Redoubt: Book Four of the Collegium Chronicles (A Valdemar Novel)

by Mercedes Lackey

  Mags took the hint, and the shot. One rabbit later, and one sated cat, the rabbit quarters were in the pot of vegetables stewing on the hearth, and Mags and Reaylis were back on the garden bench. Reaylis was washing himself with great thoroughness and apparent concentration that was belied by the fact that he was talking to Mags at the same time.

  :I know that you have many, many questions, and I am far more prepared and equipped to answer them than Franse is. Keep what you say short,: the cat advised, eyes half-closed as he worked on his paws. :Let me do all the work. And if you would rather say things aloud, do. I’ll get the sense from your mind.:

  Mags thought about all the things he wanted to know. Things that were important for Nikolas to know. He tried to figure out how to frame his questions about what was going on with the Karsite religion, with the demon-summoning black-robes, with all of the complicated situation—into something very short and very simple. What would give him the most information for the fewest mental words?

  Finally he sighed. :What the hell is goin’ on with yer priests? Why’re they so bad?:

  The cat paused. :What always happens when religion goes to the bad?: the cat replied, and resumed his grooming. :Power. The love of power overcomes the love of the gods. Priests stop listening for the voice in their hearts and souls—which is very, very hard to hear even at the best of times—and start to listen only to what they wish to hear or to the voice of their own selfish desires. Priests begin to believe that they, and not the gods, are the real authorities. Priests confine broad truths into narrow doctrines, because more rules mean that they have more power. Priests mistake their own prejudice for conscience and mistake what they personally fear for what should universally be feared. Priests look inward to their own small souls and try to impress that smallness on the world, when they should be looking at the greatness of the universe and trying to impress that upon their souls. Priests forget they owe everything to their gods and begin to think the world owes everything to them . . . : the cat stopped, and shook his head. :Power is a poison. Priests should know better than to indulge in it. But once they do, you stop having those who wish to serve becoming priests, and you start seeing those who wish to be served becoming priests, and the rot sets in. It started to happen long ago here as humans reckon time.:

  Mags thought about asking why the Sunlord had allowed this to happen but thought better of the idea. After all, not that long ago, he hadn’t been altogether certain that gods existed at all, and now, well, maybe it would be a bad notion to draw their attention too closely.

  The cat was far from done with the subject, however. :Once there were the black-robes, the red-robes, and the white-robes. The black-robes were few, and their mandate was to control the demons in order to protect the people of Karse from their depredations, not command them. The red-robes tended to the everyday needs of the people, and the white-robes were made up of outsiders who had been called to the Sunlord’s service or those who went to serve the Sunlord in foreign lands. Go-betweens, if you will, charged with keeping the peace—bridges from the people of the Sunlord to the outside and back again. But then the black-robes began commanding demons; little things at first, hunting down a bandit tribe here, repelling an attempt at an invasion there . . . it all must have seemed to be in the best of causes and for the best of intentions. But they got used to being called on to use the power. They got used to being deferred to because they had the power. And then one day, a black-robe said to himself, “Why shouldn’t I be the Son of the Sun? I’m able, I am powerful, I am intelligent.” And he commanded his demons to make it appear that Vkandis had chosen him.:

  Mags’ head hurt, so instead of thinking the question, he asked the next one out loud. “Didn’t anybody say anything?”

  :Of course they did. Especially the Gifted among the red-robes, who had the power of Mindspeech, and the white-robes, who were pointing out that this was not the way things were done. In fact, they conspired among themselves and very nearly overthrew him. But his demons were too powerful, the Gifted red-robes were slain, the white-robes fled, and that was when Gifts were declared anathema.:

  Mags felt his jaw dropping open a little.

  :And that was when the Suncats began coming only to Gifted red-robes, helping them to hide themselves, seeking out and hiding those like Franse. I have been helping the red-robes who live in this place for quite some time. Six red-robes have come and gone, in fact, and Franse is the seventh.:

  Mags got his mouth and his brain working again. “Does Franse know all this?”

  Reaylis finished his washing and arranged himself in a dignified pose. :Of course not. It will be a long time before the people realize that they are oppressed, that their rulers are evil, and that they must rise up and overthrow them. We are here merely to keep the spark alive. They must be the ones to blow it into a fire to burn away the rot. Gods do not sweep in and fix things. You are not children to be saved. You must save yourselves.:

  “Then why are you tellin’ me? Unless you think Valdemar should—”

  :No, and your King would be the first to tell you that Valdemar should keep itself to itself unless the people of Karse ask for help.:

  Well, that seemed definitive enough.

  :You need to know, because your King needs to know that Karse must be left alone and why this is so. The temptation to save these people will be great, but they must save themselves. The key to their prison is within their grasp, but only they can use it.: Reaylis shook himself all over again. :You must tell them, Horse-Boy, you and your Horse. Oh, it will be perfectly all right if you help a few here, some refugees there, if they come to you for help . . . but to make a formal war of it? No. No, to make war for the sake of imposing what you think is right upon someone else is never going to end in anything but agony. And you must tell them that, make them understand, so they do not even think of making the attempt.:

  “I will,” he promised, though as soon as he did so, the temptation to go back on the promise was incredible. After all, what had the people in that little village done to deserve suffering?

