Beyond

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I’ll never be ready,” someone finally said, breaking the silence. “But I’ll be able.”

  Ponu cackled. “That’s what I want to hear. All right, you layabouts. This is where you pay for your years of living high on the hog and never being asked to do a lick of work. Now get out of here!”

  And, to Delia’s surprise—the mages cheered.

  11

  Kordas’s bed was comfortable, which was not a given, seeing as it was the Capital. He awoke at his usual hour—which, he suspected, was much earlier than most people living here could tolerate. He was going to leap up out of bed, get dressed, and then—

  But then he remembered his new wardrobe and how impossible it was going to be to get into it unaided. With a sigh, he got out of bed and pulled the copper chain beside it.

  Star entered the room immediately. “How may this one aid you, my Lord?” it asked.

  “A bath and breakfast,” he said. “Or maybe the reverse order?”

  “This one will serve breakfast in bed, as all the Great Ones take it,” Star said, and he thought that he registered a hint of reproach in its voice, as if he had offended it merely by suggesting that he take his meal any other way.

  He sighed and got back into bed. Eating in bed had never appealed to him. Too much chance of crumbs or a spill that would require that the servants take the bedclothes apart and clean them ahead of the weekly schedule. But . . . people in the Capital didn’t have human servants anymore, now did they? And no one cared if the Dolls were inconvenienced. “What sort of breakfast is there?” he asked.

  “Whatever my Lord wishes,” Star replied. “The kitchens will make it.”

  “Bread, fruit, butter. Are there egg pies? A small one of those if there are. If there aren’t, just cooked eggs, three of them. Ham, cheese, and a bit of white or black sausage if you have it. Beans. Tea, I don’t care what kind.”

  Star froze again for just a moment. He was beginning to realize this meant he had said something it didn’t expect, or perhaps it was speaking to other Dolls. Maybe the ones in the kitchen? It came to life again. “That is not the usual amount of food, my Lord,” it said carefully.

  “I’m apparently awake much earlier than anyone else,” he pointed out. “If I just nibble a pastry and drink a glass of wine I’ll be faint by lunchtime. Is anyone going to want me this morning? What about this afternoon?”

  “No one presents themselves in public before luncheon,” Star told him. “This afternoon you will be expected to appear in the Great Hall with the rest of the Court, whether or not you are called upon.”

  Because of course I will. The Emperor needs to remind us daily that we serve him, not the other way around.

  “Your breakfast has arrived, my Lord,” Star said, interrupting his thoughts. “As has Beltran’s.” It left the room and returned with a heavily laden tray.

  If he had not been so hungry—and why that would be he had no idea after that huge dinner, but maybe all the head-work he was doing to maneuver around in the intricate Court dance had used up all the energy from dinner—he would never have considered eating that much food. When the Doll put the copper (of course) tray down across his legs, it was so laden that if it had not had its own set of supports, it would have been uncomfortable. There was an entire pot of tea, a delicate cup to drink it out of, a tart-sized egg pie and three boiled eggs, a slice of ham, a chunk of yellow cheese, slices of black and white pudding, a dish of white beans with butter atop them, a hand-sized loaf of bread, a dish of butter, and a sliced apple. He took his time eating, pondering what he should do with the day. And then it occurred to him; if there were no more human servants, what had become of the child-hostages?

  “Can I see where the hostages are now?” he asked Star, who simply waited for his next order, standing beside the bed. He supposed that if he had asked the Doll to cut up his food for him and feed him, it would have done so.

  It went still, then replied, “There seems to be no reason why my Lord cannot.”

  “Then after my bath and I get dressed, I’d like to,” he declared, and for the benefit of whoever might be scrying him, added, “I had good memories of that time and the kindness of the Emperor.”

  The Doll winced, just a little, probably at the blatant lie. But it did not call him out, and he was certain it did not report the lie to whatever it was reporting to. “Then this will be so,” it said. “Will Beltran be coming?”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” he said. “Now, what about luncheon? Does the Court eat together?”

  “Yes and no,” Star told him. “There is the option to be served in the Grand Dining Hall, but no one takes it amiss if one desires to eat in the privacy of one’s apartments.”

  What in the seven hells do these people do with their lives? he wondered. Then something occurred to him. “What does Merrin do?”

  “He generally is served in the Grand Dining Hall,” said the Doll.

  “Can I ask to be seated with him?”

  “One can ask to be seated with anyone else at luncheon,” Star said. “But seats are assigned at dinner.”

  “Then get me seated with him, and make sure I’m there in time for us to meet.” He had decided that it might be useful to prop up the “country bumpkin” image with Merrin, who would, of course, know what life looked like at the Valdemar manor . . . or so he thought. Plant some ideas, plant some deceptions. Give him the impression that he’s still spying on me for the Emperor. Give him some more useful stories. Useful to me, anyway.

  He heard soft sounds suggestive of a bath in the room between his and Beltran’s, and figured that his Herald had given his Doll fewer breakfast options, and so had finished earlier than he had. When the sounds ceased, he asked Star to take the tray away. “I’ll have that bath now,” he said.

