Honor's Paradox-ARC

by P. C. Hodgell

  Dammit, Jame, what are you up to now?

  III

  “Careful with that bucket,” said Jame. “There’s a salamander in it.”

  Damson paused to glare at Dar, who had handed her the vessel in question as part of a bucket brigade hauling mud out of the flood-damaged Knorth kitchen. The muck inside the bucket seethed and stank. An incandescent, spotted back surfaced, then disappeared again in a petulant gout of steam.

  “Too hot for you to handle?” Dar inquired innocently.

  His expression turned to a worried frown and he swayed as if about to pitch face-forward into the slimy mud that coated the floor ankle-deep.

  “Damson!”

  The cadet made a face at Jame’s sharp tone, but Dar stopped wobbling. Then he started to belch.

  Mint slipped a steadying arm around him as the paroxysms continued, bending him double. “Permission to get some fresh air, Ten?”

  “Go. And you, behave,” Jame said sternly to Damson. “See if you can get that beastie into the fireplace,” she added, indicating the raised, reasonably dry hearth. “If it settles in properly, we’ll never lack for a kitchen spark again.”

  She watched as the cadet gingerly prodded the lizard into a nest of kindling, which promptly ignited. The salamander curled up in the flames, steaming and purring like a kettle.

  “Ha!” said Damson, with a glance after her would-be tormenter.

  She and Dar had been sparring for weeks but, to Jame’s relief, Damson hadn’t pursued it to extremes. Was she finally growing a conscience, or was it only because she felt Jame’s eye constantly on her? Now a third possibility occurred to her: Damson might actually be enjoying herself.

  “You missed a spot,” said Timmon from his perch above the mess on a countertop.

  “I’m missing the entire floor, but it’s down there somewhere. Why aren’t you helping to clean up your own barracks?”

  “I’d much rather watch you work. I’ve been good . . . mostly. Doesn’t that buy me the right to indulge myself once in a while?”

  “You’re starting to slide out of things again.”

  “Truly, only out of some. But I wanted to ask you: have you spoken to Gorbel since he came back from Restormir?”

  “I’ve tried. He doesn’t answer.”

  “Huh. Something’s afoot there. Fash and Higbert have been smirking all over the college, and we haven’t seen much of the Commandant either.”

  Voices sounded above, one of them urgent.

  Timmon froze in dismay. “It can’t be.”

  But it was.

  Lord Ardeth descended the stair and stepped into the mud without seeming to notice it.

  “My dear boy!”

  Timmon scrambled to his feet. “Grandfather!”

  “I was on my way to visit you when I met your dear mother on the road. Is it true? Do you have Pereden’s lost ring? Where did you find it?”

  The sight of the gaping cadets who surrounded this tableau spurred Jame to action.

  “Up. Out,” she said to them. They sidled around the edges of the room and fled up the stair. “Timmon, why don’t you take m’lord to your quarters for some refreshments?”

  Anything to get him out of this stinking hole, to make him forget that wretched ring, not that that was likely with it in bold display on Timmon’s finger.

  “My lord,” she said, raising her voice, “I’m sorry about the death of your brother, Ran Aden. It was a terrible accident.”

  Ardeth waved this away, as if of little interest. “Dear Aden was growing a bit difficult. It happens to some Highborn at a certain age. No doubt I would soon have had to replace him as war-leader anyway. Now, Pereden—”

  Timmon interrupted desperately, with his most charming smile. The kitchen in all of its disarray seemed a brighter place for it. “Yes, do come with me, Grandfather. You must be weary after your long ride.”

  He led Adric up the stairs past Jame, who flattened herself against the noisome wall to let them pass.

  Ancestors preserve us, she thought as she hurried after them, then broke away at the barracks door, bound for Old Tentir. Adric’s cream-colored riding leathers had been stained not only with sweat but also with flecks of blood.

  She ran down the ramp to the subterranean stable, there to find the horse-master grimly examining Brithany by torchlight. The gray Whinno-hir drooped in her stall, her sister Bel-tiari at her side anxiously nuzzling her neck.

