by Janet Morris
I considered it again: I might run. But I did not know whether or not the dharen would give chase. Nor did I know if I could elude him, or even if that was what I desired. It would take a steadier stance than I presently possessed in the moment to outwit Khys.
I sat upon the rock, where a lichen climbed, staring out to sea. I reached for Khys’s mind, across what seemed a great distance. There appeared to me a deep gorge, mist-enshrouded. Unscalable cliff face rose upon every side, except directly in my field of vision. In that cleft trail I saw black-suited figures, perhaps a yra. Many of those heads were blond. None that I could see wore flashing belts.
He had, then, done what he said. I awaited his return, and when it did not come, I reached another way. I sought Sereth, across the sea. Either I had not the strength, or his shield was all it had been rumored to be, and more.
I hested a waterspout. It caused me great effort. The first step, creating turbulence, was the hardest. I ripped at the inner scars that encysted my skills. I allowed myself no pain, for I had desperate need to prove myself, to myself, effective. The worst Khys had done to me was that; he had altered my self-conception. I habitually conceived weakness and failure, confusion and helplessness. He had taught me to do so. To function, I must first break those bonds. Tiny feats, I performed. But I did them. And I was strengthened, each success a girder of the bridge I built across the abyss. Khys, I realized, had allowed me this time for the purpose to which I had put it. So said the sort, and what I could see of owkahen. It was, I cautioned myself, too late to change occurrences so long abuilding. It had come to me: what I must do; but it was too soon, although the initial hest had been laid before Khys and I stood in each other’s presence. I rubbed my naked throat, where the band had rested.
In the sand, my fingers traced a threx. Rubbing out two lines, I amended him with a threxman. My mounted threxman I gave the best of weapons, even a huija of Parset style. The drawing grew so complex I found myself needing the sharper lines my fingernails could provide. Four days, and more, had I lain drugged. It troubled me that I did not even recall ablutions made during that period. I thought I detected a sluggishness about me, drug residue in my system. I shrugged, and my thick braid flopped from under the cloak onto the threxman’s rump. Cursing, I wiped my sand-wet braid. Then I erased the drawing with my palm, and turned about, to scan the rocks for him. Awkwardly I rose, brushed the sand from my knees.
He stood there.
“Khys,” I greeted him, my eyes lowered upon my feet.
He chose to allow me that small defiance. “Think you,” he queried, “that you can assay the journey to the lakeside alone?” I recollected the shriveling cold, the searing pain that had attended my previous efforts at such travel. And I had been, then, stronger.
“No,” I admitted. “I would not even attempt it.”
“Then I perhaps might be of help, for you have sufficient power to do so. It is rather a flaw in your method.” I saw his eyes narrow, turn in the direction of the Oniar-M. I thought I detected the slight air flicker of the protective envelope he cast around the ship, before he split asunder each of its molecules one from the other, and shunted those now nonnative atoms into a universe where the physical laws to which he had reconditioned them obtained. I shielded my eyes with my forearm from that shadow-devouring light.
“You would teach me?” I disbelieved, blinking in the green afterglow.
“I have been teaching you, all along. It is my custom to do so. If you would scale even the most modest pinnacle of those to which you aspire, you had best apply yourself to my lessons.” And he bent down in the sand, his long forefinger slashing illumination; the topography of the planes, did Khys set down for me; and beside them, a schematic for permeation. One does not push through; one but sets up consonance and demands synchronistic exchange. I sat back from it at last, my insteps aching, much disheartened.
“I am not mathematical.” I despaired of the stringent parameters Khys set upon the obviation of space. I might never master them. Notwithstanding, I consoled myself silently, I had in the past performed creditably. Even with my sloppy and disordered methodology, I had met Raet, when Khys dared not. I had been first, also, to set foot upon Mi’ysten. Khys, with all his power, had not made that journey. Though he was more at home with shaping skills than I, he had not, to my knowledge, made a world.
