Warautumn

by Tom Deitz

  “But that last will not occur. It will not occur because everyone here is a coward, bribed with power on one hand or protecting their own heads on the other. This I understand but do not forgive.

  “And so, I imagine, within a quarter hand, I will be condemned to death. Yet I do not fear death. Death has no hold over me. For I know absolutely that the best part of me—that which makes me unique and powerful—has but a temporary bond to my body. I know this because I have seen sign over and over that this is true. I have seen my kinsmen speak mind-to-mind more than once, and been party to that speaking—peripherally—as well. I have heard my kinsman Gynn syn Argen-el and my kinsman Avall syn Argen-a speak of visiting the Overworld, and whatever else these men are, they are not liars.

  “I could say more, example after example, and so give lie to rumor. But I will not. Ignorance punishes the ignorant more than it punishes those with knowledge, regardless of who wields the power of life and death. But I will say this. You claim to speak for The Eight, but The Eight speak not through you. This court—nay, this entire Council—is a sham and a lie, and the more so because your lawful King still lives and pursues the good of this Kingdom in distant parts. Yet he will return, and when he does, The Eight have mercy on you all, for Avall will not. I hope I am here to see that return, but I fear that will not be so, in which case I have every confidence that my soul—my essence—will observe your downfall from afar.

  “That is all I have so say, but this: that this is a sad day for this—nay, for any—Kingdom; and that I only regret that I must end my days surrounded by sycophants and cowards.”

  Once again, there was silence. Tyrill tried not to heave the sigh she could feel impending as she reclaimed her seat. She couldn’t believe it! She had actually said her piece—as much as she could improvise in a hurry—without interruption. Of course the Priests were all glaring at her as though she were some loathsome insect that had crawled upon their dinner table, and every guard but one had his hand on the hilt of his or her sword.

  But she’d had her say, and now she would endure what came after.

  Man cleared his throat and stamped his staff again. “Thank you for saving me the trouble of addressing you, Tyrill,” he acknowledged with heavy sarcasm. “Now, then, members of the Council of Chiefs, the time has come for judgment. Black means guilty; white means acquittal. I trust you know where your heads and your hearts must stand.”

  Tyrill did not watch what ensued—not that she could have witnessed the actual proceedings, the way her chair was stationed. Yet she knew without looking what transpired in the chamber behind her. Everyone in a legal Council seat—every Chief of Clan or Craft—had a bag of black and white marbles to hand. There was a hole in the arm of each seat, and that hole connected by a system of chutes and levers to a tallying device, which would do the actual counting. That accomplished, a mechanism inside the statue of Fate behind the dais would reveal how the Council had voted by raising that statue’s sword or lowering it.

  Tyrill did not see the voting, either, though she heard a low rustle of conversation, a fair bit of anxious breathing, and the click of marbles falling.

  But she did see the statue of Fate ever so slowly point its weapon toward the floor.

  A quarter hand passed, as rite required, and then Man spoke once again.

  “Tyrill san Argen-yr, you have been found guilty of High Treason. The sentence for this crime, as prescribed by Ancient Law, is death. The Council of Chiefs acting in concert with the Priest of Law will determine the proper time and place for the enactment of this sentence.”

  A pause, then: “Guards, you may escort the condemned away.”

  “There are not enough guards in Tir-Eron to escort even the condemned I see before me,” Tyrill muttered, as she rose like a woman half her age and let four Ninth Face knights usher her back to her cell.

  CHAPTER XXXII:

  A VISITATION

  (NORTHWESTERN ERON–NEAR-AUTUMN: DAY XV–LATE MORNING)

  “It’s a balance,” Avall confided to Lykkon, who was riding beside him that morning. “Information against time.”

  He reined his horse to a halt and stared thoughtfully at the vista before him, remembering the last time he had seen it, which had been at dusk with him bound into the saddle of a very different, though equally smooth-gaited, steed.

