and her son to Gothregor while you are also here, since your Shanir talent lies in determining bloodlines at a touch. You will tell me, dear heart, and then I will know how to act. I must admit, I do hope our dear Rawneth has mated with a monster.

  “ ‘But if so, why did she laugh so triumphantly?

  “ ‘How the wind howls! Now something has fallen over below. I hear many feet on the stair. Perhaps it is Ganth, come home at last . . .’ ”

  Kirien lowered her pad and picked up the fragile linen square with both hands, delicately, as if it might disintegrate at her touch.

  “There this letter ends, I suppose, with the arrival of the shadow assassins and Kinzi’s death. The breaks in the note appear to come where her blood has eaten through the fabric. Look.”

  They regarded the discolored cloth, dotted with stitches, fretted with holes, perhaps the last thing that the Knorth Matriarch Kinzi Keen-eyed had ever touched.

  “Well.” Kirien looked up. “Do you make of that what I do? Adiraina was going to establish Kenan’s bloodlines, but before she could, the Knorth women were slaughtered. Ganth returned to find them all dead—except for Tieri, who was still in hiding—and stormed off after the wrong enemy. Adiraina never received this letter. The question of Kenan’s parentage, therefore, has never been established except that, if Kinzi is right, his father was some kind of a changer. And we are left to imply . . . what?”

  “That Lady Rawneth sent the assassins . . . to forestall her son’s testing.”

  Kindrie was appalled. “For that, she would kill all the Knorth ladies?”

  “There was bad blood . . . between Kinzi and Rawneth . . . long before the Massacre.”

  “That,” said Kirien, ever the scrollswoman, “is one interpretation of the evidence before us. There may be others. Certainly, this raises questions, but it doesn’t establish the whole truth. Kindrie, will you tell your cousins? They need to know this, for what it’s worth.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Kindrie. The blunder over the contract still rattled him, but even more so this sudden window into events that had shaped his life even before his birth. He thought of his mother, only a child, finding herself in a house of death and then being left behind to become a virtual prisoner, alone, in the Ghost Walks. It wasn’t only his birth that had left her an empty shell.

  Kirien rose and slipped her notepad into a pocket. The cloth letter she returned to Kindrie. “I have some research to do.” She kissed the healer lightly on the lips. “Don’t fret.” And she left.

  “She is fond of you,” said Ashe. “Don’t hurt her.”

  Kindrie fumbled with the alien idea that he could hurt anyone, much less the young woman whom he had come to think of as his patron, and his friend.

  “You could hurt . . . you know. Badly.” The haunt singer regarded him steadily from t
he shadows of her hood. More than ever, he felt the unnatural cold radiating off of her and ached to cure it with fire. “You have access to the soulscape . . . on our most vulnerable level. It is in your mind even now . . . to burn me where I stand.”

  “I wouldn’t. Not without cause.”

  “It isn’t enough . . . that I am dead? And if I told you . . . that I have guessed your secret? Tieri had a contract. That could only have been . . . for you . . . therefore you are legitimate. As for your father . . . the dead whisper each to each. Tieri spoke . . . to your great-grandmother Kinzi and to Aerulan . . . before her banner wore to rags with decades of exposure . . . and neglect. I could name the man . . . who sired you.”

  “Don’t!”

  “Would you stop me? You can . . . with one searing word.”

  Kindrie struggled with the thought. Until recently, he had been as alone in his way as his mother had been in hers. What would Kirien think if she knew that his father was the greatest archtraitor in the history of the Kencyrath? He could hardly blame her if she threw him out. But to hurt instead of to heal . . .

  Yet he had spoken the pyric rune before the Haunted Lands keep to prevent the dead from rising. One of them, he gathered, had been his uncle Ganth himself, not that that had apparently stopped the Gray Lord from haunting his son.

  There is a locked door in Torisen’s soul, and behind that, a mad, muttering voice.

  But those darklings had risen consumed with mindless hunger, not as Ashe had done, her intellect still held intact by her will alone, suspended between life and death.

  “You’re testing me.”

  “So I am. You are . . . potentially one of the Tyr-ridan. Are you worthy . . . that we should rest one third of our hopes . . . on you?”

  “Trinity knows, I don’t feel it, but then the idea is new to me. And it may not come to pass. Are you testing Jame and Torisen as well?”

  “Jame, yes . . .”

  Despite himself, Kindrie was impressed; he would never have had the nerve.