The Carnelian Throne (14 page)

Before the raised platform on which the four teen waited, the guard released him, brushing at his tunic in disgust. He heard himself announced.

The back of his neck afire, he realized he was supposed to climb those stairs of his own will, to meekly ascend to take their ... what? Judgment? He did not know.

So he climbed them, glad enough to get to the end of all things mysterious. As he ascended each of the twenty steps, he could see more of those atop them: sandals gave way to furred, booted legs or long clinging robes, to girded hips and armed ones, to a crowd that split to funnel him into place before Mahrlys-iis-Vahais and the black ossasim. Both were resplendant in black silk and silver; each item of his masculine attire, finding its counterpart in her woman’s wear. She even bore a slim dagger at, her hip, tucked through a loop in her belt, its blade and hilt exposed. As he did.

Disconcerted, he looked around him. Six other pairings displayed themselves to his eyes. A growl issued from him. So deep was the animal response this state of affairs evoked in him, he did not even know he had made a sound until a woman tittered. Then he growled a second time, articulately, that there be no mistake.

He had wanted to seek her out. When things had been bleakest, when he had cheated death in the forest, he had determined to do so. He took another step toward her, and the black ossasim, whose right wing was pierced where it fringed his bicep by an encircling armlet of silver, stepped forward and laid hand on his chest.

A moment they stood so. Then Deilcrit retreated a pace, and the black-furred ossasim also stepped back.

He had wanted to seek her, to beg her, aid with his soul’s distress, to pour out all that had so confounded him and hear her wisdom make sense of it. He had held her of high spirit: she had proved herself less than his faith had pictured her: his piety was bitterly disappointed. And his stance echoed his thoughts so clearly that the black ossasim tossed back his forewing imperiously, and before Deilcrit’s eyes the wings began to stiffen, rustling, until they framed his glistening form.

“Eviduey,” said Mahrlys imploringly, and the black ossasim, with a toss of his thick-maned head, spoke:

“This is a formal review: let it be so written.” Deilcrit found himself fascinated by the ossasim’s black lips, framed in a manlike beard, through which red tongue and white teeth peeked with each word. A back of his mind noted a silent procession filing along the tabernacle’s walls: priestesses and ossasim and the brown-furred ones and ...

“Kirelli and Ashra, for Wehrdom.” The announcement split silence, and like one being, all on the dais turned.

Through the double doors, before they had truly swung back, ambled a huge ptaiss the color of moonlight, who bore on her back Kirelli the whelt. A murmur followed them up onto the dais like a train of fine silk.

Eviduey bowed low, with exaggerated flourish, wings rigid.

The great ptaiss yawned, and sat upon its haunches in the middle of the aisle of dignitaries. Kirelli, with great aplomb, hopped from the ptaiss’ back, took air, and, amid a growing rumble of conversation, alighted on Deilcrit’s shoulder.

Slowly, so as not to unseat the whelt, he turned back to face the black-and-silver-silked pair. The ossasim’s eyes gleamed like bloody slits in his face, and Mahrlys’ visage was for a moment so contorted that he flinched, seeing what her beauty camouflaged. Then she smoothed it, with an obvious effort like the shooing of wrinkles from a gown. The whelt trembled, shifted weight, its talons piercing his jerkin to rest against his skin.

A scribe, brown-furred, scuttled to Eviduey’s side and crouched there.

“With your permission, Kirelli?” queried the black ossasim Eviduey in a voice like velvet. The whelt humped its wings.

“We are here,” continued the wehr-master reaching beneath the nightfall robe draped over his shoulders to bring forth a scroll which he unrolled, “to adjudicate the crimes of one Deilcrit, formerly iyl of the Spirit Gate, and determine suitable penance therefore.

“Deilcrit, before the convened wisdom of Dey-Ceilneeth, say truth only, on pain of dissolution. Do you agree?”

“I do,” he replied, dry-mouthed, while recollecting his determination to keep silent about what had passed between him and the spirit power called Chayin.

“Mahrlys-iis-Vahais will pose the allegations,” intoned Eviduey. With yet another sweeping bow, this time to Mahrlys, he stepped back a pace.

Her lips trembled. She took a breath that quivered her nostrils, and Deilcrit tried to squeeze from his inner eyes’ sight those moments he had spent with her in the forest. But what lay under her silks had been exposed to him, and a fury he did not understand raised bile in his throat, that she had so demeaned them both in advance of this moment.

