CHAPTER NINE
The primary powers of guile--sympathy, influence, shielding, and illusion--are never evenly distributed. Even great witches like Raym are likely to be stronger in one than in another. And there are those, like young Mani, who exhibit certain powers very strongly and others not at all. Mani was unusually adept at recognizing illusions and even more so at shielding his feelings from other witches. Thus his awareness that I'd employed the Great Shift in my appearance as the pirate was something I knew by deduction only. If my disguise had been mere illusion, he'd have seen through it.
It seemed to me that the only danger in my going along with Mani lay in the remote possibility that he was an agent of the Red Prince or the Lady Orath, though what Orath might want with me--or how she could know anything about me, except perhaps from having sensed my glimmer at a distance when she was at Horok's hall--wasn't clear. If Raym had told her I would follow them to Maal, of course, she might indeed be on the lookout for me. But since I'd already decided to seek her out openly, Mani's taking me to her would serve my purpose anyway.
"What are you thinking?" he said suddenly as we walked along. We'd left the harbor area and entered a decrepit residential district.
"You're a witch. Why don't you read my mind and find out? I'm not blocking you." Although I was, a little.
"Ah, I asked about thoughts, not feelings. I didn't know anyone could read thoughts. But I'm not much good at feelings, either. Most of what I can do you already know. My other talents are purely human." He grinned engagingly.
"Witches are human," I said in a reproving tone.
"Don't I know it," he laughed. "My father was one. Not the best, but not too bad either. And one of the lucky ones who can help make babies without losing their guile. He taught me what he could; otherwise I'd probably not have recognized what I am. He introduced me to some of his colleagues, and that's where we're going now."
"Tell me about them." I gave him a touch of influence so he wouldn't hesitate.
"We're not a formal group, really. There's no leader, no rule. There are five of us, and we share our earnings. Except Tada. She does healing, and she won't take payment, not even goods in barter. Says that would block her power, so the rest support her. And Riga..." He paused, as if deciding not to say whatever he'd started to say. "You know how I'm employed. Kai and Fin both work at the hospital, as cleaners, not healers, but they use their influence when they can."
"Most people can't close their minds so completely from me," I said. "You do it very well. But why are you doing it? I'm not resisting you, you know. You found me out, but I could get away from you if I wanted to."
He glanced suspiciously at me. "I don't know why you're here in Maal. You could've stayed on the ship, gone back to your own country, if you hadn't wanted to be here. Until I know you better, I've got things to hide."
"Will you know me better when we get where you're taking me?"
"I think so," he said. "That's not guile, just regular intuition. I think you're all right. I think you'll help us. But I want the others to see you first." He gave me a rueful smile. "Intuition's fine, but sometimes they're inclined to doubt it. So I don't make decisions like that."
Mani's commune was housed in a wooden building that leaned precipitously westward. It was braced with what appeared to be old ship's timbers, or it would long ago have collapsed. Although it was midmorning, two of his housemates were at home.
Riga was a pale woman who looked and moved as if she were about to faint. She was, I discerned, in the best of health and full of a kind of focused, resentful energy. At first she ignored me, not bothering even to identify me as a person of guile. Fin, who was sitting at a wooden table, chopping greens, was a slight, studious-looking man with a large head and very sharp eyes. He nodded curtly to me.
"Why have you brought a witch here without warning?" As he rose and turned to Mani, a small white tomcat with a black tail, who'd been draped over his lap, hopped down and considered me.
Riga's mind quickly became almost a blank.
Mani grinned at me. Then, to Fin he said, "She can't read me. If she hadn't wanted you to know she's a witch, you wouldn't know. She killed Krinos. Enough?"
Fin turned the bright beam of his curiosity upon me for a sudden second, and I met it with all the skill Raym had helped me to sharpen. There was much he didn't see, but he was satisfied. "Killed Krinos, did you? Did you take his purse?"
I had to laugh. "That's for me to know and you to find out, isn't it? If you give me shelter here, I can pay for my keep."
"Good."