“But I took a helsar,” he said quietly, “when your great-grandmother was not even conceived. And what I have done, and come to be, I have brought into the time by my will alone. No help was there for me, in those early days, when the future of Silistra lay in my sole keeping. And I conceived the truth about the fathers while we huddled in the hides. Before that, we had been only reactive. Raet had toyed with us. We were unknowing. We had no chance, none at all.” It seemed to me, then, that the centuries rolled away, and I saw through his eyes stop-frames of agony and desperation. They had sorted, those few, but there was no name for the skill. They had foreread, and none would harken unto them. And as the time grew close, the brothers and sisters gathered, like-mindedness being the sibling ship between them. Those who saw, and those alone, lived through Horoun-Vhass, the fall of man. Even did he show to me hide aniet, that day the gristasha tribesmen were ushered into the undertunnels, that their line might survive. “By you,” he assured me, “and by our people, I would this time do better.” He extended his hand to me. I took it, rising, and we obviated space, our fingers laced.
Upon the seal in the seven-cornered room, his hand released mine. There had been no pain, no dragging of my substance through the void. Nor had it been any work of mine. I had merely ridden his wake to the audience chamber at the Lake of Horns.
Khys knew. He shook his head at me, reproving, that I had not even tried.
I opened my mouth to ask him why he sought me strengthened.
“No questions,” he reminded me sternly. He turned, strode to the window.
I closed my mouth and blew out a breath devoid of words. I knew not even what day it was, though I guessed it Brinar third fourth. M’tras had accused Khys of being a day premature in his actions. My hands found the braid beneath Khys’s cloak and loosed it. Would he, I wondered, restrain me again, now that he had no need to move my flesh through space?
“No,” he said, his tone soft from where he held back the draperies, admitting the lakeside. “Not now. Our travel is not yet done.” His voice seemed choked with sadness. “Leave me,” he whispered. “Carth is in the baths. Ask what you will of him. At sun’s set, seek me.”
Trepidation attended me as I walked alone for the first time the halls of the dharen’s tower. It is truly said that if one does not maintain the habit of triumph, its touch will pass unnoticed. It was nothing to me that I was unbanded and nominally freer. But it must be everything, for I sought stance in the time. Chayin, I must find, and Sereth also must I confront and make reparation for what Khys’s Estri had said and done. And Santh. I took the taernite stairs two at a time, letting my momentum work for me. Down and around and down again, my bare feet took me surely over the well-dressed stone. Of Khys, I was hesitant to even think; what awaited was already fixed; in his sadness and solicitude he bespoke it. I put thought of him away, and from M’tras, Dellin, and politics did I free my mind. I needed more desperately other news.
What had the dharen seen, of what I still most dimly sensed?
Carth was indeed there, among the steam and the hissing rocks, as were a score of others. It was, I conjectured from that, late day. Late cloudy day, I amended my thought from the glimpse I had had of the lakeside. Silent, I threaded my way through the slabs toward his, nearest the steaming stones.
“Carth!” I shook his shoulder, moist and hot.
With a grunt he rolled to his side. His face was contused. Upon his right arm was a wound. It was no more than days old. “Do you not think you should have left that outside?” He grinned and sought my hand. I flushed. I still wore Khys’s cloak and the silk short-length. “Presti m’it, tenni
t,” he said quietly, sitting up. I took seat beside him.
“What happened to you?” I asked him.
“What happened to you?” he parried, eyeing me quizzically. There was a small thread in his black curls. I reached up and disentangled it.
“Khys said you would answer my queries.” I unlatched the cloak chain at my bare throat.
“First let me congratulate you.” His meaning was clear—the band.
“It is only a convenience, I fear. Tell me the date, Carth. And what occurred when Chayin discovered Liuma? And of where Sereth was, inform me. And what kept Khys so long at the lakeside?” One cannot get answers to questions unasked from such a man as Carth. “And how came you by those bruises? I would hear that tale.”
Rueful was Carth’s answering grin. It minded me of our first meeting, as crells in the pits of Nemar. The thought’s trail touched him, and he rubbed his left wrist,, scarred dark from chain sores. The man upon the next slab groaned and stretched.
“You seem to be yourself in entirety.”
“And you somewhat bettered. Please, Carth.”