“Allegations!” she spat at last, when all eyes waited upon her words. “These are no allegations, but a redundant exposition of facts!” By the shock rippling Eviduey’s wings, by the black-pelted arm that reached out, cautionary, and then withdrew without having touched her, Deilcrit understood that these words were not those she had been expected to speak.

“This is a farce, a joke!” she continued. “Imca-Sorr-Aat demands this offender’s life. Will you be the one to deny him? You, Eviduey?” And she spun on her consort, who looked then to his feet. “Or you, whelt? Or you? Or you?”

When none of her court made answer to this, somewhat calmed, she continued:

“Not I. Bring it in. Let us have done with this game!” She spoke over her shoulder, to someone out of his sight.

As two brown-furred ones wheeled in what seemed to be a caldron, Eviduey whispered in Mahrlys’ ear, proffering the scroll. With an angry shake of her head, she spat some answer to him in a tongue Deilcrit did not know. Kirelli, on his shoulder, cooed reassuringly, tugged at his hair with his beak.

He was not invited to crowd around the Eye of Mnemaat, which had a rod or handle of brass protruding from it. Rather, the ossasim Eviduey himself attended him while the twelve paired jury members, and the ptaiss, and even Kirelli filed down the dais to join Mahrlys and the two servants by the wheeled basin.

“This is a rather sorry introduction to Wehrdom,” said the ossasim, distinctly and very low, when all were intent upon the caldron’s contents. Then, when Deilcrit made no reply: “Let us hope something in your intent may mitigate.”

Try as he might, he could make nothing of those words, nor the black creature’s expressionless face; nothing other than the hostility and wariness in those stiffened, ever-fluttering wings.

They filed back, up the far side of the dais they had descended, and every face he saw was thoughtful, worry-lined, guarded. The ptaiss fairly slunk, belly brushing the ground.

“Proceed, Eviduey,” ordered Mahrlys, becalmed, glowing with a feral satisfaction.

Taking up once more his position at her side, the ossasim read from the scroll an itemization of Deilcrit’s failures: his failure to stop the intruders from lighting fire; his failure to save the pregnant ptaiss; even his failure to die under the attacking wehrs’ claws. And his sins of commission, also, were chronicled: his raising of arms against wehrs, his prostration before the “powers of Evil,” his defilement at the hands of the sorcerous Estri; even his admission that he thought himself wehrchosen, which he had made only to his cellmate Laonan, was included, labeled as sedition, among his crimes.

“Do you deny that you did these things?” asked Eviduey finally.

“No,” answered Deilcrit. “But I would have come here. I would have come to you.” It was to Mahrlys he spoke, in spite of his design against it. “You asked me for the swords. I gave them to you. Ask for my life, I will give you that. But I did not mean—”

“Deilcrit,” interrupted Eviduey softly but firmly. “Your life is not yours to apportion. Whose it is, we will now determine.”

There was a preemptory casting of lots, preceded by a huddle that included Eviduey and the ptaiss, but from which Kirelli and Mahrlys were excluded, as was he.

She stared the whole time with venomous eyes at him, and when the jury formed its twin lines again and their spokesman proceeded betwixt them to whisper in her ear, her face drained white as the ptaiss’ pelt. Then she in turn whispered in Eviduey’s ear. It was he who spoke to Dielcrit:

“The Vahais’ of Mnemaat has taken the measure of your transgressions, and its mercy proclaims sentencing as follows: Tomorrow you will take the Trial of Imca-Sorr-Aat. You will seek him out in Othdaliee and receive from him either absolution or death. Should it be absolution, you are free to return to within the Wall of Mnemaat. You may have whatever comfort and aid you can request before this length of silk touches the floor.”

He had one moment of understanding before the ossasim reached skyward, let go the length of black silk, and it fluttered toward the seafoam stone. He saw Mahrlys’ face, so suffused with fury that it seemed enshadowed. Kirelli screeched and flapped heavenward, and he blurted his answer, Kirelli’s mind-picture clear within him:

“The man, Laonan. The green-metaled sword. Mahrlys, this night, to myself.”

And as the jurors buzzed and Kirelli screeched, circling with dizzying speed around the tabernacle’s dome, he caught her blank, then stricken, then tearful expression.