  “Look,” said the horse-master, almost speechless with indignation. “Just look! He’s put spurs to her sides and near whipped her flanks raw. How could he?”

  “The man is ridden by demons of his own. He probably didn’t realize what he was doing.”

  “What he’ll do, if he takes this mare out again tonight, is kill her.”

  “He’s in the Ardeth barracks now. I’ll see that he doesn’t leave until tomorrow.”

  How to do that, though?

  So Jame wondered, standing at the rail looking up at Timmon’s lit windows. Dusk was falling. Soon it would be time for the cold supper on which they had all subsisted since the flood. Surely Adric wouldn’t leave before then, but after?

  Unless he could completely befuddle the man, Timmon was bound to tell Adric where he had gotten the ring. Holding out on his mother was one thing, on his sovereign lord, quite another. She had been a fool not to realize that the burning of Pereden’s finger would affect his father, although Adric still seemed to be somewhat confused between his son and grandson. Torisen had to be warned about this latest development, but how?

  Along the southern rail, the Jaran master-ten was smoking a pipe and blowing rings into the cooling air. Jame approached her.

  “I’ve a favor to ask. Someone in your barracks is in far-writing communications with the Scrollsmen’s College. May I speak with him or her?”

  “Whom at Mount Alban do you wish to contact?”

  “Kirien, the Jaran Lordan.”

  The master-ten puffed contemplatively. “We value our Shanir in this house, and we protect them. You will only cause pain.”

  “Sweet Trinity, d’you think I would deliberately hurt any of the Old Blood, being one myself?”

  “Deliberately, no, but in this case it’s inevitable. Wait here.”

  She entered the barracks and shortly returned with a thin, pale boy. So this was the cadet who had strewn Index’s messages over her sleeping body. Jame remembered seeing him at Senetha practice. She had wondered at the time why he was here and not at Mount Alban as some scrollsman’s apprentice, but it seemed that he wanted to be a randon.

  “Can you help me?” she asked.

  The cadet pulled a rolled, blank parchment out of one sleeve and a steel-tipped quill out of the other. Jame noted that his right hand was bound in linen. He loosened the bandage and pocketed it. His palm was scored with seeping cuts.

  “What do you want to ask?” he said, bracing the parchment on the rail and digging the quill into his raw flesh.

  You can only hurt.

  Jame gulped. If this weren’t so important . . .

  “To Kirien: please pass this message along to Trishien and ask her to tell my brother. Adric knows about the ring. He is coming to ask you where you got it.”

  The cadet wrote her message in sputtering block letters on the parchment, returning several times to dip the quill into his own welling blood.

  Then they waited.

  “She may not be in her study,” said Jame.

  “It shouldn’t matter. The itch to write will take her.”

  His hand jerked into spiky script. “M’lady Kirien acknowledges the message, but reports that the Highlord had gone to Wilden to settle a border dispute. She also asks when Kindrie means to return to Mount Alban.”

  Jame felt a chill. “He isn’t there now?”

  The cadet’s scrip rounded as Trishien joined the conversation: “ ‘He isn’t at Gothregor either.’ ”

  “Trinity,” breathed Jame. “Not here, nor at Mount Alban, nor at Gothre
gor.”

  She remembered saying good-bye to her cousin and his discontented expression. He hadn’t been pleased not to take his pretty chart directly to Torisen on her mere say-so. After she had left, could he possibly have turned south rather than north on the New Road? If so, where had he been the past twenty-odd days? On the road, he should have been safe, but there were always wild animals and, these days, roving Noyat hillmen. Besides, Wilden lay between Tentir and Gothregor.

  Oh lord, what if he had fallen into Randir hands?

  CHAPTER XV

  Wilden

  Spring 48

  1

  In the cool of early morning, Kindrie walked in the Moon Garden of his soul-image. Regardless of their season, herbs bloomed all around him: comfrey and yarrow, anemone and colt’s-tail, masterwort and hoarhound, all white but all ragged and dispirited as if after a long drought. The stream at the garden’s southern end ran low with brackish water. Kindrie cupped some in his hands, his fingers scraping the woven bed. It was as if a death banner underlay the whole garden, undercutting life.

  No.

  This was still his sanctuary and he would tend it. Most of the water spilled before he could carry it to a drooping patch of white heartsease. He shook his long, pale fingers above the blooms and they momentarily revived.

  Drops of water, drops of hope.

  As he turned away, the flowers withered again and petals fell.

  Across the stream, a thing of tangled cords fumbled at the wall. Here in the soulscape, the flood had failed to wash away Tieri’s remains completely. Those that remained had woven themselves into a flaccid travesty that moped about the garden idly tearing flowers apart. Mostly, however, they either followed him or clung to the wall from which her banner had hung, beyond which Perimal Darkling had once gaped.

  “Mother, no.” Kindrie tried to draw her away.

  Sodden loops of cord fell over his hands, clammy to the touch.

  My son, come to me, come . . .

  If he pulled on them, she would unravel. He let go.

  Kindrie suspected that she—no, it—was animated by Rawneth. From the first, he had felt her fumbling about his soul, seeking some chink by which to enter. Once the Witch of Wilden and her pet priest Ishtier had shut him out of his soul-image altogether. He shuddered, remembering that terrible time when he could heal no one, not even himself. Ah, the bitter taste of mortality! Moreover, he had been denied his only source of comfort and peace, without which life was a cold, ragged thing and he little better. What his cousin Jame must have thought of him then. No wonder she had treated him with so little respect, for surely he had deserved none.

  He was stronger now, he told himself, able to walk his soul even as he regarded the blight on it that days in Randir captivity had brought. He could even unravel the sorry threads of this mock mother, but then he would be truly alone. Let her be.

  A cord fumbled around his ankle.

  My son . . .

  Not strong. Weak, when even such a cold, slimy touch brought comfort. More cords twined up his body.

  My son, lean on me. Who else have you?

  He remembered riding down the New Road in the dark, nearing Shadow Rock, so glad to see its lights over the shoulder of a hill. Cousin Holly had emerged from the evening mist to meet him. How his heart had leaped, and then fallen at the other’s cold smile.

  “Come to me, have you? Fool. Bastards have no family.”

  And he had delivered Kindrie to the Randir patrol that followed him.

  Something was wrong there. What? Oh, he was stupid, unable to think straight. Had this memory come to him once or over and over, night after night? How often had he felt this clammy touch, dreamed this dark dream.

  Lord Danior be damned. Surely Jame, Tori, Kirien or even Ashe would come to look for him.

  Fool. Bastards have no friends.

  A lifetime of experience told him that. He had been an idiot to believe otherwise.

  The cords climbed higher, threading in and out of his skin. Soon they would reach his throat.

  Something stuck his shoulder, and the garden blurred.

  “Up, you slugabeds, or break your teeth on the charred scrapings of the pot!”

  Kindrie groaned and opened his eyes. He lay on a narrow, lumpy cot in the subterranean Priests’ College at Wilden. Before him on the luminous moss that covered the wall were twenty-five thin scratches. He added a twenty-sixth. It seemed to him that he had been a prisoner much longer than that, since childhood even, friends and family only a desperate dream.

  Beyond detaining him, however, the Randir seemed to have no other immediate use for him than to throw him back into the routine of the Priests’ College. He had been theirs once; now he was again. Of course, if they had known that he was a purebred, legitimate Knorth, he would have had value as a pawn or a hostage. As it was, he accepted their seeming indifference gladly. Far better that than M’lady Rawneth’s special attention.

  He drew his hairy brown robe over thin shoulders. There had been muscle there once—well, a little. Here, however, there was no exercise but the Great Dance and no sustaining food except for that allotted to the high priests, and he was only an acolyte.

  Outside his door, he joined the brown-and-gray-clad mob as it shuffled down the spiral corridor past dormitories and classrooms. The subterranean college was built in a spindle shape, narrow at the top and bottom, wide in the middle. Above, the novices and acolytes lived in squalor; below, in unguessed at luxury, the priests, minor and high. In between was the communal dining hall.

