by Janet Morris
Behind me, I heard the blind arrar shut the doors. Then he was beside me. I nodded, content. We were sufficient, for witnesses.
A cracking roar began, first like a blocked ear, then ocean’s pound, then louder. They merely considered each other. Their forms were limned clear and bright by their motionless attacks and parries. Then clearer and brighter as the keep began to fade away about them. I felt their need, seeking my substance to fuel their battle. I threw a shield and held it, attentive. The need passed on seeking easier prey. Doubtless it would come snuffling back, if they both lasted so long. The arrar muttered. I felt his hand upon my shoulder. And his fear was very real. My eyes upon Gherein’s black-haired head, I widened my care to include the man beside me. Why I did, I did not know, for he was Gherein’s.
The dark around grew thicker. My feet found themselves upon a different, more resilient surface from which vegetation sprouted as the fighting extended into another plane. I did not look down, lest I come to reside there. My ears ached deep in my head. The moving air from the whirl buffeted me with hot thirsty tongues.
Gherein’s brows were in a line of pain over his black eyes, from which the fire visibly dimmed. They spoke to each other, somehow, in the cacophony that deafened me. Their mouths moved. Only that. They were both still as death.
And then I began to feel it. The presaging was a sly and vengeful smile upon Gherein’s face. Doubtless he displayed it at great cost. Then as it faded, the pain began. Consumed with it, entrapped, unable to break Khys’s hold, Gherein fought back. He took his agony and with all his considerable talent broadcast it across the Lake of Horns. I found myself on the mat, writhing, my own moans on my ears. It took a time to know the dissolution his. That time I spent reviewing my life. Then I realized the place in which I lay. Then that there was another rolling upon the mat beside me. And who he was, the arrar, and my name also I recollected as I struggled to my knees, gagging upon the sudden unnamable stench.
I saw Gherein, weaving, stagger and fall. His face and form seemed blistered by the fire that emanated from him. While I watched, he crawled forward, supporting himself upon hands and knees. On his back, the skin and in some places muscle had been charred. It flaked away blackly. As he fell upon his face, I saw bone, gaping white through holes in his flesh. And then there was no pain. Only a settling. The fire-seeming spiral grew very bright. I shielded my face with my arm.
Lowering it, I saw only Khys. There was no stain or ash or sigh upon the rust-toned mat of Gherein. I regarded the bronze-scaled ceiling. There were no longer twelve stars entrapped there, but thirteen.
Khys stood very still. I did not venture to approach him until the fire faded from his flesh.
But I squinted at him though that glow like banked embers. And I judged him unscathed. The blond arrar caught my gaze. He was pale with shock and horror. I grinned and turned away. The dharen’s body seemed near normal, save for his lack of movement. In moments only, that stiffness was gone from his limbs. A strange place to do battle Gherein had chosen, neither here nor there, half in one world and half in another.
Khys ran a hand over his forehead. Behind him, the window showed dusk. “Gherein brought the accounting to me. Witnesses have seen it. Get out of here.” He pointed to the arrar. Gherein’s witness. “Do what needs to be done. Tell them not to seek me. None are to disturb my seclusion.”
The arrar backed to the doors, his eyes upon the mat. He fumbled behind him for the bronze handle. When he had managed his exit, I locked the doors.
Khys sat upon the alcove ledge, looking out over the Lake of Horns. The sun had set while they were about their testing. I was glad I had been prompt.
I crossed the keep and filled two bowls of kifra, brought them to him. He received the bowl from me, absently. I stepped carefully through the morass of loose cushions, taking a seat upon the ledge’s opposite end. He seemed a man once more. And in truth he was no god. I had seen gods fight, and such was not their custom. But it had been Gherein, surely, who had chosen the weapons and place of battle. Khys would have given him that choice, as Raet had given it to me. I sipped my kifra, taking rein upon my mind. His eyes ranged the lake’s far shore. If he had heard my importunate thoughts, he gave no sign. I felt sorrow for him, that he had killed his own offspring.