  To the casual observer, it would have resembled one of those sudden upthrusts of stone that dotted the land between Gem-Hold-Winter and the place where the Ri-Eron made a sharp turn to the south. Though the Trek Road ran almost straight between the two, Avall had elected to waste a day by riding north into what was supposed to be the uninhabited and largely unmapped northwest section of the Wild, so that he could come here to this place where so many things had ended and so many more begun.

  For, according to what Merryn had determined from her ongoing interrogation of Ahfinn, that vast upwelling of dark stone housed the Ninth Face’s primary citadel. They had others, of course, but his sister had not yet coerced the location of those from Zeff’s former adjutant. It would take imphor, she said—a lot of it—and there wasn’t that much of the right kind to spare in the camp. There might be more in the abandoned citadel, however, which was another reason to investigate it.

  Whatever else it was, the place was certainly impressive—as raw landscape, if nothing else; never mind as the site of a hidden hold. Easily fifty spans high, and close to that to a side, it was more than large enough to house any number of well-trained scholar-soldiers—not that one could tell that it was inhabited simply by looking at it. What few windows it possessed were carefully concealed within the vertical fissures that marked the walls and were either of dark glass, well shuttered, or set so as to follow the shape of those cracks precisely. And since the stone was vitreous already, and the place well, if clandestinely, guarded; by the time one was close enough to discern windows one was too close for that observation to go unmarked or unheeded.

  As for the locale—it rose from one of those places where forest made war with stonier ground, and where geysers and fumeroles spat steam and smoke into the air, to produce a place of otherworldly enchantment—and implicit threat. Not all those openings into the ground were what they seemed, either; at least one provided access to the citadel’s bowels. Avall knew; he had been there—and escaped via one, only to be recaptured and taken prisoner to Gem-Hold-Winter.

  Rrath had been with him then, if unconscious. Nor had that been Rrath’s first foray into that citadel. Why, even Eddyn had been there once—and had probably seen more of its interior than anyone.

  Of course Eddyn was dead, too, and that death at least in part a function of his sojourn here.

  But Avall could think of any number of things that justified this detour, not the least of them being the use of the place as possible housing for those folk evacuated from Gem-Hold who were not hale enough or venturesome enough to return to Tir-Eron. Or who simply wanted to start their lives over again. There were some three hundred of those, according to Lykkon. More than enough to man this hold exceedingly well—with men loyal to the King.

  So here he was, on a bright, clear, Near-Autumn morning, gazing at it expectantly, and waiting for Merryn to return with news that Ahfinn had, by choice or coercion, agreed to show them the way in. Of course Avall could always take the route he had taken during his aborted escape the first time he had been inside, but that had been no more than a tunnel and viable only for people, not for horses. Never mind that it took him through a place he was not yet ready to reveal to the rank and file.

  Rann, who had fallen back to talk to Tryffon, urged his horse up beside Avall’s, then reined in.

  “Looks promising,” he began. “It was good thinking to house the refugees here, and a nice piece of balance—again. Since the Ninth Face depleted Gem’s resources, it’s only fair that the Gem-Holders deplete theirs.”

  “If we can get in,” Avall grumbled. “How’s Merry managing with Ahfinn? Last night she was trying to find out how
much he values his foreskin. Today—I have no idea; but I think it’s back to a mix of alcohol, imphor, and intimidation. Where Merryn’s concerned, the last alone would be enough for me.”

  “But he worked with Zeff for years,” Lykkon retorted. “I suspect he’s acquired quite a thick skin—fore or otherwise—never mind that anyone who’s conversant with torture is usually conversant with ways to resist it. But she’ll come through, and if not, you’ve always got the sword. You could simply find a likely place and start blasting.”

  Avall scowled at him. “I would never do that. I’ve learned my lesson about using that thing capriciously or for personal gain. Don’t ask me how this has happened, but ever since I jumped while in the river, I seem to have learned lots of things, many of them things I don’t know that I know. Most take the form of hunches, but—well, it’s just hard to explain.”

  “You could always do it through bonding,” Rann murmured. “You and I haven’t done that in a while, and I’ve got my gem back now.”

  Avall reached over to clasp his hand. “I’d love to, when I’ve got time to enjoy it. For now, I’m either too busy or too tired, and that isn’t going to change even slightly during the next day, at minimum.”

  “You think it’ll take that long to get the displaced folk settled?”

  “Probably not, but I want someone—probably it will default to you, me, Merry, Lyk, and Bingg—to prowl through that place looking for records; in particular, looking for records that might reveal other Ninth Face citadels, even minor bolt-holes, and absolutely revealing any safe places or bolt-holes they might have in Tir-Eron. If we could find a back way into Priest-Hold, for instance—that would solve a multitude of problems.”

  “It would,” Rann agreed. “But do you know what I’m looking forward to?”

  “What?”

  “Sleeping in a proper bed and taking a proper bath. If nothing else, we can surely manage that in there. Ascetics the Ninth Face might be; they’re still Eronese. I don’t care if the sheets are plain white cotton and there’s no mosaic in the bath, all I want is something softer than stone or stretched leather under me, and an endless supply of hot water. I—”

  He broke off, for one of the more distant geysers had chosen that moment to shoot a cloud of steam into the crisp air.

  Avall grinned at him. “You won’t have to argue with me there. Now, shall we see what’s holding up Merry? Or I really may think about using the sword.”

  Rann eyed him askance, suddenly very sober. “There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there? I just caught a flash of it across my mind: mostly intense anticipation, I think, but not of bed or bath, yet not exactly of information. It had something to do with being King.”

  Avall’s grin became a frown. “If you know that much, why bother asking?”

  “Because,” Rann replied sadly, “you’ve a tendency to take risks without telling anyone. Besides which I … I just like it when you tell me things.”

  Avall forced a second grin. “Fine, then, I’m telling you that I want to be riding into that place by noon. Now, let’s go find my sister.”

  Merryn, as it happened, was already on her way to meet them, a broad grin on her face. “He told me,” she crowed, when she came into speaking range. “I gave him last night to ponder a number of suggestions, most of which affected his standing as a man. He just told me where the secret entrance is—or the one that can accommodate horses, anyway. He also swore there were no traps, but I’m making him ride in the vanguard just in case.”

  Avall raised a brow. “Why this change of heart?”

  “You mean besides preserving the integrity of his scrotum? He said that whatever else it was, their citadel was an architectural wonder the equal of any major hold, and that any efforts to force it open could result in irreparable damage.”

  “Damn!” Rann muttered beside them. “He really is Eronese.”

  “Get him up here,” Avall commanded. “Put all the Ninth Facers under double guard—and blindhood them—then lead the way.”

  The Ninth Face’s secret gate did not prove so impressively secret once they finally found it. Mostly it consisted of a jumble of fallen trees beside a medium-sized stream on the outcrop’s northwest side. Flood wrack, many would have called it—unless one moved a broken limb in a certain way, whereupon two more fallen trees lying athwart each other atop a slanting slab of stone that ended in the river rolled half a turn aside. That revealed the sides of a vee-shaped opening in the earth, of which the stone was the cap, and the pivot and third side of which were masked by running water when the gate was down. The slope was fairly steep for horses, but not that bad, considering. And the stone kept foot- or hoofprints from showing, as did the water into which it slid.

  More surprising was the fact that glow-globes showed down there, and since Ahfinn was already approaching the bottom, with Vorinn and Veen not far behind, accompanied by twenty Night Guard, Avall found a balance point between vanity and caution and fell in with the second rank.

  One moment he was watching the sides of the gate rise up around him, the next Boot was making her way down a paved stone slope and he was ducking to avoid the top of the opening. The place was still a shot from the obvious roots of the citadel, however, and despite the strategically placed glow-globes, it was not until Avall found the route sloping upward again, eventually to disport itself into an impressive ring of stables, that he truly felt at ease. Ahfinn, still chained and with his feet bound into his stirrups, was gazing anxiously around as the chamber began to fill up. “This hold will accommodate most of you,” he said flatly, “but not all—unless they like sharing beds. In any case, I have given you what you asked, and pray that you will remember it. Now then, unless you wish to sleep with horses, I would advise those who would claim the sort of quarters to which you are doubtless accustomed to take the stair to the right and continue up, up, and up.” He looked straight at Avall. “Zeff’s quarters are twenty flights up,” he continued. “I hope your legs prove equal to the task. If not, I’m sure some of my brothers will be glad to carry you.”

