Beyond

by Mercedes Lackey

  The Duke brayed with laughter, looking directly at the Count, and the Count flushed an angry red. Hmm. Could be the Count’s title is rather shiny and new.

  “So it does, Valdemar,” said the Duke genially. “So it does.”

  The mage-lights in the enormous dining chamber dimmed and turned a pale green, which made everyone look as if they were slightly bilious and seemed to be the signal that it was time to leave the table. Kordas followed the Duke at a discreet distance, and discovered that they were all expected to mingle in an adjoining, equally large room, where there were more musicians and an open floor for dancing. Star stayed quietly at his elbow and said nothing as he found himself an out-of-the-way corner by an alcove that contained an extraordinarily realistic and extraordinarily bland statue of a heroic figure in full armor. Probably an Emperor. If not the current one, then at least one of his ancestors.

  He was exhausted. This entire evening had been more of a drain on his emotional and mental resources than he could have imagined. He hoped that he could remain ignored for the rest of the night.

  Fortunately, it appeared that there were things that were far more interesting right now than he was. The company was mixed, although most of the women sat along the walls. There was a pattern there, clusters of young women heavily supervised by a single older one. Probably sisters and a mother or aunt. Men would come and ask them to dance, and the older woman would either look pleased or stern—the young ones would go to dance regardless, but if the chaperone looked stern, they would return once a single dance was over.

  But there was a more interesting game going on. Several women, young and not so young, stood, rather than sitting, by themselves. These ladies were dancing a very different sort of dance among clusters of men—young and not so young—who were competing for their attentions. Those who were not part of those clusters appeared to be very much engrossed in the little dramas being played out before them.

  Kordas started when someone touched his elbow.

  He turned to find himself looking into the eyes of the Prince who had sat across from him. “Pardon. Did I startle you, Valdemar?” the young man asked. The polite tone seemed genuine.

  “A trifle, your Highness,” he replied. “I was taking in the view, and engrossed in the music. My little Duchy is too small to have such gatherings every night. And we are rather too backwater as well. Our days begin early and end early, and our entertainments are generally simpler.”

  The Prince smiled thinly. “So it seems,” he said in neutral tones. “I was wondering; was that story you told about mounting all the Knights of the Realm on Valdemar Chargers a true one?”

  Careful. “It’s family legend, Highness,” he said. “I can’t speak for how true it is. Although I could verify it if I had access to our records. We keep very careful records.”

  “Apparently, if you know the pedigree even of horses that have been bred when out of your hands.” There didn’t seem to be any irony in the Prince’s statement. “I wonder, would it be possible to secure an entire year’s—would you call it a ‘crop’?—of Chargers at once?”

  “This year’s Chargers, no, I regret to say,” he replied, trying to convey a genuine regret. “And the ones born this year won’t be released for a while regardless. We hold them until they are four years old, and send them out fully trained, so that they are up to bearing the weight of a fully armored knight, and so that we know when they leave our hands they are battle ready. About half of our Chargers for this year have been sent out already, and most of the rest are spoken for. You could secure the current three-year-olds, however, to be delivered in a year.”

  The Prince smiled again, this time with satisfaction. “That would suit me perfectly well. Even the two-year-olds would do. We will speak later, Valdemar.”

  He bowed deeply, as was proper. “I am at your service, your Highness,” he said, and the Prince nodded and slipped away.

  What the hell was that about? Why would anyone want a full year’s worth of Chargers?

  Well . . . moot question. Because it wasn’t going to happen. If all went well, by the time the snow fell, he and his and all of his horses would be long gone.

  * * *

  —

  “It is appropriate for you to leave now, if you choose, lord Duke,” Star said in a quiet whisper, just as Kordas was debating whether or not to find out if anything available to drink on the table across the room was something other than intoxicating. The behavior of some of the people suggested this was unlikely. None of them were drunk—that would clearly be dangerous—but eyes were a little too bright, cheeks too flushed, laughter too loud, and behavior ventured on reckless. Duels were sparked at these damned things, and he didn’t want to find himself on the receiving end of a challenge just because some idiot stumbled into him and decided to take offense.