"Vivia needs food and rest," Mani said. "I suppose there's stew on the stove? She can sleep in my room." He gave me an earnest look. "I won't touch you."
"That's quite true," I said.
Riga laughed unexpectedly. She was probing me, like Fin, but finding out only what I allowed her to see. Still, I put up a barrier around myself before I slept, a low-intensity spell around the purses and a warning to myself to wake if someone approached too near.
The cat had followed me to the bed and, after eyeing me for a minute, jumped up and nestled into the crook of my knees. I was pleased to find that it, at least, trusted me.
* * * *
When I woke, it was early evening and the other two members of the group had arrived. Tada was a lovely, placid woman in her fifties who exuded a sweet glimmer that reminded me of my adopted mother Katra. Kai was a much younger woman, sturdy and muscular, well-shielded, against whom the languid Riga reclined dreamily. They were finishing a meal when I came into the room, and Mani rose to get me a plate.
"That's all right," I told him quickly. "I had plenty earlier. And--" To Fin, the cook. "--very good it was, too." I let him see I meant it, and he looked pleased in spite of himself.
But he, like all but Tada, had closed his mind firmly to me. While Mani cleared the table, the rest of us probed one another in silence.
The clearest to me was Tada, who sent out an aura so expressive it was almost music. She knew that my mind was partly closed to her as well as to the others, but she projected welcome and a friendly trust in the ultimate goodness of the universe. The secrets she kept, I felt, were the others' secrets, not her own.
Riga, too, revealed something of herself, not by choice but because she was unable to deny me access. This she resented. I sensed her love for Kai and, again, a deeply passionate loathing directed toward someone who seemed to be far away and yet almost always, uncomfortably, in her thoughts.
I was well shut out, however, from Kai and Fin, and still entirely from Mani, who gave me a slight shrug. I understood it well enough. He was waiting until the others had made up their minds. As soon as he came back to the table with a pot of tea, he looked around inquiringly. "A bit of sparring to which I'm not privy, I take it?" he said.
"She won't open to us," Kai said. "Thus she's no use to us. We wouldn't be able to trust her. Maybe she's the one, maybe she's not. There's no way of telling."
"Have you opened to her?"
"How can we? That could be suicide, as you well know." This from Riga.
"I'm far outnumbered," I said. "Why should I give myself up first? If I let you know why I'm here, showed you my strengths, I could be in big trouble. Tada's open to me, and I could learn a lot from her, but nothing of what I need to know about the rest of you, unfortunately. For example, maybe I'm what one?"
They all glared at me and I glared back. It was a standoff.
Finally Fin spoke. "All right. Your strengths. You killed Krinos, Mani says. How did you do that? By influence, I suppose. What exactly?"
I shook my head. "It wasn't influence at all. It was an accident. I sent an illusion, meant to frighten him, and it frightened him too much. Stopped his heart."
"Was it what Tonio and I saw?" Mani asked. I told him it was, and he laughed. "Well, it was a good one. A double-goer. He thought he was seeing himself. The old dog spent his life scaring people, and at last he scared himself to death. Fitting."
> "And you saw through the illusion?" Kai asked him.
"He did," I said quickly. "I didn't know that Mani was a witch, or I'd have made it stronger." I had no intention of letting them know that what Mani had seen when he looked at me was a Shifted form, and I was glad he hadn't told them.
Tada had not yet entered the conversation, and I thought at first that she wouldn't. Somehow the rest of the group's suspicions, and my own, seemed not to concern her. But now she spoke gently. "They're right to mistrust you, Vivia, and you're right to mistrust them. We're at an impasse, of course. You see, there's an element of--shall we say politics?--involved here. On both sides, I think. If there weren't, there'd be no reason for any of us to hide anything from the others. In our case, the danger would be very great if what you're hiding is that you're an agent of our enemies."
"And in my case, too," I said. "But isn't there a good chance that our enemies are the same?"
