The Carnelian Throne (8 page)

“Chayin, give Estri your sword.” And to my horrified shudder, Sereth added: “Long ago I told you that in future you must dispatch your own wounded. Is there not even that much mercy in you, Shapers’ spawn? The thing suffers.”

With downcast eyes I took the weapon from Chayin, but as I bent close, debating whether to slit its throat, lop head from shoulders, or simply drive the sword point into its heart, the creature stirred, and fixed upon me its yellow-eyed stare, and its words stayed my hand:

“Woman, wild or no, you should know better than to lift arms against a representative of Wehrdom! Imca-Sorr-Aat’s curse upon you! Upon all your heads, it is levied.” The voice was a soughing wind. It came from everywhere, so ubiquitous that I thought for a moment that my mind alone had heard, for its cartilaginous mouth had not opened. Solicitous, I dropped the sword and raised up its head. From that crushed skull out onto my hand oozed spongy, viscous pulp.

One look at Sereth and Chayin proved that they also heard the winged wehr, and even while its brains and blood ran down my arm, the thing recommenced its speech:

“There is no escape! Though you roam the earth entire, the creatures of land and air and sea will follow to exact their vengeance. You have defiled the river, you have laid about you with all the wantonness of your kind. He who eats our flesh will in his own turn be eaten; he who has slaughtered ptaiss will end under their claws.

“But you”—and the creature lifted its mashed skull from my palm, and thrust its gory head so close I could smell the stink of death on its breath “you have murdered not one wehr-master, but two, and for your crimes, Mahrlys-iis-Vahais’ justice would be too merciful. It is Imca-Sorr-Aat himself who will exact from you the price of ...” Abruptly the creature sagged in my arms. Then, in a racking spasm that spewed blood and bile over us both, it succumbed to its fate.

I laid the corpse back on the sand and made a desultory attempt to sluice the foul death fluids from my breasts and arms.

“Well,” said Chayin, wrinkling up his nose in. distaste and lifting me bodily from the corpse’s side, “let us get you cleaned up. You may be accursed, but you need not smell like it.” And he gave me a broad grin, whose like I had seen before, too often.

I twisted in his grasp to confront Sereth, just quitting the wehr-master’s side.

“You are well pleased, are you not?” I accused him.

“I must admit that events have taken an intriguing turn,” he said, tossing his head. His temper, so vile earlier, was not at all in evidence. Even the night’s mask could not hide the deepened channel where the scar on his cheek brushed his mouth. He was eager, now that the enemy had declared himself, for the battle to be joined.

“And I would add”—Chayin chortled—“that my mind is greatly eased by the revelation that there exists here more than a handful of bronze-age primitives, affrighted of their own shadows huddled in the ruins of their ancestors’ prehistoric technocracy.”

“Thank you, Oh Stoth adept,” I jibed, as I splashed water over my beslimed self, keeping a careful eye out for straggling guerm who might be dining in the shallows.

“Perhaps it was only boredom that you sought to vanquish here, Estri, but it was knowledge of what has so long lain unknowable that called me out from the desert,” retorted the cahndor.

“And what of the M’ksakkans that murdered the mother of your son?” I demanded.

The cahndor snorted. “They did me a great service in that. I will admit that the, gesture of pursuit needed to be made. But may I also point out this considering that the denizens of this land seem to be actively at war with man, little chance would a handful of comfort-bred off-worlders, weaponless, ignorant of wilderness skills, have had. No, when the wehrs first attacked us, I had to face the fact that searching out M’ksakkan bones would be merely an exercise in tracking. But no matter, we have something infinitely more stimulating to do, and, I would predict, more demanding. After all, we cannot just go home and wait for the curse to strike. My sleep would be marred beyond repair. And I hate, above all things, waiting.”

“Indeed,” joined in Sereth as I made my way out of the surf, “in such engagements it is better to take the offensive. It might serve us to pool our suppositions with an eye toward determining what weapons we could most profitably bring to bear.” Both Chayin and I knew what arsenal Sereth proposed to inventory.

“And then? Surely neither of you believe in this ... this Imca-Sorr-Aat’s curse?”

Sereth snorted softly. Chayin chuckled aloud, and recalled a time he had said to me that every curse ever written had been laid upon his head.

“And then,” Sereth replied, “we will collect our belongings from the clearing, and travel the road I saw among the trees. At the end of it I suspect we will find Mahrlys-iis-Vahais, whose control of these wehrs is far less ephemeral than any curse, and from him exact either a suitable vessel and crew to replace that which his wehrs destroyed, or sufficient satisfaction to convince us to return home without a ship. But”—and here he leaned forward, his eyes narrowed, and his voice knifed the night—“I am not going to be frightened away, or driven away, by either his curses or his wehrs.”

“But you are willing to risk being carried away,” I spat back.