  The third Doll, Clover, was already drawing the bath when he made his way to the room. So what one knows, all of them really do know. Kordas brought the Ducal Crest in with him; no better time to “recharge” the thought-masking device than when relaxing in a hot bath. He traced his left thumb in circles around it. “Clover,” he said, “I’d like to have something made for me, if you don’t mind.”

  The Doll replied, “This one will attend,” and leaned in toward Kordas slightly, as if intent to hear.

  “There is a shirt I wear. There,” Kordas went on, pointing at the stormcloud-dyed undershirt. “It has special significance to me, but it has not aged well. It’s a bit ratty, in fact. Could you make me more shirts like that, but new? I know that may seem weird.”

  Clover rocked back a little, like someone might do if they were laughing hard. “It shall be done. And this one assures you that such a request is far from ‘weird’ compared to many of the uses Dolls are put to.”

  Kordas set the Ducal Crest aside, sitting up in the tub. “I don’t think I can imagine.”

  Clover replied, “This one opines that may be for the best. Dolls are versatile, and are sometimes modified for specific tastes.” The Doll laid the shirt out on a towel stand and examined it closely. “This one assumes the shirt is of sentimental value. It is threadbare, but appears . . . beloved.”

  “Sometimes we humans need to remind ourselves who we are. Our minds are limited, compared to particular others. We mark ourselves, or wear things to help us focus when we might otherwise find our minds in panic. The storm shirt is like that for me.”

  It reminds me that whatever I may appear to be on the outside, and even whatever I show my closest friends, what I am inside is a lethal thunderstorm, and if I don’t keep constant control, I destroy.

  “I am seldom happy with who and what I am,” Kordas admitted in a subdued tone. “So, I occupy myself trying to make things better for others, in the hope that if I bring about enough that is good for others, I will, overall, have become a good person when all is weighed. I wear that shirt to remind myself that however—awful�
��I am inside, there is more to me than only that. I don’t want to stall out at what I was, but it’s foolish to deny it existed.”

  Clover was silent for a long time. Motionless, in fact, for long enough that Kordas sighed, emerged from the tub, and dried himself off. It was only when Kordas wrapped a towel around himself that Clover finally replied, “Self-examination is not common for my kind. We mainly exist simply to be, and to avoid not-being. If this one were to sum up my kind—as Dolls—in your terms, this one would say that . . . we are very sad. In our efforts to avoid not-being, we have submerged our aspirations of what we could be.”

  Kordas leaned against the wall, and exhaled a long, tense breath. “I understand. When anyone is preoccupied only with staying alive, it is damned near impossible to embrace the fact that a better future is even possible. That’s why poverty is a form of suppression—it keeps the people without power from thinking too big. And you—the Dolls—are the ultimate in poverty.” He didn’t say any more out loud, but it was pretty obvious, even to a vrondi, how angry that made him. And it apparently affected Clover strongly enough that the Doll didn’t move to open the door, but rather, followed Kordas into the bedroom—and held up the thunderstorm-dyed shirt as if presenting a sacred weapon.

  Something just happened, Kordas thought. Something I said hit home. “Thank you, Clover. I appreciate it.”

  Clover backed away while Kordas donned the time-worn shirt. “We will see to it that your wishes are met.”

  But it was Star that helped him into the breeches, coat, and boots. So it looked as if Star had assigned itself to him, Rose to Beltran, and Clover did whatever the other two were too busy to do.

  This is a very seductive lifestyle. Yet another way for the Emperor to get his hooks into your soul. It leaves the powerful with nothing else to do but maneuver and indulge. It disconnects them from even their own people—and damn the Emperor for it, it’s diabolically effective.

  “All right,” he told Star, when the latter was finally satisfied with Kordas’s garments, hair, and accessories. Or, if not satisfied, the Doll had at least stopped tweaking at them. “Let’s get Beltran, and make that visit to the Fostering School.”

  Beltran’s door opened almost as soon as he and Star had stepped into the antechamber. “Rose says that we are making a visit to where the hostages are kept?” Beltran asked.

  “Fosters,” Kordas corrected him warningly. “Our Mighty Emperor does not keep hostages. His guests are here to get a proper Imperial education, in order to bring that education home and use it there with their subjects.”

  “Oh yes, of course, my mistake,” Beltran said, going a little white.

  “No harm done,” Star said. Which he took to mean that they were not being scryed at that moment.

  “What’s the name of the Fostering School?” he asked Star, preparing to hold his bracelet up to the Gate before going through. “We had other names for it, of course, when we were there. I never learned the proper one.”

  “The Hall of Education,” said Star. He repeated that, and stepped through.

  They stepped out into the room he remembered with dread.

  It was another “Great Hall”–sized room, but this one had low ceilings, had nothing on the walls but portraits of the Emperor, and was filled with row after row of long tables and benches. The children were organized from back to front by age, with the youngest in the rear and the eldest at the front. They were seated four to a table except at the front. Each table had a teacher. But now, there were two differences.

  The first was that beside each child was a Doll. The Doll must be taking the place of the personal servant each had formerly been allowed to bring along.