“It was long coming. I tried three times to dissuade him. Upon the next occasion, I could avoid my duty no longer. I did what the time demanded. If not over you and our son, then over the number of clouds in the sky would we have come to contest.” His voice was quieter than I liked. I did not know what to say. He had commanded my presence at his son’s self-sought execution. I raised my bowl, not sipping. Over its rim I gazed at him. There was in him no grief, but a kind of weariness. That I caught taste of it bespoke its strength.
Letting the liquid lap against my closed lips, I searched some reply.
“Carth,” said Khys as the knock came, without turning his head. He had the look of a man steeling for battle rather than meditating afterward. I went and admitted Carth.
“Dharen,” he said, halfway to his master. “You know, surely.” His whole bearing was distressed.
Khys closed his eyes. His lashes lay almost atop his cheeks, copper in the light from the thirteen entrapped stars. “Tell me, Carth, that it may go as I have envisioned it.” He did not open his eyes. I saw the whiteness of his knuckles, tight fists clenched in his lap.
“The death of Gherein blanketed the Lake of Horns. It did not immediately identify itself as his. A number are injured. A greater number are profoundly disturbed, frightened. The council convenes.”
“Witnesses have heard it,” said Khys with a bare smile. “You are now first councilman. Appoint your own replacement. I will speak with you tomorrow, mid-meal. At that time, you may, if you wish, seek corroboration from the off-worlder M’tras as to Gherein’s complicity in these affairs.”
“There is no need, dharen,” Carth demurred.
Khys shrugged, his gaze still off over the lakeside. “Have a meal sent to us. This night I will give audience to my off-world guests. I want no interruptions. I will see no one, you included, before mid-meal next.” And then he did turn, his majesty flaring from him like sun’s spume. “When you know what you must come to know, attend me. You will soon have a thing to say worthy of my attention. Until then, I will not hear you. I bid you go and await the message you must transmit when next we meet. Leave me now,” he commanded. “Carth! I bid you look well about you, for what you have not seen!”
Khys turned back to the Lake of Horns. The audience was over. I, too, turned from Carth, that I might keep at least an ith between us.
But I could not turn from the specter that hovered like a flame’s afterglow before my eyes. Gherein had sent his respects to my father, Estrazi. What I had glimpsed of owkahen told me I might soon deliver them. Convey to your father my awe, Gherein had bade me, that he could put into the time such a force. Insightful was Gherein, I realized, as my stance in the time came clearer.
“That, in truth, he was,” said Khys calmly. “Though enfleshed no more, his influence extends out into owkahen. We will feel his will, both you and I, some little while longer.”
I thought of Chayin, in the holding keep, and Sereth in his dank cell. I did not conceal my feelings.
“And you, who bring crux wherever you go, how dare you presume to judge my actions? I had thought to avoid much of what has come to be. And all of what owkahen yields up next. Yet, it rises. A man can only claim so much of the time. When one brings in a number of convergent hests, in the heavy crux, where one mind has ceased, another may have started. There is, in truimph, a most vulnerable moment. How vulnerable one can come to be, I am ever learning. Beware, if you can, such prideful laxity. The time seeks the shape I have long denied it. The blacklash from my own inertia works another’s will.” A grimace, pretender of a smile, came and went. “I should read with greater care my own writings.” He studied me a moment, his countenance abstracted. “I wonder per
iodically whether you understand half of what I say. The time takes new shape with alacrity. You yourself have experienced such moments.”
“I know it,” I rejoined, but I felt no sympathy for his plight. I knew that he would not have it otherwise. That is the feeling that sustains upon the edge of the abyss. One walks the ledge, upon the substance of its simplicity. The life right rules. I nodded. I had been there. “Often in such times, one is offered a choice. It has been my experience that the option of stepping out of the circle is repeatedly given, though few seem ever to take it. Take it, Khys.”
He crossed his arms. “Tonight we will sup here. Then you will accompany me to view the off-worlders.”
“You cannot deprive the cahndor so cruelly.” I spoke of uris.