“I am, actually, battered. I have come to sit upon the dharen’s council.” His tone was disbelieving. He touched his grin, as if to reassure himself.
“I think,” I said with gravity, “that you owe me an apology.” He had been so righteously angry with Khys’s Estri when she had postulated that such a thing would have to come to be.
I regarded him, eyes half-closed, awaiting his response.
“In that,” he said, much sobered, “and in all else I have done concerning you, I take no pride. But neither am I shamed.” He went to rub his chin, encountered a bruise. “I will tell you what you need to know,” he said, “but not here.”
“Where?” I asked, citing half the slap, my by rote cloak over my arm.
“Upon the way to where you will want to go when I have finished my telling,” said Carth wryly, easing his feet to the floor. Whatever had happened to him, I judged it more in the nature of a fall from height than man violence. There was much discoloration on his skin, a great stiffness in his movements.
We walked silently through the slabs. No word did we exchange as Carth sponged himself, nor as he pulled about him the unadorned robe of a council member. Nor as he led through a complexity of unfamiliar corridors. Not even when we passed between two arrars stiff and silent upon the threshold of a bar-gated passage did he utter a word. He guided me through it to some ill-used stairs behind a massive stra door. He knocked upon the stra, a pattern, and the door was opened from within. I heard chain hiss upon its ratchet, and thought it odd.
The stairs were torch-lit, the two guards respectively surly and taciturn. A growl apiece did they give Carth, who then ushered me down those moist-slick stairs. No ceiling stars had they wasted in this dank place. My skin crawled.
“Why did you bring me here?” I whispered as we made a better-lit landing off which three passages radiated.
“I wanted you to see the place. Have a seat,” he advised. Against one wall were plank benches. I sat with care upon one, mindful of splinters, my cloak pulled well under me.
“Tell,” I urged him.
He did not sit, but leaned an arm upon the wall. Looming over me, he began it:
“I was asked by Khys to keep him apprised of Sereth and the cahndor as best I could,” he admitted hesitantly. “In doing so, I was upon the second floor when you were abducted. And thus it came to be that I was directly behind Sereth and Chayin as they hurried from couch with bare blades only to investigate. I could not catch them upon the stairs. I gained their side only because Gherein detained them at the stair’s head.”
And I recollected those footsteps I had thought I heard on the stairs while I faced M’ksakkans within Khys’s keep. If they had reached me unobstructed, I would surely have been saved. Then I knew who of Silistra had aided M’ksakka.
“I am sorry, Carth. I lost the thread,” I excused my wandered attention.
“I can see why,” he remarked, but picked up where he left off.
“Gherein enjoined them to hasten outside, where they would find the body of Liuma. Estri, he assured us, was nowhere about. And when they would have passed by him he did not allow it, but derided them for their disbelief. He was, he reminded them, first of Khys’s council. He demanded they prostrate themselves and show respect. That was not out of character for Gherein, and I thought little of it. I but soothed him, that he might step aside, allow Sereth to inspect the keep. It was a thing of iths!” He spread his hands, his eyes mere slits.
“Sereth,” Carth continued, “was admirably restrained. Or so it seemed, he locked behind that shield. Not one word did he say, but brushed by Gherein as I engaged him. The cahndor, seeing this, turned and descended the stairs, running. I think he knew then, if not before.
“Gherein gave me tasa immediately following their departure. He took his leave in the direction of Khys’s keep. It was iths, only, before Sereth reappeared. They must have passed in the hall. He was withdrawn, pale. His eyes sought his path before him. Then only did I think to seek you. And I did not find.” His tone turned bitter. “I gathered my wits enough to follow him down the stairs.” He stopped.
“Carth ...” I touched his arm. “Carth, please.”
He confirmed my guess of the date in a low tone. Then he raised one leg up on the bench, rested his elbow upon his thigh. “Sereth did not hurry,” he continued, and I began to see it—Sereth’s back before him as they descended the stairs, his touch upon the other’s arm. And Sereth’s face, most terrible in Carth’s sight, did I see, as he recalled it.