  The second was that his senses told him there were spells on these children. His mage-sight told him what the spells were. Silence, and Stillness. The children literally could not move or speak unless someone, presumably the teacher, spoke the words to counter it.

  The teachers ignored his presence, as did the Dolls, as he and Star moved along the wall and he took in the faces of the hostages. Though they could not speak, he saw expressions he recognized. On some, terror. On some, despair. On a very, very few, a look of absorption, as if they were genuinely enjoying what they were learning. And on a few, the same sort of smug self-satisfaction he saw so often on the face of Lord Merrin.

  All of the children were boys. That had not been the case when he had been here—there had been a few girls that had been valuable enough to their families that they made good hostages. Not anymore. Just before Isla’s father had died, the Emperor had changed the law from “the eldest living child will inherit the estate and title” to “the eldest living male will inherit the estate and title.”

  Girls were of no value to the Empire anymore.

  It probably made things a lot easier in the Imperial “foster” dormitories now, though. Although, of course, that still did not preclude older or stronger hostages beating, raping, or abusing the younger . . . and would the Dolls even prevent that?

  He’d have to ask Star that question. He really didn’t want to know the answer, but he really needed to know the answer, because that was going to impact his escape plans.

  Yet again.

  It appeared that this was all rote learning and memorization, drilling only what needed to be known to pass the Imperial tests into the heads of the students. He’d been very lucky; there had been a handful of genuinely passionate teachers when he had been here who had been willing to teach far more than that, to any hostages who were willing to learn. It was not uncommon for weaker children to overstudy, to escape the “free time” when predatory hostages could roam among the others looking for victims—and some, like him, because they were genuinely curious and had had a love for learning itself instilled into them at a young age.

  These hostages would go home as proper little examples of the Empire; without compassion, without empathy, thinking of no one but themselves, willing to exploit anyone and anything. If their lands were lucky, and their parents had somehow escaped that conditioning, someone at home would bring them out of that mindset. Or, if their lands were lucky, they would do something that got them killed, and a younger, unindoctrinated sibling would rule in their stead.

  But most would be what the Empire wanted.

  What the Emperor wanted.

  He drew on his time here to school his face into an absolute mask, showing no expression whatsoever.

  There were about fifty or sixty students here. At the very front of the room, the oldest were divided up into pairs, each supervised by a human teacher, seated at small tables, and facing each other. On the table between each pair was one of the Three Games. It was clear that for the Emperor, mastery of the Games was the most important thing these hostages could learn.

  It had been that way when he’d been here as well.

  The teachers mostly watched in silence, but occasionally berated or mocked someone who was playing badly.

  He remembered that all too well too.

  There was another difference from when he’d been here. They’d all worn identical “uniforms” of Imperial red with the purple wolf-head on the left breast of the coat.

  Now, though, they wore long, open robes of Imperial red with the wolf-head, but beneath the robes they wore their own clothing. And as he took in the degrees of splendor or lack of it in that clothing, he understood why this had changed. Being able to display the wealth of their families was one more way in which the hostages were divided against each other. If you were poor, the only way to escape abuse was to be big and strong, or to be quick and clever and know how to cheat. If you were rich, everyone around you would know it.

  Most of the hostages did not look at him. Most of the few who did, did so with alarm, as if they suspected he was somehow heralding some new punishment. Only one or two, the youngest, would glance at him with pleading, as if begging him to take
them away from this.

  If only he could . . .

  Not now. Not yet.

  He’d finally had enough, and moved back to the Gate at the back of the room, with Star and Beltran in silent, faithful attendance. Not one teacher had asked why he was here. It took him a moment to figure out why.

  They don’t know why I’ve come, and they don’t dare ask. They’re as ruled by fear as the hostages are. They’re afraid if they challenge me, I’ll bring about some sort of punishment for them.

  He couldn’t take another moment. He held up his bracelet to the Gate and said, “The Copper Apartment.”

  When they were back in the antechamber, he ground his teeth and carefully schooled his voice to sound neutral. “Well. A lot has certainly changed.”

  Star froze a moment.

  He waited.

  Star unfroze. “It is safe to speak, my Lord,” the Doll said.

  “I hate that place! I hate it. I absolutely despise it. It’s—it’s sabotaging their futures, all of them. I hate it,” Kordas raged. “Did you see it? The—they were making children into things. Into—into functions.”

  Beltran backed away. He was pale, and he’d never seen Kordas like this before. “Maybe it isn’t—permanent,” he offered, but received only a glare from the Duke.

  Kordas was stripping his jacket off, as if it was a fetter he was desperate to escape. “It has to stop,” the Duke panted. “It has to stop. It is wrong. It’s heartless. But the point of an Empire isn’t to be kind, is it? It’s to maintain itself. Did you see? By all gods great and small, the Empire is a living thing now. It’s turning everyone into its bones and belly. This is Hell. This is Hell.” He stood sweating, shaking, and then upturned a pitcher of water over his head, soaking his hair and the storm shirt, before shaking his head like a dog casting rain off. “It has to stop. It has to be stopped,” he trailed off, wiping his face and beard down with both hands.