“I have done so,” he observed. “It equals the weight upon the two of them.”
“You cannot go through with this,” I decried him. “The circumstances—”
“The circumstances demand this accounting,” he interrupted. “You are thinking that they could have done no different, given their natures and customs. And I say to you that I can do naught else, given owkahen and life right. Do not plead for them to me. I will not hear you. I have spoken of their disposition before witnesses, and that disposition stands.” It was in his most ringing voice that he intoned those words. Having done so, he rose up from the sill and took couch.
After a time, I went and joined him. He lay on his stomach, his head resting upon folded arms, and his reality was heavy upon his spirit. So might mine have been, I thought, finally discarding the rumpled short-length silk I had worn since M’tras abducted me from the Lake of Horns. Much had happened in those five days. Tomorrow, I recollected as I rolled to Khys’s side upon the couch silks, was the day he had given as deadline to M’ksakkans. But he had not waited. He had reclaimed me aforehand.
His eyes were closed, his breathing regular. He had not pulled the silks around him, but lay atop them. It seemed to me he was asleep. I sought dimness from the entrapped stars, and they obeyed me, all thirteen. I wondered at the new one, at what it might know of its origin. But that wondering made me shiver, and I forsook it. I took pleasure in their obedience to my will. I thought I might seek some enlightenment from Khys in sleep. I found instead oblivion, and missed the moons’ rise over the Lake of Horns.
Carth woke me. I had not known him possessed of a key. Upon the gol table was the service he had brought for the dharen. Khys did not stir. Carth, his hand upon my arm, asked a thing. Appraising Khys’s chest, I doubted that he still slept. But I rose and accompanied Carth through the double doors into the hall. I stood there hugging myself, my feet on the cool stone squares.
“What?” I demanded in a whisper. The evening laid long shadows in the dharen’s hall. The few ceiling stars seemed conspiratorially dim.
“I saw to the cahndor’s comfort,” he said upon breath. “I wanted you to know.”
“What if Khys takes your generosity from my mind?” I suppressed a smile.
“He did not forbid it,” said Carth, his brow furrowed.
“That is true,” I allowed. “Now, if you could heal their wounds and remove their bands, you might have made some creditable start upon the reparations due them. And their freedom—perhaps you might consider giving that back to them.”
“Estri—”
“Carth, I find it difficult to look upon you.” And I pushed back through the doors and closed them upon his shadowed form. Leaning against their locked expanse, I sought calm. I dared not even consider how my work lay in the time.
“I mentioned to Carth Chayin’s needs,” I said softly to his prostrate form. “He found it in his heart to see to them.” Then I pushed away from the doors and sought his wardrobe for wrap. By the time I reached it, he had risen.
I stood there in quandary before my belongings. The white Galeshir silk I had so favored had been lost to me. Liuma had worn it to her death. I was still undecided when he came and joined me.
“This is for you,” he said, indicating a tas bundle next to my ors.
I opened it and found a tas breech, band, and tunic. “My thanks,” I breathed.
“I also, as I had promised, found you a circle partner. But I doubt you will have time to try him,” he said, taking up his dark robe.
“What mean you?” I asked, my pleasure swept away by his portent-heavy demeanor.
“It is my hope that you will be able to answer your own questions soon.”
“May I get another white robe from the fitters? Mine is nowhere about.”
“You may get what you wish from them,” he said, eyeing me curiously.
To divert myself, I tried the breech and band. While I was about adjusting the lacings, Khys sought his meal. He allowed, from the table, that since I had no robe, I might belt one of his about me.
I felt strange in the voluminous dark web-work. I could have pulled it twice around me. I bent the sleeves up thrice before my wrists came into view. Under it I had retained the breech and band. Tomorrow I would order a white robe.
When I exited into the keep proper, he was at the couch with a filled plate. Beside him lay another, bearing the food he had allotted to me.
He grinned when his eyes fell upon me. Khys smiled occasionally. Most times his face was composed, severe. Seldom did the dharen grin. “You look far too young to couch,” he observed.