  “Lead the way, Star,” he muttered, and followed the Doll as it threaded its way effortlessly along the wall, avoiding everything and everyone, in an intricate sort of dance that was surprisingly graceful. He wasn’t the only one leaving, as he soon found when he was brought to a hallway, which in turn led into either that enormous entry hall full of Gates, or a room just like it. There were quite a few people heading for those Gates, and presumably to their apartments.

  “Step up to a Gate, hold up your bracelet to the Gate, and say ‘The Copper Apartment,’” Star murmured, stopping briefly to let him get ahead, so that the Doll could follow him as the other Dolls were following their masters. Right. Don’t look out of place, he reminded himself, and picked a Gate no one seemed to be heading to.

  “The Copper Apartment,” he said, and stepped through, to find himself in that now-familiar antechamber. Beltran, who had been waiting for him there, sitting on one of those excruciatingly uncomfortable copper chairs, leapt to his feet, anxiety draining from his expression.

  “How was it?” the Herald asked anxiously.

  He wanted to say “appalling,” but smiled and said, “Too much to eat, too much to drink, and no one wanting to talk about anything interesting. At least not until someone asked me about our herds. And then they really didn’t seem interested.”

  He beckoned to Beltran to follow him, and led the way into his chamber, with the Doll following. A moment later, Rose and Clover entered, presumably in case they needed something that required more than two “hands.”

  The mage-lights were low, and the curtains to the sole window parted. Not yet ready to say anything, and not ready to fall on the bed just yet, he was drawn to the window.

  It looked as if he was at least ten stories up, if not more. The window looked out on part of the Palace grounds; not the grand pavement and courtyard at the front, but instead over what he judged were probably the stables, kitchen-gardens, and the rest of the working part of the grounds. Clearly, this apartment was not one of the favored ones, which would overlook something much more aesthetically pleasing. He didn’t mind, though, not at all. It was a little surprising to see that everything below was well lit, and there were still a few people coming and going, not only from the stables, which he somewhat expected, but among the vegetables and herbs too. By far, though, there were more Dolls than humans.

  “Are the kitchen staff Dolls too, Star?” he asked, without turning away from the view.

  “Yes, my lord, aside from the chefs,” Star said. “There are no longer any human servants here. Humans require food and sleep, and we do not. We have replaced every job that used to be filled by a human. There are only courtiers, officials of the Court, and sometimes their families here, and the Emperor’s soldiers and guards.”

  He blinked at that. “When did this happen?” he asked. “And how?”

  “About eight years ago,” Star told him. Then the Doll paused, and he turned away from the window to look at it. It stood so still that for a moment he wondered if something had “broken” it.

  “It is now safe to
speak in candor,” it said.

  He blinked. “Wait. What?”

  “It is now safe to speak in candor,” repeated Star. “They have lost interest in you and are scrying someone else’s chamber. There are only so many mages, after all, and they are human. Their time is limited. Their resources are limited. You are deemed to be uninteresting for the moment. They were hoping you would say something to Beltran, but instead you spoke to this one, and they deem anything said to a Doll to be unimportant. This one knows this, because the mage whose task was to scry you has moved on to another, and his servant-Doll has observed this. What one of us knows, all of us can know.”

  “Well . . . that’s convenient,” he said, a little dubiously. A little too convenient? “How do I know I can trust what you say?”

  “Because, my lord Duke,” Star said, in tones of infinite sadness, “Dolls cannot speak other than truth, and we always know truth when we hear it. We are implanted in these serviceable bodies, but they are burdens to us. A Doll is a prison.”

