The Carnelian Throne (18 page)

“I do not control them, and they are not creatures. I will ask them, and let you know our joint decision.”

“Please do. The duties of a gracious host are much lightened by knowledge of how long the guest will abide. I could prepare some wondrous entertainments—”

“I thank you, no.”

“Will you not dine with me this meal, then?”

“I think not. We have had a surfeit of excitement. A meal in our chambers and an early rest would suit us all.”

Her brows knitted. “If not a meal, then, we must at least view the rising moon. It is customary when exchanging attendants.”

“I am not sure—”

“Please, again I beg your indulgence in what is customary.”

I sipped the drink she had long ago handed me, and turned the beaten bronze in my hands. “Is it that black ossasim you propose to send me?” I asked.

“Eviduey.” Her tone caressed the name, and her arms drew together about her breasts. “I do you great honor. Do not reject it. He is more than Third Hand to me.”

There was steel in her voice as deadly as the dagger she fingered beneath her robe. I had not previously marked it, and I found myself fussing about my boot tops, caressing the slender circles nestled there.

“It is the dark one I would prefer,” she breathed on a sigh, and let her hand fall to her lap.

“I will ask him.” And though she did not understand, she caught my sarcasm and gave me a quizzical look, head cocked, that reminded me that wehrs looked through her eyes, and I begged exhaustion.

Etiquette ruled in Dey-Ceilneeth. If I had foreseen the automatic response my soft inquiry as to the location of my rooms evoked, I would have done it much sooner. Happily, she profusely apologized and then seemed to lapse into the familiarity of her ritual. If I had understood the sanctity of form and demeanor in that society when first I challenged it, I would have fared better. As it was, I followed along dumbstruck as she pulled me to the doors and threw them open.

They were faced off in a triangle. By reading Sereth and Chayin’s feigned ease, the fight readiness in Eviduey screamed at me.

Oblivious, Malwlys strode down the corridor to, as she had said, examine the humble quarters her staff had prepared next to her own. Helplessly, drawn in her wake, I followed. Sereth and Chayin, and the black wehr-master, after a moment’s mutual hesitation, joined us.

None spoke. Breathing sounded loud in my ears. Mahrlys’ back as we proceeded along the corridor gradually stiffened until I wondered what such a rapid change in bearing might portend, but nothing showed when she threw open the door of rushes and with a flourish invited me to step in before her.

I thanked her, complimented her on the creamy carpets that lay like foam on the emerald stone. The pleasure in her face was not feigned, nor her pride. Only when she turned to leave and saw Chayin stripping off his filthy boots did her smile freeze stiff on her face.

I caught a glimpse of Eviduey’s wing-cloaked arm wrapping around her shoulders as Sereth closed the doors of tied rushes and slid the crude bar across.

The chamber held two huge oblong wooden baskets, a bench or table of stone that matched the floor, caned platforms, low, with loose cushions. I sat on one, rested my elbows on my knees and chin in my hands.

I had hoped to hear, sitting there, jokes or banter between them, a query as to how I had fared—anything that smacked of normalcy, confederation, the three of us at work upon the problem at hand. But there were not three there. In that room of ancient and dilapidated splendor were three units of one each. Chayin pulled off his garments one by one, stuck the sword belt between his mud-caked boots, and stretched full out on the carpet with an explosive sigh. Hands under his head, eyes closed, his regular breathing might have fooled a stranger: to me it said “Do not disturb.”

Neither did Sereth even so much as query me as to my success with Mahrlys. He made a thorough circuit of the room, barred a second door he found, and leaned for a long time against a hanging pulled back from an overgrown window, staring out between the cleaves.

When nothing had changed but day to night, the nearing of moon’s rise made me speak. “Ask me how I fared, Sereth,” I suggested. I had hoped he would join me on the cushioned platform. He had not previously. He did not then.

“If you have something to say, say it.” He did not even turn from the window.

I wondered what I had done to elicit such censure from him. I can perform miraculous feats, wreak carnage, trek continents and the space between the moments when in his company, or to serve him, or to make him smile. Ousted so arbitrarily from his grace, I felt unworthy of grace.

My voice shook. “I ended up telling her the truth, but she will have none of it. Woman to woman, or not at all. With one exception: she wants Chayin for the night.”