Though he did not comprehend, he felt elation, and more, as she stepped unsteadily backward, shaking her head, and the black ossasim followed, obscuring his sight of her. For a long moment there were only those inky spread wings; and the disconcerted mutterings of the crowd, and Kirelli’s blaring caw.

From nowhere, brown-furred wingless ones converged upon him. As he was hustled away he caught scraps of converse from those who lined the walls.

“So much for her. She will never ...”

“If I were Eviduey, I would kill him myself.” This from an ossasim.

“... so she did not win his heart to lay on Mnemaat’s alter. If ...”

“... to subvert so eloquent an ally as Kirelli, he must be ...”

“... as dead as if Eviduey lopped his head off here and now. From the gardens of Othdaliee there is no returning. The question is, obviously, why she is not content with that. Did you see Eviduey ‘s face? She’ll have trouble ...”

And when the double doors closed out the sounds, and he was alone with the brown-furred guards, he was glad of it.

They did not take him back to the cavern cell, but deposited him in a small, irregularly shaped chamber walled in the black, glossy stone on three sides. The fourth was an outer wall such as he had seen in the corridors. Through it he was able to determine the time as near midday, even though vines and high branches crawled in profusion upon the outside of the green-tinted transparency that made a window twice his height in the otherwise featureless cubicle. He stood for a long time with his forehead pressed to the cool slick surface, staring out past the overgrowth at Dey-Ceilneeth’s innermost maze.

He tried not to think of those things he had overheard. He tried not to think of the tears he had seen in the eyes of Mahrlys-iis-Vahais. Or of the murderous snarl that came from Eviduey as he whirled to comfort her. He did not understand what he had done. She had not withheld her person in the forest. But that was not true: it was an instinctive vengeance he had levied upon her there in the tabernacle of Mnemaat, and no part of the whelt’s counsel. The words had sprung of their own will from his mouth, spilling out just before the square of blacksilk made contact with the seafoam floor. Although much was a blur in his memory, this he recalled distinctly: Kirelli’s raucous screeching, and the settling of the silk upon the stone.

He sat before the window and drew up his knees and rested his elbows upon them and kneaded his left arm with his right, staring unseeing out the window crafted by his most remote ancestor.

“Deilcrit,” he said glumly, resting his chin on his crossed arms, “although I would not have believed it, you have managed to make a bad situation worse.” His self made no retort. He snorted derisively. “Nothing to say? Othdaliee, is it? You have about as much business there as in the Temple of Mnemaat, defiled as you are. Or in the arms of Mnemaat’s high priestess. You deserve all you get, spoiled one.”

And though he fell silent, that part of him which hallowed Mnemaat urged him to renege, to beg the priestess’s forgiveness, and permission to enter once more Mnemaat’s sanctuary—this time to pray.

To which his emerging self replied that any god who would still hear him after all that had occurred deserved no man’s homage, and that as for Mahrlys’ desserts, he himself was going to see that she got them. If he must set out on a hopeless journey with only death at its ending by her design, he would make sure that she, at least, carried a memory of him that would last the length of her soul’s survival.

When two priestesses came to prepare him at the sun’s set, he was still sitting there, listening to the dialogue yet raging within.

He let them lead him dumbly into baths and chambers filled with women who fussed about him, whispering scandalized incomprehensibles among themselves. He was docile while they cut his hair and picked the parasites from it, and redressed his arm with foul-smelling unguents and bound it up again with white gauze; and when they fed him, giggling, he ate as they demanded, carefully, so as not to despoil his anointments or the fine-woven robes they draped around him. The robes were cut for ossasim, with great slits where sleeves might have been, slits deep enough to accommodate a pair of fine-furred wings.

When he became impatient, demanding his right, the same blue-robed woman who had delivered him to the guards appeared, extended her arm to him as she had then, and led him to the chamber of Mahrlys-iis-Vahais.

Awaiting in that chamber was not Mahrlys, but the ossasim Eviduey, lounging with wings at rest on a caned platform, supported by two whelt-head full-breasted female statues as tall as he.

He hesitated at the threshold, but the cobalt-robed woman pushed him inside and closed the rushed doors behind his back.

He stood there in consternation, staring about for sight of Mahrlys. No Mahrlys did he see, but such grand and gilded lamps and benches and legged cushions as befitted a woman of rank. And man-size diorite statues, those of every god in Benegua’s pantheon, as befitted Benegua’s high priestess.