"That's what Mani has argued, because you killed Krinos. But there could be many reasons for killing Krinos. It's possible you did it intentionally, with the object of gaining access to this group." She smiled at me. "I myself believe you're who you say you are, Vivia, a person of guile from Monsara, the Fair Coast as we call your land. But you might, instead, be someone known to us. Powerfully disguised."
"Why should someone want to do that?"
"To learn our plans, naturally," said Riga.
"Well, I haven't learned them. I think it's safe to say that, if your enemy is the woman at the Red Prince's court, and if I were she, I would have learned them." I didn't know this, of course; Orath's dark and dire glimmer didn't mean she was any stronger than I was--only that she wasn't nearly as nice. But it seemed like a good thing to say.
I felt a surge of hatred from Riga.
"I have plans of my own," I went on, "and this conversation is wasting our time. I'll pay for my meal and bed, and be on my way."
I rose from the table, and Fin rose too. "No, you don't seem to understand. If you're who you might be, whatever you say, we can't afford to let you go."
My heart sank. I thought I was a match for any one of them alone--Mani and Riga, certainly, and although Kai and Fin were unknown quantities I felt unshielded areas in both that I might be able to exploit. But all together? Tada, I believed, would stay out of it, as Mani might. But in any case I seemed to have no choice. I took a deep breath.
"How do you propose to stop me?" I asked Fin, and began to gather my concentration. I could exert powerful influence, but I'd never attempted to disable so many at once, witches at that. I should never have come with Mani.
Another word for fearless is reckless, Raym had once told me. It seemed I never remembered that quite in time for it to be useful. Now I would have to engage in a battle of influence. Raym had always beaten me at that when we sparred, but sometimes with difficulty. Although maybe, I thought unhappily, he hadn't really been trying all that hard.
Tada lowered her head into her hands; I dismissed her and faced the others. My arms and legs went immediately numb and I fell back into my chair, struggling to free them, at the same time sending as much pain as I could in three directions. I heard a woman groan and hoped it was Riga. Then I felt a knife cutting into my brain.
"Stop!" Mani cried.
To my astonishment they did. So did I. I opened my eyes. My hands and feet tingled, but otherwise I felt fine.
Mani was gripping the table with both hands. "You idiots!" he shouted. "I brought this woman here to help us. We need help. She's strong, probably with more finesse than Kai, I told you that. At the harbor in Monsara she was small-shifted for Krinos, to draw him in, so that means she wasn't working with him and hadn't booked passage. He had her gagged, so that means he didn't know what she was until I did. I put all that together without reading her at all, just with human common sense.
"But you, with your wonderful witchy ways, all you can do is get into a wrangle. Flexing your muscles." He faced me accusingly. "You, too. I should've left you at the docks."
"I wish you had," I said.
Kai stuck out her chin. "You're a witch yourself," she reminded him.
"Sometimes I wish to God I wasn't. At least I'm not a showoff."
"Only because you haven't much to show."
"Oh, shut up." He turned back to me. "Look, I'm sorry I got you into this, but now you have to get yourself out of it. I know you didn't get on that ship under your own power, but what brought you as far as you did come? And why did you go to Krinos's cabin with him? And why didn't you stay on the ship, disguised?"
"I have business here in Maal, and it's my own business, mostly just personal. The ship was an accident. I'd have taken passage on another if I hadn't had the luck to get brought here on that one, if you can call it luck. I went to Krinos's cabin so I could get some money--my own money, it was. And yes, I did mean to kill him, only not the way it happened. I meant to make him suffer more."
"Why?"
Suddenly, unexpectedly, I had tears in my eyes. "Because he killed my father." The scene came back to me vividly: my father's jovial face, expecting his fortune, and his astonishment as Krinos's dagger came out.
Mani's eyes got very wide. "The old man was your father?" My mental image had been so strong that even he had seen it. And he'd recognized it.
"You were there," I whispered. "It must've been you who knocked me out."
"I saw what you'd done to Krinos and I saw you going for him," he said. "I wanted him for myself. Forgive me, please. I was sorry the minute I'd done it, so I didn't tie you up quite as tight as I could have." With that, he opened to me completely.