That one, who had been pretending sleep, sat up abruptly.

“And she sends me her black and winged friend, in an equal gesture of trust and respect.”

Sereth turned from the window, leaned back against the wall, slid down it, and crossed his arms. “No.”

“Let me make my own decision, dharen,” said Chayin. There was no veil upon him then. “For the good of all, for the equality, trust, and respect between our two lands, I will take my chances with Mahrlys-iis-Vahais.”

This was the cahndor whole, decisive, as I had once known him. He dug a pouch from his sword belt and touched it to his lips. It was small and held little, but that little was a potent drug, used by Parsets in moments of decision or stress.

Sereth tossed his head, stared up at the ceiling. “Chayin, things are less than they might be between us. We do a precipitous dance here with the unknowable. Owkahen serves itself only. Do not be foolhardy. We can ride out this time and things will be as they were before. Or we can act regardless of what might change. Do not pursue a course on whim, with no clear end in view. Too much depends on us.”

I had thought I was beyond shock, but that from him left me speechless.

Chayin, too, looked long upon him before he answered: “Sereth, I appreciate your concern. I see what you see, and admit the risks. But from my point of view there is no other choice. Even Eviduey saw that.”

“I like not this love affair of yours with Wehrdom.”

“I know,” said Chayin, sadly.

I merely looked between them, castigating myself for my shallowness. Then Chayin asked me when he was to be summoned, and I explained about the assignation at moon’s rising, and Sereth rose up and began pacing.

“Estri,” he said as he came abreast of me, “just what would you like me to do about this Eviduey?”

“I ... I do not know. Whatever you like.” You may think that a coward’s answer, but you did not hear the tone of his question.

He grunted, and began methodically to draw from me all that had been said about Deilcrit and Wehrdom’s workings by Mahrlys-iis-Vahais.

He was still about it when a woman came to lead us to her mistress. He was his most ingratiateing self, grinning out from under his hair at her, and asking about baths and fresh garments and laundry and what was planned for our meal. His eyes danced with humor at her consternation that he would speak to her at all. But she rose gamely to the moment, answering his every question, her face turned pointedly away and in my direction, as if indeed I had queried her of these things.

Now the word that Mahrlys used, that I have translated as “attendant,” was not that at all, but “ipherim,” which means literally “attendant of ipheri,” which in turn means “radiant,” “resplendent in the sun’s rays.” The word, as the entire language spoken of as Beneguan, is in reality much older than the Benegua, or Wehrdom; old as the Darsti tongue from which it devolved, old as the science the Darsti language evolved to service; older than Dey-Ceilneeth itself.

Once, in a time hazy in my great-great-grandmother’s memory, the continent of Aehre-Kanoss was a great power, possessed of mighty sciences, bastion of the Laonan faith. Near the Fall of Man, at the onset of the mechanist wars, Dey-Ceilneeth was constructed, light in the eye of a great nation, to stand witness to what majesty had existed therein. Here was enshrined Se’keroth, symbol of the Laonan rise—until Khys and some few others stole it back. Those tempestuous days have been elsewhere chronicled, but allow me to remind you: it was the ideological incompatibilities of Silistra and Aehre-Kanoss that precipitated civilization’s fall, and framed by its flaunting thereof the genetic policies that have since that time obtained on civilized Silistra. Staring around, awed, in the fabled tabernacle of Dey-Ceilneeth, I conjectured as to what mismatched recombination had created a climate in which such an all-pervasive mutation as the communcations gene shared by Wehrdom could become dominant. I could think of no circumstance which would inculcate as bizarre a collection of strategies upon a society as had stabilized into the tableau before my eyes.

Chayin, himself born of a mother whose genetic strengths had been chosen by man and not owkahen, seemed to draw about him the very light that inundated the temple, though the moon only peaked the hedge. It was a soft light, thrown from the six crystal towers that pillared the hall; a light that threw holographic phantoms into each corner. They watched, those mindless light sculptures from Dey-Ceilneeth’s past glory, eyes ever upon the viewer, facing always each observer as they had for thousands of years. Once hailed as the greatest art ever, produced by the technocratic elite, they guarded the temple impassive, their nature forgotten, their countenances smooth and unruffled by the tragedies that had made of them deities before whom sacrifices were zealously and punctually laid, befitting their station as ipherim to Mnemaat the Unseen.