I pulled his robe around me and settled at the couch’s foot. I did not move toward my plate, but waited to refill his. When he was done, I took it to table and replenished the harth and jellied gul. Also did I bring him brin, tasting it first for fitness. Such manners were lakeside custom. They rang loudly false to me, even as I employed them. He signified that I might attend my own plate. It was good to taste again Silistran bounty after the starfare M’tras had fed me. As I ate, I waxed hungry. I had not been, after so long abstaining. My stomach, although startled, was more than willing to take up once more its function.
He drained his goblet, handed it to me. “What will you do with them?” I asked as I again got him drink.
“Who?” he said accepting from me the silver goblet upon which fog was forming.
“Dellin and M’tras,” I said, taking the moment to reconsider. “What seek you with them?”
“It is what they will come to seek that is of importance.”
“And what is that?”
“A way home.” His words rose from the goblet’s innards.
“Your explanation explains nothing,” I objected softly.
He closed his eyes. I found myself upon my heels by the time he consented to open them. “Little savage,” he said to me, “they are going to reside upon Silistra until they can provide themselves a means of exit other than in the belly of a machine. Between now and then they will come to be other than the men they presently are. And that which I am about, the widening of their conception, is an undertaking that should not confound you. Though the specifics may be tailored to the individual, the goals diverse, the practice remains the same.”
And I shook my head, not understanding, shamed by my inability to grasp his meaning. I should not have been. Only such as Khys can set such far-reaching catalysts loose upon the time. Being one, I could not see siblings in the making. I was not concerned with the fate of Dellin and M’tras, but the speed of events, and the fact that Khys had at least temporarily ceded control of owkahen, greatly concerned me. They concerned my flesh and caused the hairs upon it to stand away, one from the other. I pulled Khys’s robe tighter, but it did not warm my alerted flesh.
He bade me then accompany him to view them. I told myself, upon the way there, that their fate was no responsibility of mine.
Yet I think now that I must have known, after a fashion, for in all that followed, I felt no surprise, not even at first sight of them in keep number twelve. Although upon the same level, holding keep twelve differed markedly from Sereth’s prison. I wondered if all were different. And I wondered also how many were filled.
T
he cell of rough-hewn brown taernite had no window, nor were lake rushes strewn upon the floor. They were not chained; they lay upon pelts spread over the stone. High above their heads, torches blazed in sconces reached from a circular gallery. One might have stood there above them, higher than one man could jump from the shoulders of another. From that gallery they might be observed, questioned, or slain. We made only cursory use of it upon our way to them.
The guards, so surly upon my first visit here, unbended themselves with fervor. One guided us to the gallery access, slid aside the ponderous plank door. A finger across his lips, Khys motioned me within the passage thus revealed. At its termination was a square of uncertain light. I found, when I stood there, that the platform was a man’s length across. It followed the curving taernite wall. At intervals the torches that lit the prison floor below were sconced in the waist-high guardwall.
I sought the view, pressing myself against the brown stone. Below me they lay opposite each other on their pelts. They were reading. I read a thing into the opposition of their bodies, from my time in the Parset Lands. And I fancied I saw it, too, in the set of their frames. And in their silence did I feel the enmity between them.
“I thought,” said Khys in a low voice, “that I would put them in a keep that would not discomfort their preconceptions.”
The humor of it welled up in me. I stepped back from the edge, trying to swallow my amusement. And it may have been hysteria, but it seemed truly fitting that M’tras should have for his first sight of Silistra this most ancient part of the dharen’s tower.
“I am considering sending each a suitable forereader this night,” he whispered, ducking by me into the passage. Such a move would feed their fantasies, I realized as I followed. And it bespoke once more Khys’s humor. But I liked it not.
“M’tras much abused me,” I said levelly. The guard slid the door across the access passage. “I think it unseemly of you to reward him.”
Khys raised a brow. “I would not begrudge them women. They have, at any rate, each other.” I had not thought of that. But I was angered, still, at the lightness of the hand of judgment upon them, in contrast to the weight of it upon Sereth and Chayin.