What I learned tumbled out fast in images and feelings, but its sense was clear. Mani's participation in Krinos's raids had been meant to finance the Red Prince's demise. The group had learned from one of Krinos's officers what was planned. Mani had signed on for the voyage with the intention of waiting until the return, slipping a knife between Krinos's ribs, and stealing whatever part of the plunder he could. He and one of the women, Riga or Kai, would travel to Maltuk's court then, where Mani would seek an audience with the Red Prince and his witch, for the group believed that Mani's power of closing his mind was proof against even Orath. Once in Maltuk's presence, he would win the Red Prince's trust and when the time was right would assassinate the man, after which Kai--or Riga--would spirit them both away.
The plan was so full of ill-considered risks and dependent upon so much lucky coincidence that its chances of success approached zero. Mani had suspected this, I realized. I guessed that the reason his vision of Riga--or Kai--was so blurred was that, after recognizing my strength of guile, he'd hoped to substitute me for whichever of them the group had proposed to go with him. But Mani's hatred of the Red Prince was genuine and passionate and his spirit of adventure was so keen that he rejected the idea of failure.
All this was given to me in a great flash of consciousness. I saw from the rest of the group's dismay that they, too, had read what Mani had sent me.
I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could make a sound Riga had turned to me. The knifelike pain in my head transfixed me again, and it was many times stronger than before. The world became suddenly and briefly very bright.
And then very dark indeed.
CHAPTER TEN
For the second time in far too few days, I came back to consciousness in the dark, remembering clearly what had happened and wondering why, if my guile was so strong, I hadn't been able to stop it from happening. This time I knew I was in Mani's cot, where I'd slept earlier.
How much earlier? From the hollow feeling in my stomach, I guessed it had been more than a few hours since I'd had anything to eat.
I tried to sit up but was overcome by dizziness. The door opened immediately and someone came into the room carrying a lamp turned low. Tada, the healer. She set the lamp down and looked at me. "Thank God," she said. "I was afraid..."
"That she'd killed me?" My voice sounded strange, wobbly and rusty.
&
nbsp; She nodded. "That you wouldn't wake. Riga has trained herself to a very fine focus. You reacted defensively, and that made it worse; she turned your guile against you, and even she was surprised at how effective that was. Now, wait--"
She left the room and came back with a cup of broth. "Here, let me help you sit up. You need to drink this."
I was so shaky that she had to hold the cup to my lips. I drank it hungrily. "How long?"
"Four days, almost. I've been giving you a little water and doing what else I could for you. But I couldn't bring you out of it. You've finally done it for yourself. I'll get you another cup of broth, and then you must rest."
"Rest? What've I been doing? I have to get up." But I found that I couldn't. After the second cup, I made it to the toilet with Tada's help, and then had to lie down again. "Where's Riga?"
"Gone. All three are gone, Riga and Kai and Mani." She sighed. "I'm afraid it was wrong, and I think Mani thought so too, but Riga insisted."
"Ah, Tada," I said. "I've not opened my mind to you, so I have no right to ask you anything. I'll do it now, if you like. For Fin, too, if he's here."
"He'll be back shortly. Why don't you rest until he gets here? And thank you, Vivia. I don't know what your business is here in Maal, but I'm sure it's not Maltuk's business. I wish the rest of them had accepted that and taken you with them. That way they'd have had a better chance of succeeding."
On the fool's errand Mani's thoughts had showed me? I'd never have gone. But I didn't say so to Tada. Her feelings were still open to me, and I knew she was worried about her friends. No point in making her feel worse, at least until I knew exactly what they were up to. I dozed.
When Fin returned I got up, feeling stronger, and went into the front room to join him and Tada. While he prepared an evening meal, with Tada's occasional help, I sat silently at the table.
Fin turned to me after he'd taken a pan of biscuits from the oven and set it to cool. "So... Tada says you're prepared to let us know your reason for being here. How are we to be sure you're showing us all of it?"
A Glimmer of Guile Page 9