When these ipherim of light were pacified with offerings of fruit and oil and grain, two liver-brown ossasim swung their weight against a brass windlass and without even a single screech of metal a whole section of the temple’s stamped metal ceiling drew back to admit the light of the rising moon.

Coincidental to this opening of the ceiling, the holographic figures dimmed, and into the square of moonlight was rolled a hemispherical basin on casters, from which a handle of brass rose a hand’s height, then curved back toward the basin’s surface.

It was this handle Mahrlys rubbed repeatedly with her palm after we had all filed down the dais to crowd around it. Into the depths of this caldron-like affair we stared: myself, Sereth, Chayin, Eviduey, and an ossasim whose pure white fur and stooped hobbling gait denoted advanced age.

So we looked into the Eye of Mnemaat: in the basin, which seemed to be at least in part composed of a convexly ground crystal, a turbulence began. From Mahrlys stroking palm, along the dully glowing brass, circling around and down the caldron’s circumference, traveled a pale blue, pulsing light bright as an electric spark. Through squinted eyes I saw the basin’s crystal seem to melt, to take chop like a restless sea. And then the glow burned so bright I turned my head away. But when Mahrlys breathed a command that we commune with Mnemaat, I turned back my head and saw within that frothing brightness a massive throne hewn of red stone, and a sword set across its arms, and that sword was Se’keroth. Then the vision was obscured as if by giant wings and the hook-beaked visage of a whelt glared at me from the basin’s depths.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Mahrlys uttered a thin cry and snatched her palm from the handle as if burned.

“It is an evil omen,” muttered the aged ossasim on my left, as he peremptorily gestured me away from the caldron’s edge.

Not one of us in that hall supposed otherwise.

There was a time of staring around, shattered by the ossasim attending the windlass that rolled closed the ceiling to the night.

Mahrlys, white-faced, spoke a benediction in Mnemaat’s name. Then the pale-furred one left by one door with his underlings, and we by the great carven ones. When they had shut behind us and we stood in the torchlit hall, Sereth brazenly demanded of Mahrlys how long Deilcrit had been gone.

This Eviduey answered smoothly, before Mahrlys could retort, “A day and night and half a day again.” His wings were half-raised, his eyes the brighter for the uncertain illumination, and he bade us accompany him in the same breath with which he answered Sereth.

Inscrutably, Sereth assented, taking me firmly by the arm. I had no idea what course he intended to pursue in this affair. Nor had I thought much about it: I had been watching Chayin. He in turn was intent upon Mahrlys, every muscle of his form dedicated to communicating to her his desire, his desirability, his magnificence, and his strength. I found it strange to see these introductory intimacies lavished upon another, the slight brushings of limbs and inclinations of head I had previously thought restricted to myself alone. I turned from it at Sereth’s urging wearily, not pleased with the dismayed rustlings prowling my stomach. I deemed them jealousy, and jealousy they seemed to be, and I spent the walk back to our quarters sunk in a self-castigation the crueler for my error. It was not jealousy; it was owkahen’s advice and assessment of what I saw between Chayin and Mahrlys, but I did not trust myself. Nor did I trust the Eye of Mnemaat, rather assuming that the psionic device had picked Chayin’s prophecy from his mind and displayed it to us all.

How subtle owkahen is, to display before us a raging tornado that it may suck unheeded from our path the pearl of knowledge before we stumble upon it. And we see the tornado and battle the affront and congratulate ourselves afterward that we have triumphed, while we have truly suffered the most ignominious of defeats, uncomprehending.

What I could at that time not comprehend was what Sereth intended for me and for Eviduey, Third Hand, Follower of Mnemaat.

Upon our way to our sparsely furnished chamber, the ossasim detailed with conciliating candor all that Sereth asked of the trail to Othdaliee, wings fluttering relaxed in an easy drape over his arms. I was more conscious than I had previously been of the ossasim’s size: he was of Chayin’s stature, carrying perhaps a sixth again Sereth’s weight.

It was to be expected that this painstaking civility between them would wear thin, and we had barely chased out the torchlighters with their fire pots and closed the doors again when Sereth asked the ossasim point-blank if privacy was required to this satisfaction of local mores, and the ossasim answered: