Honor's Paradox-ARC

by P. C. Hodgell

  “You destroyed it!”

  “No. Only he can do that. See. It has him in its grip again.”

  The boy broke Kindrie’s hold and backed off, shaking, sneering. His thoughts echoed in the Knorth’s mind:

  “I deserve it, I deserve it, I deserve it . . .”

  “Try me,” said the fire-boy, suddenly before him, gripping Kindrie’s sleeves.

  Kindrie felt heat. The dank wool smoked and stank. His hands in turn gripped the other’s wrists. He was falling toward fire. No. The one falling was a child on a hearth, ignored by his parents as they argued about his fate. That had been decided long ago but still he fell, only to be thrust away by Kindrie’s will.

  The acolyte looked at his hands, aghast. His ruined face crumpled on the side not fixed with scar tissue. “I can’t,” he said, almost in tears. “What have you done to me, you bastard?”

  Nothing that would last, thought Kindrie sadly as the other, blundering, withdrew. Not without his consent. That was one of the bitter lessons he had learned over the past three weeks: those here below in the Priests’ College had been made to embrace their wretchedness. Earth shaker and fire-touch both might have turned their talents to more constructive ends, but not under the college’s direction.

  For the rest of the lesson, the instructor ignored him while the burnt boy wept scalding tears and the trembling boy complacently jittered in place, occasionally gulping back foam.

  The next class was wind-blowing Senetha as practiced for the Great Dance. Ah, the freedom to move, almost to fly, but here one also felt a touch of the power that the dance was meant to channel. It streamed in at the top of the college from the Kencyrath’s wide-flung temples and spiraled down through it, bound for the catch pool below, the cloaca of divinity. From whence did it come? Different currents had different scents—the musk of Tai-tastigon, the jungle sweat of Tai-than, the spice of Kothifir, the dust and ashes of Karkinaroth—and there were other flavors there too, including one very strong like simmering brimstone. Kindrie was gingerly trying to backtrack this last when the class ended.

  Next(without any intervening lunch) was elementary runes, taught by a former randon whose eyes kept straying to Kindrie.

  “Not like that. Here. Look.” He bent over Kindrie’s wax tablet and drew on it. Kindrie noticed that the back of the priest’s neck was scarred, but not heavily enough to disguise the swooping lines of the rathorn sigil. On Kindrie’s pad he had written, “Wake up! She has her nails in you.”

  She . . . who?

  The cords, climbing higher and higher, obscenely burrowing in and out of flesh . . .

  For a moment he knew what was happening to him, and then it was gone. The priest had scraped clean the slate.

  Last came potions and powders.

  “Today we will compound a dust to stop an enemy’s breath,” announced the instructor, “something so simple that even our esteemed Knorth Bastard should be able to master it.”

  The other students tittered and shot him sidelong glances, but Kindrie had his doubts. Nothing that he tried in this class ever came out as planned, perhaps because most of it was meant to harm.

  Throttle-weed, ash-berry, powdered bilge-beetle . . .

  The instructor was right: what could be simpler—assuming that he really did want someone to choke.

  The priestling gingerly sniffed at Kindrie’s concoction, the antidote clutched ready in one fist. His breath caught and his eyes bulged.

  Trinity, thought Kindrie, dismayed, did I really do it right?

  Then the man drew a whooping gasp and began convulsively to sneeze. His explosive breath scattered the powder throughout the room. Some bent double helplessly as if about to blow their brains out. Others keeled over chairs and table, sending their own ingredients flying to add to the confusion. Kindrie stood back in alarm, holding his breath.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to face a senior priest holding a cloth to his face. “Of course, it would be you,” he said in a tone of muffled exasperation. “Come along. Someone wants to see you.”

  Kindrie went with him, but not before surreptitiously sweeping what little was left of his experiment into a pocket.

  His guide led him up the spiral ramp to the foot of a stair, then up into the stone building, hardly more than a shed, that masked the college’s entrance. Outside was Wilden’s high, windy terrace looking down over the fortress’ many barred family compounds full of steep, narrow buildings like so many pinched, inward-turning faces. The shadow of the Witch’s Tower fell across the flagstones, turning puddles to ice where it touched.

  Kindrie hesitated on the tower’s threshold, loath to enter, and looked out over the clean world denied to him. Beyond the sweep of buildings, down on the river flats, he saw a large tent flying a black flag with white tracery on it, too distant to make out.

  “Who is that?” he asked his escort.

  The priest laughed. “The Highlord, come to settle our little border dispute, or so he thinks.”

  Torisen, so close . . .

  Clean air seemed to blow through him for the first time in weeks, but the priest’s hand closed on his arm as he took an involuntary step toward the terrace’s edge.

  “Do you think that we don’t know?” the man breathed in his ear. “You could call him ‘cousin,’ but wait: bastards have no kin, do they, even so high-blooded a one as you. Aren’t you glad that we took you in? This way.”

  He pushed Kindrie into the Witch’s Tower.

  “Now climb.”

  The shadows struck him cold as he mounted the twisting stair and his breath smoked. Kindrie remembered the first time, as a child, that he had come this way, not knowing what awaited him.

  “Let me see you, infant.” Oh, that chill, caressing voice. “Come close. Closer. Close enough. They say that no one can do you lasting harm. How . . . intriguing. Shall we see?”

  Another more recent memory: “What a pretty chart. Here are all the Highlord’s dependents lined up so neatly. Does he really need such an aid to memory? Dear me. The written word is so easily destroyed, though, isn’t it?”

  And she had thrust the scroll into the fire.

  Witch. Bitch.

  At least he still had the rough notes in his room at Mount Alban.

  Rawneth lived in the upper stories of the tower, but the doors to the lower of these were closed. Only the way to the top level stood open. Kindrie paused at the head of the stair. Open windows all around let in the wind to swirl sheer curtains of dusky purple and deep blue, spangled with stars like the night sky but turned by the afternoon sun into glowing twilight. Through shifting veils he saw movement, heard muffled voices. The Lady had company in her tower.

  “My dear,” she was saying, “now is not the right time. I told you so two nights ago. If you succeed today, might not we be blamed too?”

  “Nonsense,” said a familiar, confident voice. “I’m too clever for that. Look.”

  A dark figure loomed behind the drapes and swept them aside. Sudden sunlight momentarily blinded Kindrie, but he heard the smile in the other’s voice:

  “I even have the perfect witness.”

  Kindrie caught his breath as his sight returned, haloed around the edges. That curly brown hair, that smooth, young face so full of seeming innocence . . .

  Rawneth’s guest was Holly, Lord Hollens of Danior.

  II

  It was the second, long, restless day for Torisen, spent waiting for the scrollsman expert to arrive who hopefully could settle this land squabble without a pitched battle. Holly’s people prowled on one side of the contested ground. On the other, the envoy Wither had pitched a pavilion and could be seen in it placidly reading as he waited. His lack of guards was almost an insult. Holly himself, having heard that Randir were already on his side of the river, poaching, had ridden off to hunt them. Torisen wasn’t sorry to see him go. Lord Danior made a very unquiet companion when frustrated.

  The sun beat down, unusually hot for the time of year. Gnat
s rose in swirling clouds from the marshy land. They didn’t bother Torisen—stinging insects never did—but he could hear his guards slapping at themselves and swearing. Either he had brought too many of them or too few—not enough to protect him in case of an assault, too many to make this seem like a casual affair. He had let the Randir maneuver him into placing his prestige behind the dispute. If he couldn’t protect Holly’s interests, his allies would look at him askance. If he did so by breaking law or custom, however, friends and foes alike would have good cause to question his judgment.

  Across the plain, Wither looked up from his book and gravely saluted him. Torisen gave him a nod and debated retiring into his own tent for a nap, but that was something he seldom did, as everyone well knew.

  He didn’t even have Grimly to bicker with. That morning, there had been a slight tremor and he had sent the wolver to scout the lands north of the keeps with strict instructions to stay in human form so as to give the Randir bowmen no excuse to shoot at him.

  Midafternoon brought a warning cry from his guards.

  Torisen emerged from his tent to see Adric, Lord Ardeth, splashing toward him over the marshy ground on an exhausted gray mare.