  They didn’t get up on their hind legs and drive the bastards out of their village, that’s what, came the reluctant answer.

  It was a hard truth, but unless someone was so vastly outnumbered and overpowered—like, say, the slaveys in Cole Pieters’ mine—they always had the power in their hands to take back their freedom. That was the choice: to lie down and be abused, or stand up and refuse to be abused and throw the abusers out. Lying down and taking it never worked anyway; you might suffer and die if you fought, but you were going to suffer and die regardless, and at least the suffering and dying part would be shorter if you fought.

  :So you see.: The cat nodded. :It’s not punishment for allowing this to happen. It’s the consequence of allowing this to happen. It’s the consequence of cowardice, of apathy, of giving up. The two things are very different.:

  Mags sighed. He still didn’t like it. He could see it, but he still didn’t like it. He actually agreed with it. But he didn’t like it.

  :So see to it that it doesn’t happen to your people, Horse-Boy. Now, let’s work on getting those shields of yours working again.:

  13

  Three days later, and the ache in his head was still a dull throb, so Franse and Reaylis were still forbidding another attempt to reach Dallen. So, early in the morning, even before the sun had come up over the mountains and down into the valley, Mags was shivering down by the pond, bow in hand, and severely puzzled.

  There were no waterfowl at all, nor any sign of them.

  Though the sky above was a cloudless blue and sun gilded the tops of the mountains on all sides, here in the valley, it was deeply shaded and a thick dew lay over everything. It was chilly, and a faint mist hung just above the surface of the water.

  He had come up on the pond as silently as always, and there had been no sounds of birds taking off as if he’d flushed them. But the pond was utterly still and empty; not only were there no du
cks or geese out in the open water, there were no little coots, no waders, not even birds in the reeds, rushes, and cattails. It was as if something had frightened everything off before he got there, which made no sense. A fox or a wolf might flush a few birds at the verge, but they’d only go to the deeper water where they knew they were safe. A goshawk might take down one, and perhaps even flush the whole flock, but there would be signs of the successful hunt—like a goshawk with a fat crop and a half-eaten carcass—and a goshawk wouldn’t have disturbed the smaller birds. In fact, the smaller birds would be scolding it right now, noisily.

  What could this mean—

  “Not to be moving, Northerner,” said a harsh, heavily accented voice behind him. And something sharp pricked through his shirt to his skin, before withdrawing.

  He froze.

  “Good. I am to be having a large sword, and there are twenty men with crossbows,” said the voice, sounding extremely satisfied. “You will to be dropping your bow. And you will to be turning.”

  He did so. Slowly.

  The voice belonged to a man who could have been Franse’s cousin: big, very blond, very strong, and dressed in brown leather with riveted plate mail over it. He barked an order, and half a dozen men pushed their way through the cattails and rushes at the edge of the pond, heading for him. They were dressed in much the same way, except without the plate mail.

  Mags was surrounded. These men must have infiltrated the area in the early morning or even before dawn; that was why there were no birds.

  He thought about fighting them and trying to run, and thought better of it. Granted, he knew the area much better than they did, but there were far too many for him to fight off effectively.

  The last thing he wanted to do right now was to fight, end up with another blow to the head, and lose his Mindspeech again.

  And they’d called him “Northerner,” which suggested that they knew he was from Valdemar, or at least guessed it, but didn’t know he was a Herald. He could be anyone or anything. So he submitted tamely while they bound his hands behind his back, roughed him up a little, and then bound his arms to his body, leaving just a sort of leash of rope by which they could pull him. He didn’t fight any of it, and he didn’t ask any questions either.

  For one thing, he was pretty sure that asking questions was going to get him hit some more. For another, he was also pretty sure that they wouldn’t answer him.

  He did let down his shields a very, very little bit, but he snapped them back up again as something exceedingly cold and exceedingly nasty brushed against his mind. It had a very familiar feeling to it, and after a moment he understood what it was.

  It felt like that Karsite demon.

  Now he felt terror; he clamped down his shields so tight that not even the slightest thought would escape; as he stumbled along in the wake of the Karsite who held his leash, he felt cold sweat breaking out all over his body. He was just glad that he wasn’t wearing anything that was identifiable as belonging to a Trainee. Somehow they already knew he was a Northerner, but maybe he could get away with . . . well he would have to think of a story, and fast.

  His mind raced as he stumbled along; he was paying very little attention to where he was going or even to his captors.

  Why would a Valdemaran be in Karse anyway?

  He couldn’t feign being feebleminded, and he couldn’t feign being a deaf-mute. He’d had a bow and clearly knew how to use it, and he’d responded to the orders of the Karsite soldier.

  Well, what if he wasn’t a Valdemaran, as such . . .