  “I’ll walk,” Avall said curtly, and dismounted.

  Zeff’s quarters were indeed on the top inhabited level of the hold and offered a splendid view, though the mechanism of that view was heavily disguised. There was even a turnpike stair leading up two more levels to the outcrop’s summit, where a nice small garden still survived, its edges artfully contrived so that no one gazing upward from ground level could see it. It would be a wonderful place from which to watch stars, Avall concluded, noting even as that thought appeared, how star paths were laid out across the stone. Yes, it was certainly an impressive place, and Avall felt slightly giddy, as though he could take a running start, leap from the edge, and soar off into the afternoon sky. He wondered if the gem—or what it had left in him—would save him then. It had saved him from death by cold and by water. But from falling? It had not saved that unfortunate Ixtian from death by fire. Besides, it would be tempting Fate, and he owed Fate too much already.

  “We should come up here again,” Rann acknowledged, “after dinner. It would be wonderful to watch twilight arrive from this aerie.”

  “It would,” Avall agreed. “And I hope we can do that very thing. But there’s something else I want to do first—have to do, really—and a lot will depend on how that resolves.”

  Rann glared at him. “That thing you wouldn’t tell me?”

  Avall schooled his face to calm, which he hoped made him unreadable. “I’ll tell you everything, if it goes as it ought.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  Avall laid an arm across Rann’s shoulders and drew him toward the stair that led down to what had been Zeff’s suite, where the evening meal was already in preparation. “Tell Vorinn that I hope he makes a good King, and see if you can convince Strynn to marry either Lykkon or Kylin.”

  Rann froze in place. “It can’t be that big a risk. If it is, I won’t let you—”

  “You ca
n’t stop me,” Avall shot back fiercely. “Besides, the worst that can happen won’t. I don’t see any way that it can. It’s just worth remembering that no matter how minor a task one undertakes, death is always an option.”

  “Yes,” Rann snorted derisively. “Remind me to kill you if you die.”

  “I’ve decided that you can come with me,” Avall told Rann four hands later, in Zeff’s formal banquet hall. They had just finished a magnificent dinner that had been contrived simply by raiding Ninth Hold (as they had taken to calling the outcrop citadel) of its very best. Most of it was stored food, granted, so there was a paucity of fresh meat, but Avall barely noticed its absence.

  “Something could happen,” he continued, “and I’d prefer there was a witness, but I can’t allow you to try to stop me.”

  Rann regarded Avall dubiously, but eased in beside him as he exited the feast, moving casually, as though he sought a garderobe.

  Which, in a sense, he did, for the entrance to what he sought was located by moving a pair of tiles in one. This Avall did, standing aside as a section of mosaicked wall slid back, revealing a spiral staircase leading down. Rann raised a brow. “How did you know about this place?”

  Avall couldn’t suppress a grin. “I found Zeff’s journal back at Gem-Hold; it had references. Once I knew that much, I made a point of prowling through his private records before dinner. I found a complete set of plans for this suite. Those people were nothing if not thorough about their documentation—to their sorrow, now that we control their documents. Now … shall we?”

  “Lead the way.”

  With no more reply than another lifted brow, Avall turned and stepped onto the landing, leaving Rann to watch the door slide closed behind him. The stair was steep—not good for legs used to the sprawl of open land—but fortunately, it was also decently lit by glow-globes in another testament to Ninth Face affluence. Still, he was sweating when they reached the corridor at the bottom, at the end of which a single door was set in a recessed arch. He paused there, breathing hard. Rann was sweating, too, he noticed, but Rann had also possessed the foresight to bring along a flask of wine. He took a long draught and offered the rest to Avall. Avall accepted it gratefully, but only granted himself the smallest sip. “It’s going to be hot,” he told Rann. “I’m going to strip to my hose, I’d suggest you do the same.”