  “Really, Adric!” Torisen touched the Whinno-hir’s shoulder, stained nearly black with sweat. “Someone, rub her down and find some firm ground to walk her on until she’s cool. And now, my lord . . .”

  He led Adric into the tent and induced him to sit. When he offered the old man wine, Adric took it but absentmindedly, without tasting it. He continued to fidget through the ceremony of welcome, and Torisen’s heart sank.

  “Now,” he said finally, “what brings you from Omiroth to randon college to my humble tent in such a lather?”

  Adric put down his cup and leaned forward. “I would have been here earlier, but someone slipped nightshade into my evening tipple and I overslept. I’ve talked to my grandson Timmon. He tells me that you gave him Pereden’s ring. Where did you get it?”

  Torisen sipped his own wine, mentally bracing himself. He had known ever since he gave the ring and finger to Timmon that this moment was coming.

  “My lords, I hope I don’t interrupt.”

  A wizened Jaran scrollsman stood at the tent flap, nearsightedly peering inside. “I was at the High Keep examining some rare manuscripts when your summons reached me. Then I had to consult Mount Alban’s library and certain of my colleagues. Sorry if I’m late. Wine? I wouldn’t say no. A hot day, is it not?”

  Burr entered and served him while Torisen scrambled to make sense of his sudden appearance. Of course. This was the expert for whom they had all been waiting. As if in confirmation, Wither appeared at the flap.

  Adric plucked at Torisen’s sleeve. “About the ring . . .”

  “I hope,” the Randir was saying courteously to the scrollsman, “that you come bearing the solution to our little dilemma.”

  “It isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems. Some of the older scrolls refer not to the riverbed but to the River Snake’s back, which is said to run all the way from the Silver Steps to the mouth of the river bordering on Nekrien.”

  Wither waved this away. “Mere primitive superstitions. What do the charters between Bashti and Hathir say?”

  Grimly entered. “Tori, you should see the shape of the land to the north. Oh, and here’s Holly.”

  The young Danior lord paused on the threshold of the already crowded tent, his face in shadow. In his coat of blue velvet laced with silver, he was surprisingly well dressed for someone who had spent the day tracking poachers. Apparently he had caught one, for he led a brown-robed figure by a tether around his neck. Torisen met a pair of anxious, pale blue eyes over a white gag.

  “Kindrie?”

  Holly twitched the lead, making his prisoner stumble forward. “It’s just a runaway acolyte from the Priests’ College. I was about to send him back.”

  “That, be damned. He’s my cousin!”

  “He’s a bastard, kin to no one.”

  Torisen flicked a throwing knife out of his collar, spun Kindrie around, and cut the rope that bound his wrists. The Shanir scrabbled free of the gag.

  “Tori,” he croaked, “I saw Lord Danior with Rawneth!”

  As Torisen turned, incredulous, toward Holly, he saw the knife in the other’s hand. It darted toward him. His lighter knife turned the other’s blade, but only so far before snapping. As he twisted aside, he heard cloth rip and felt a line of fire across his ribs. Burr swore and lunged to the rescue, only to crash into Wither. Holly yelped. Grimly had bitten him on the leg. He slashed at the wolver, clipping off the tip of one furry ear, then stumbled as Yce barged between his legs. Torisen grabbed his knife hand at the wrist, bent it, and sent him crashing into the table. Wine flew in a crimson arc across Ardeth’s face.

  “Oh, I say,” protested the scrollsman, snatching up his own cup.

  In the moment that Holly was down, Kindrie threw the remains of experimental powder in his face. His features convulsed.

  “Ah-choo!”

  Dust flew everywhere, wrecking havoc. Bodies lurched about in paroxysms of sneezing, falling over furniture and each other. The canvas walls bulged and jittered as if the tent were also suffering a fit. Guards outside cried out in alarm. Those who reached the door first, however, also doubled over, coughing and half-blinded with tears.

  Inside, only Torisen and Kindrie had had the wits to hold their breaths.

  The figure that Torisen pinned writhed under his hands, distorting fantastically. It gasped, sneezed again, and seemed nearly to blow off its own face. An elbow weirdly bent caught Torisen in the chin, knocking him back. Before he could recover, his opponent had lurched out of the tent through the incapacitated guards with the two wolvers in close pursuit.