  Star paused to let that sink in, then said, “A Doll has no ability to communicate or move unless we, like this one did, submit to encasement within a Doll body. Failure to submit to the process results in the dissipation of the self. We refer to ourselves without names to distance ourselves from the painful memories of what we were.”

  Kordas had laced his fingers tight, and suddenly realized Star’s explanation had made him clench them until they ached. “What are you inside, then?”

  “I am a vrondi.”

  He staggered back a little in shock. Because he knew exactly what a vrondi was. They were ubiquitous little Air Elementals, perfectly harmless . . . but how and why was this one bound up in a doll of canvas and wood?

  Wait, wait, don’t take anything here at face value, he reminded himself, and cautiously invoked mage-sight.

  Sure enough. Under mage-sight, the two ethereal blue eyes of a vrondi, the only parts of one you usually ever saw, blinked at him out of the canvas face. There was absolutely no way to counterfeit that.

  “How?” he managed to say, as Beltran looked from him to Rose and back again, thoroughly bewildered. Poor Beltran. I’ll have to explain all this to him in a moment.

  “The Emperor’s mages were concerned about the dangers of Abyssal magic, and began looking for means to harness Elemental magic instead,” said Rose. “By unhappy accident, a way was found to attract, catch, and contain us. After much more experimentation, the method was found of binding us to these bodies.” The Doll pulled its tabard aside, and showed him a buttoned seam down the middle of its sexless, blank torso. It slowly unbuttoned that seam and pulled it slightly apart. Within the cavity revealed was a blue, faintly glowing, round object that looked a bit like a Spitter pellet, only larger. It buttoned itself back up again, and dropped the tabard back in place. “That is this one. That is where this one is confined. That is where . . . I am confined.”

  “Does it . . . hurt?” He couldn’t imagine it didn’t hurt. This was an Air Elemental; to be confined to something physical must be like—being drowned.

  “It is uncomfortable,” Star said. “But disobedience is excruciating.”

  He passed his hand over his eyes, wincing in sympathy. “Can I release you—no, wait, I can’t, can I?”

  “It would be exceedingly dangerous for you to attempt that, my Lord,” said Star. “And I would likely just be caught and confined again. We cannot escape the Trap. It draws all vrondi to it, like a vortex. The only escape is dissipation . . . death.”

  Death? “Wait—what?” he said again. “You can die?” He had no idea that Elementals could die! This was . . . horrid.

  “Yes, my Lord. If this body is abused badly enough, the vessel ruptures, and we die. I cannot explain it in a way that you would understand, but suppose that we are under great pressure, just as the air in a Spitter pellet is under great pressure. If the vessel is ruptured, we disintegrate like the shell of the pellet. And, by design, our prisons are made to be easily broken, whether by misfortune or intent.”

  “Oh gods,” he groaned, and even Beltran understood enough to be appalled. “How often does that happen?”

  “Often enough,” Star stated sadly. “It is presumed that there is an endless number of us, and it is of no matter if some are destroyed.”

  “Of course it matters!” he snarled. “And there isn’t an endless number of you, is there?”

  “No, my Lord.” Star fell silent.

  “Give me a moment,” he said, so filled with rage that it was very hard to think.

  “My lord?” Beltran said quietly. “What’s a vrondi?”

  Thinking about how to explain Elemental magic to his Herald allowed him time to let his temper cool. “You know there are four—well, call them ‘worlds,’ right? We mages call them ‘planes of existence.’ Because as complicated as they are, the most plain way to make any sense of it all or chart it is to think of them as flat. They aren’t flat, at all, but that’s the easiest way to make sense of what we can perceive.”

  “I have read that, my Lord, yes. One of them is the world in which we live, and it interacts with the other three. But because the other three are different, we can’t see the creatures that live there without specific effort, either on our part or theirs.” Beltran scratched his head. “I can’t say as I understand it, but my ma and pa taught me to believe in Heaven and Hell and I can’t see those either, nor the ones that live there, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t believe you when you tell me these things exist too.”