  Other acolytes shoved and pinched him.

  “Thinks he’s too good for us.” “Yah, runagate!” “Are you happy to be home?”

  Breakfast was thin gruel, watery milk, and stale bread already spotted with blue mold. All around him, pinched faces bent to their meal, many under the ragged mops of white hair that betrayed those of the despised Old Blood.

  One novice, younger and plumper than the others, pushed back his bowl.

  “This is awful,” he whined. “I want my mother!”

  A Coman, Kindrie thought, about six years old. From the traces of brown dye in his hair, he had been hidden away at home until his Shanir nature had betrayed itself.

  “Mommy’s boy, mommy’s boy!” the others chanted at him. Most, like Kindrie, had been delivered to the college as babies. It had been mother and father to them, a lean breast and a hard hand.

  The newcomer buried his face in his arms and burst out sobbing.

  “Up, you motley rats, up!” cried the stewards, passing among them, thwacking with rods. “To class with you all!”

  Kindrie touched the boy’s shoulder in passing and found himself for an instant in the other’s soul-image: a small, bright chamber with childish drawings on the wall and a woman’s voice speaking in the next room.

  “Mother!”

  The boy leaped up, but his face crumpled when he saw the dank stone that surrounded him. Throwing off Kindrie’s hand, he blundered after the others.

  Had it been kind to remind him? Kindrie wondered, following. Already shadows were gathering in that childhood nursery and the beloved voice was fading. It took the strength of innocence to cling to such an image, and there was little of that in this dark place. Was he himself still innocent? In an odd way, yes. Under the circumstances of his childhood, he had never really grown up. Here and now, that was the only strength that he had.

  He filed into his first class, where those of pronounced Shanir power met in a claustrophobic room lit only by garish lichen murals of unpleasant designs.

  “Who is our lord?” demanded their instructor, a minor priest disparagingly behind his back called a priestling.

  “No one!” chorused back the assembled acolytes from the circle that they made around him.

  “Who is our patron?”

  “Lady Rawneth.”

  “Whom do we serve?”

  “The high priests.”

  “Who is our family?”

  “Each o
ther.”

  “On whom do we spit?”

  “On our cruel god”—each except Kindrie turned to mime spitting over his shoulder—“who has forsaken us.”

  The catechism over, the instructor turned to his class. “Remind me. What can each of you do?”

  “I can make dogs howl, master.”

  “I can start fires with a touch,” said a boy with a hideously scarred face.

  “I can shake the earth,” said another who himself couldn’t stop trembling.

  “I can madden birds.”

  “I can make snakes dance.”

  “I can carve stone images that move—all right,” the acolyte added, to the jeers of the others, “very slowly.”

  “And you?” the instructor said to Kindrie.

  “I heal.”

  “No. You can manipulate soul-images and walk the soulscape, as our Lady Rawneth does. Are you greater or lesser than she?”

  “That isn’t for me to say.”

  “Then I will. You are lesser because you can only heal, not destroy or create. Now, show us your power. Hinde, stand forth.”

  The twitching cadet nervously crossed the circle to face the Knorth.

  “Well? Touch him.”

  Reluctantly, Kindrie did.

  In his soulscape and in the room itself, not the acolyte but his entire surroundings began to quake, to the startled protests of the other students. Dust rattled down from the ceiling. Stones groaned. Standing still in the midst of growing chaos, Kindrie focused. In his soul-image, someone huge was shaking the boy, now a mere infant.

  “Oh, you little Shanir bastard . . .”

  Kindrie gripped those enormous, tormenting hands.

  “You’re killing him,” he said. “One more seizure and he will die. You are nothing but a memory, to torment him so. Go away.”

  Then they were back in the classroom, the boy quiet and bewildered in his grasp, the stones settling around them. Angry shouts came from neighboring rooms.

  “What did you do?” demanded the instructor.

  “I sent away a baleful influence.”