In silence Carth followed him down the vaulted hall with its archite floors and through the great inlaid doors. He did not deign to answer the attendant’s demands for enlightenment, but half-ran though them and down the steps. Carth’s mind sought the dharen, found him already upon his way. Out into the late day he followed Sereth’s half-naked form, around the dharen’s tower, to where Chayin crouched over the body. But for the fact that the back of her skull had broken open, she might have been asleep. The cahndor sat cross-legged beside her, his eyes closed. There was a small but prudent crowd, still as statues upon the white walk. No sound came from them.
Sereth stopped still a moment. He sheathed his gol-knife. Then he went and sat upon the right hand of the cahndor. His knee touched the cahndor’s as he assumed a position identical to Chayin’s. He, too, closed his eyes, his hands quiet in his lap. At Chayin’s discretion, they would start the keening. But a time of silence, first, do Parsets give their dead, that the totality of the grief may be gathered before it is sung upon the wind. One loves, upon the moment of loss, as one can never love aforetime. The Parsets call it their greatest gift to the dead. It comes in silence and goes in song, the assumption of the chaldra of the soil.
Carth also sat, upon Sereth’s right, for he had not well known the Nemarchan.
They still sat thusly when Khys appeared and stood staring down. Carth rose, thinking to calm the dharen, prevent him from breaking the silence. Khys’s face dissuaded him.
“Sereth,” Khys snapped, “I need you. It is over-long you have delayed. Implement my will. Bring me Gherein!” His knuckles were white upon his chald. His voice rang out over the Lake of Horns. An impious ebvrasea screeched, invisible in the clouds.
Sereth opened his eyes and regarded Khys coldly. “I am, at the moment,” he said quietly, “otherwise engaged. Ask me another day.”
“Now!” spat Khys. His eyes under arched brows caused Carth to step backward.
“When you again have what has been lost,” said Sereth, and lowered his head, returned to the formal grieving aspect.
“By morning, or I will deal with you as I will deal with Gherein,” decreed Khys. And he whirled and strode back the way he had come.
“But Sereth did not seem to hear, nor Chayin either,” Carth recalled. “They but sat there. That night, we heard their keening.” And I feared, once again, listening to him. The h
air rose up on my skin in that dank place. I pulled my mind from his, that I not see what else he had to tell. But I knew, then, that he had not fallen from any height. And why he had brought me here, I knew, also.
Carth, seeing my agitation, sank down beside me.
“At sun’s rising, Khys bid me take ten men of my choosing. He also bade me try to keep the cahndor from becoming involved. That, I could not do.” He shook his head, his countenance mere shadow play in the dimness. “We lost six men to them, all highly skilled, before we took them. I assumed you would see Sereth first. The cahndor is in the tower’s holding keep.”
I hardly heard him. I sought Sereth’s mind. It should have been easy, so close. I found nothing.
“What ... ?” It was inaudible. “What has been done to him?”
Carth shrugged, sank farther back against the stone. “We lost six men. We had to beat them both unconscious. Men do not heal fast while restrained.”
I stared at him. I knew well what feats of healing might be accomplished at the Lake of Horns. I no longer cared about Gherein or Khys. “Will they live?” I asked, rising. I felt no inclination to sit by Carth.
“Neither will die from what wounds they sustained. Khys had set a date for Sereth’s ending only.”
“Of course. It is one thing to kill an arrar, another the cahndor of Nemar and co-cahndor of the Taken Lands.” My voice shook.
“Do not be so sure,” Carth said, low. “Khys has judged them both, and his judgment was the same. Estri ...”
I recoiled from his touch, my face pressed to the chill stone. I would not cry. I would see him. And I would give him aid, some way. “Take me to him,” I said, pushing away from the wall, my eyes upon the taernite floor. I spoke no word to Carth as he led me down the middle passage. He was wise not to speak. Or to touch me. If he had touched me then, I would have leaped upon him and torn his eyes out. Fury trilled my nerves. My limbs trembled, but not with fear. Before a wisper-plank door like all the others, he stopped. I smoothed back my hair, handing him Khys’s cloak.