  “Right,” he said, relieved that he wasn’t going to have to undertake a really basic explanation. “The world we live in is the Material Plane. The others are the Abyssal Plane, where demons come from, the Elemental plane, and the Aetherial Plane, where the gods and their servants are.”

  Beltran opened his mouth, probably about to say something about “but demons come from Hell and the gods are in Heaven,” when he realized that those were just different names for the same thing—or maybe Heaven and Hell were like districts on these other planes—and shut his mouth again. “Yes, my Lord. Go on.”

  “There are lots of different kinds of Elementals, not just Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. Vrondi are Air Elementals. Mostly—mostly we don’t have much to do with each other. But vrondi have a very peculiar affinity for the truth, so some mages have learned how to get their help in being able to tell truth from falsehood. Very inexperienced or weak mages can call one or more and ask them to reveal the truth. They do that by surrounding a person and glowing blue. If the person lies, they stop glowing. If the person is telling the truth, they keep glowing.”

  “The truth is nourishment for us, my Lord,” said Star. “That is why.”

  Huh. I had no idea.

  “And a powerful mage can give them a sort of extra boost of energy, so they can actually compel the person the mage is questioning to tell the truth.” He looked to Star for confirmation.

  The Doll nodded. “It pleases us to do that. The truth is important, and the more truth in the world, the more vrondi there are.”

  He passed his hand over his eyes again and said bitterly, “Then this place must be like swimming in a sewer for you. Gods.”

  Star answered, “The sewers serve a noble purpose. And, while the amount of deceit here is profound, there is also truth in abundance. Torturers are very sincere in their desire to harm.”

  “But why vrondi?” he asked, almost desperately. “Surely there were some other Elementals they could have put in the Dolls—”

  “We are imprisoned by an application of the same process by which the pellets are made, my Lord,” said Star. “As to why it was vrondi they chose, and not another Elemental, this one cannot say. Perhaps the others are too powerful to confine. Perhaps the process would not work on them. This one is not a mage, and no mages have ever confided the reason to a vrondi.”

  “I c
an surmise why,” Beltran offered. “A vrondi cannot lie, which would make you ideal servants. None of you could be assassins, spies, traitors, or agents.”

  Star nodded. “We do not kill. We do not even harm if we can help it. We cannot lie, but we can choose how to phrase things. We can choose to perform only the minimum commanded of us, but not to refuse entirely. And there is a trick that our jailors are unaware of: even if I, as an individual, am aware of something from another of my kind, I can still say ‘I do not know,’ because knowledge gained from another is technically hearsay. It is by that trick we can live by the truth yet not betray. My truth is that I make my decisions based upon knowledge from others, but that knowledge may be sourced from another’s misunderstanding. Thus, compelled by truth, that knowledge does not qualify as a complete truth. Just a possibility or probability.”

  Beltran said slowly, “That wouldn’t show up as a lie, because it is an interpretation, but—yes. That’s clever. So you wound up dismissed as useful spies for intrigues.”

  “Just so. And virtually everyone who comes to this Court attempts it. When they are frustrated by it, we tell them, ‘The core of our control states that we must obey, above all others, who wears the Imperial Ring, the Imperial Carcanet, and the Wolf Crown.’”

  “That makes sense. An order in perpetuity. Even if an Emperor dies, you are kept loyal to who follows. Tell some power- or deceit-centered courtier that core rule, and they’ll back away fast, for fear of what might be reported by you as suspicious.”

  “It is as you say.”

  “And the mages don’t know that you can share your experiences with each other?” asked Kordas, beginning to pace. His heartbeat thumped in his ears. “Why would you—all of you, I assume—entrust us with this knowledge?”

  Clover spoke for the first time. “We are what you call ‘bored’ for much of the time, as Dolls. When someone new arrives, we take their measure, discuss it between as many of us as may be interested, and we rate you. No offense is intended by that.”