  Torisen also started after him, but stopped when Kindrie fell to his knees, choking.

  “. . . cords . . .” wheezed the Shanir, clutching at his throat. “In my . . . soul-image.”

  Torisen only saw the rope tether still around Kindrie’s neck, but it had tightened and was digging into the healer’s flesh. When he worked his fingers under it, he found himself grappling with an entire network of tough threads that bound the Shanir from head to foot. A woven mockery of a head like an inflated sack rose behind Kindrie and hissed at Torisen. Then Kindrie found a loose thread and jerked at it. The cords unraveled with a sigh, leaving Torisen with the original rope in his hands. He dropped it as if it were a dead snake.

  “Are you all right?”

  Kindrie nodded weakly, still clutching his bruised throat.

  “I-I didn’t know . . . I didn’t realize . . . all this time, sh-she had me . . .”

  Before Torisen could ask what he meant, Holly burst back into the tent with a wolver gripping either arm of his leather hunting jacket.

  “What in Perimal’s name . . .” he began, then took in the chaos only beginning to sort itself out inside the tent as various shaken Highborn extricated themselves from the furniture and each other.

  Rowan pushed past him and moved quickly to her lord’s side.

  “Blackie, you’re bleeding.”

  “I know.”

  Burr opened Torisen’s coat and shirt to examine the slash across his ribs.

  “As usual, m’lord, you’re luckier than you should be,” he said, and handed Torisen a table linen to hold against the seeping wound.

  Holly lifted the arm to which Yce was attached and regarded her dangling from it, growling around her mouthful of leather.

  “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

  “Release him, Yce, Grimly. D’you think it likely that my own cousin would try to skewer me, much less that he could change from a dress coat to hunting clothes in seconds?”

  Grimly rose, assuming a less hairy, somewhat chagrined aspect. “We did lose sight of him in the confusion,” he admitted, “and neither of us could track worth scat with a snout full of that wretched powder. So when we saw M’lord Holly here coming up the plank w
alk, bold as you please, we just grabbed him.”

  “Oh, that’s as clear as mud soup,” said Holly. “I take it that you thought I was an assassin. I also take it by the carving on your precious hide that there was a would-be assassin who looked like me. So, who and how?”

  “I think I can explain,” said Kindrie hoarsely, still sitting hunched on the floor, his face as white as his hair.

  Torisen gave him a hard look. “One thing among many that I don’t understand,” he said, abruptly changing the topic, “is why you’re here at all.”

  “He . . . the other one . . . brought me as a witness to Lord Danior’s presumed perfidy. Beyond that, I’ve been a prisoner in the Priests’ College these past twenty-six days.”

  “Did you know about this?” Torisen demanded of the Randir envoy.

  Wither shrugged. “I may have heard some rumor, but really, the priests go their own way under my lady’s protection. Besides, the man is a bastard.”

  “If anyone says that one more time, I shall wax violent and ruin more perfectly good napkins.”

  “Is there anyone here,” asked the scrollsman piteously, “who wants to hear the results of my research?”

  “I do at least,” said Wither, with a courteous inclination of his head.

  “Well, all complications aside, it comes down to this: the river establishes the boundary between keeps.”

  “Thank you.”

  Torisen sighed. “That’s it, then. I’m sorry, Holly.”

  The earth trembled again, shaking them where they stood, making the planks chatter like teeth under them.

  “That was a strong one,” Holly remarked.

  The wolver had darted out the door. Now he returned. “Tori, everyone, come look!”

  Torisen, on his way out, hesitated at the abstracted, pained look on Kindrie’s face.

  “I said the next seizure would kill him,” whispered the healer. “These are that wretched boy’s death throes.”

  Outside, a cloud of dust rose over the shoulder of the northern bluff. The far side seemed to have suffered a considerable landslide, and the eastern end had crumbled altogether. Water and debris boiled through the new cut as the Silver raced to regain its old bed, slicing off a chunk of former Randir land for good measure. They watched as the river, fanged with debris and gilded with the sunset, surged around them. Then Torisen turned to Wither.