  Who crossed borders all the time? Traders . . . entertainers . . . all right, he could pass as either of those. Or rather, something like an apprentice trader. He could grade gemstones in his sleep. Or if the Karsites didn’t, for some reason, forbid entertainers, he could easily pass himself off as a rope dancer. In either case, he could say he was with his family, and they’d all been attacked in the night—that would certainly be plausible enough and account for his wounds. And the cat had said that the demons pretty much roamed the night at will to keep people penned in their houses after dark.

  But how had they found him in the first place?

  The Mindspeech. It has to have been the Mindspeech. Maybe it was that connection to Dallen that had somehow alerted the demons . . .

  He was jerked out of his preoccupation by a sharp tug on the rope; he looked up and realized that the group had reached Franse’s cave, and there was an even larger group of men together with a trio of black-robe priests there. The armed men were evidently ransacking the cave; they were hauling everything that had been inside out into the light, and what was too heavy to take out in one piece, they were breaking up and dragging out the bits.

  He could hear the sound of axes on wood from inside, and even as the group he was with halted, someone hauled out part of one of the dressers and dumped it on the pile of discarded and wrecked furniture.

  He tried not to wince.

  Franse! The cat!

  He felt sick.

  He hung his head and looked around as covertly as he could for some sign of Franse and Reaylis, full of dread, and sure after what the cat had told him that he would see their bodies, or blood and evidence of a struggle. But as he peered around, allowing himself to shiver in fear, he didn’t see anything at all that would have told him that his friends were even in the cave when the soldiers arrived.

  Did they have a back way out to escape? He found himself praying that they did.

  The three black-robes certainly appeared extremely displeased, which would argue for Franse and the cat having escaped their clutches. So if it was Mindspeech that had somehow betrayed them . . . maybe Mags could convince them that it wasn’t his Mindspeech . . .

  But he swiftly revised his idea of what to tell them after one look at them. They didn’t look like the sort who would allow entertainers into their country, and he very much doubted that they let anything other than select traders in, either.

  However, he might be able to use his gem-sorting ability after all . . .

  And even better, there would be enough of the truth in this story that if they had some sort of variation on the Truth Spell, he might be able to pass it.

  I worked at a mine in the North. That was true enough. I’m a damn good gem sorter. That was true too. I was kidnapped. And that was true.

  Now, if they asked why he was kidnapped . . . I don’t know, I don’t know who it was that grabbed me or why, but maybe they were gonna rob a mine and they wanted somebody to sort out the good stuff. The first part was true, and the “but maybe” part might allow him to slip the rest of that in without making it come up as a lie. And it would sound plausible. He hoped.

  The Karsites were snarling among themselves, and they were talking too fast for him to understand what they were saying. The black-robes were definitely angry, and eventually, when no one brought out any more signs of Franse and Reaylis than another couple of sets of oversized and worn red robes, one of them left the other two and stalked over to him and his captors.

  The priest grabbed him by the collar and shook him. The man was bigger than Mags and quite strong, and Mags didn’t have to feign cringing.

  The Karsite priest shot out a rapid string of syllables and looked at the one in charge of the group that had taken Mags.

  “Where the Cursed One is?” the man demanded.

  Mags shook his head violently and tried to look scared and stupid. The “scared” part was easy enough to manage. “I don’t know!” he wailed. “He sent me out to hunt this morning! I don’t know!”

  The man babbled back at the black-robe . . . that was when Mags realized why he had been able to understand the men who had stopped his kidnappers and why he couldn’t understand this lot. These people were speaking about three times faster than the ones who had interrogated the assassins, probably because the troop of soldiers, or at least their leader, had recognized the assassins as foreigners.

  Mags braced himself for further interrogatio
n, but the black-robe just looked disgusted and barked an order. Mags found himself shoved roughly aside with a handful of guards, while the black-robes barked orders, and small groups of armed men peeled off to search in every possible direction.

  Mags kept his head down and shivered. He didn’t have to pretend fear; he could, very dimly, sense the inimical cold of demons, and they were inside the mine. Somehow they had managed to break through whatever Franse had used to guard the place.

  Or else plain old humans got in, and then they could follow.

  If such things could feel anything at all like comfort, they were feeling it now, in the dark, away from the sunlight. There was no sense of restlessness. They liked it in there, particularly now that everything Franse and Reaylis owned had been removed.

  Mags broke out in a cold sweat all over again. Were the black-robes going to bother to question him at all? Or were they just going to shove him into the cave and let the demons handle him?

  He was afraid to draw attention to himself but afraid to not draw attention to himself. He didn’t want to bring down their wrath on his head, but he didn’t want them to consider him disposable, either.

  He remained where he was, trussed up like a bird for the spit, while the men who had been sent out to search returned in groups of two and four, empty-handed. By this time, the sun was high overhead, and he was beginning to hope that Franse and the cat had managed to escape. He was pretty sure that if they got far enough away, the cat would be able to ensure their safety. Hadn’t Reaylis hinted that there were more Suncats than just him? He could probably guide Franse to another Suncat, another Gifted red-robe who could hide them.

  Of course, that leaves me pretty much hung out to dry . . .