“Estri,” opined Chayin, “Sereth is right. Neither of us could turn our backs on such an open challenge and retain any semblance of self-respect. And if we did flee, who is to say that one morning we might not wake up with all of Wehrdom encamped upon our doorstep? They know we are here. Doubtless they have some glimmering as to whence we have come. And it is Mahrlys-iis-Vahais that has threatened us, wherever we are. Better here, I say, than in Menetph, or Astria, or at the Lake of Horns. And that reminds me ...” He turned to Sereth. “Before the guerm attack, you accused me of cowardice.”

Sereth started to make some excuse, but Chayin would not allow it: “Let me finish. When I asked Estri if she could get us home, it was because I had not, in all the probability scans I made for our immediate future, seen a single path which led us home from this bayshore, and it occurred to me that the reason I had not seen it so was because it was not possible. Now I realize that although it is possible, even then it was highly unlikely. Though the question may presently seem academic, the procedure is pertinent, even critical. There are a number of alternatives in the sort that deserve our attention. Now, Ebvrasea, speak your say.” It was by an old nomer, one which Sereth acquired while afoul of the law on the other side of this world—our world—that Chayin called him.

Sereth smiled, and tousled the cahndor’s black curls. “I regret, then, that I falsely accused you. What do you see in the sort?”

Chayin frowned. “As always, it is more what I do not see, than what I do .... Estri will support me in the statement that when involved with a future in which no constants are known, it is very difficult to read any coherent pattern. When first we arrived here, I saw a number of futures in which were, a youngish, roughly dressed man whom I think now was Deilcrit. At any rate, if aforehand there were differences between Deilcrit and the young male in my foresight, those differences have evaporated. Wait.”

Sereth sat back.

“I still see a number of futures, viable derivatives of this moment, with a Deilcrit very stubbornly existing therein.”

“In other words, he is not dead?”

“Either that, or a very lively shade. Are you not pleased?” Chayin demanded, when I showed no reaction. I shrugged, shielded, and kept silent.

“Next time, I will ask for a synopsis,” Sereth snapped.

“That is a synopsis. Go down that road, and you will find not only Mahrlys-iis-Vahais, but Estri’s magnificent savage as well.”

“You have greatly eased my mind,” said Sereth dryly. “Now that the worst of my fears have been allayed, may I feel free to call on you for counsel as to what owkahen holds when the need strikes me? Good. And will you also, occasionally, update my awareness when you feel you have something I should know?”

“I would have, in any—”

“That is enough on that subject. Estri, you look like you have something to say.”

“I do. The wehrs are a community of minds. I felt minds in great numbers when I touched the thoughts of the wehr-master. The community, as I conceive it, spans species lines, which is why Deilcrit referred to the conglomerate of species that attacked us as wehrs.”

“I had gathered that. Even the guerm, I suppose, are wehrs.”

“But you have not realized the importance of it. That thing, the wehr-master, should have been dead when it hit the ground. I poured enough force into that turbulence to lay flatten of Chayin’s Parsets.” I was leaning forward, recalling my fear when I had realized how resilient the wehr-master was.

“That makes good sense. If a hundred minds are linked together, and one applies force sufficient to destroy ten, then the hundred minds spread and share that force among their ranks, so that no one entity receives more than a hundredth of that force.” reasoned Chayin.

“It is Mahrlys who controls the wehrs, through those winged wehr-masters,” Sereth reminded us. “One does not count on matching strength with each foot soldier, but seeks to debilitate the chain of command, as did Estri.”

“Why, then, did we not witness the same effect when Estri killed the other winged one in the ptaiss battle?” Chayin pondered.

“Perhaps there was more than one of them,” I hazarded.

“Or perhaps if we had tarried longer, we would have seen it. That was as close as I would like to come.”

“I was meaning to ask you,” Chayin picked up the thread, “what possessed you two to cast your weapons like that?”

I opened my mouth to protest, but Sereth was faster.

“When three people join hands, only one has his right hand free. And if I had not thrown my blade, the ptaiss would have been impaled on it just at the moment Estri pulled us into the congruence. I did not want to take a chance on dragging a wounded beast with us out of time, nor could I ignore the fact that if I did not stop its charge, I would have ended there under its claws.”

“I, too, found myself facing such a choice. And lest we all face it again, let us set about considering what weapons your excellencies would judge meet in dealing with our foes,” I urged, unable to keep either the sarcasm or the concern I felt from sharpening my words. Almost, then, I succumbed and spoke my mind; but Chayin jumped eagerly into the breach before Sereth could retort, and his proposition of a neutral barrier, a sort of perimeter to keep us isolate, took long enough to explain that I had time to regain my composure. Still, Sereth’s harsh words and Deilcrit’s plight rang in my ears and danced before my eyes, and I was little aid to them in their planning.

At length we had compiled a list which included a method for reintroducing any given signal into the mind-matrix of the wehr-system in such a way as to promulgate a disabling feedback; a group of contingency choices based upon the utilization of the most fruitful alternatives available from the pmbability sort—the propinquitous futures produced by the present moment; an arsenal of turbulence techniques effective against a conglomerate attack. These last Sereth strictly regulated as to what was and was not fit. For the dispatch of men in strength we could employ naught but flesh-lock—the removal of a body’s control from its owner—and weapons of the most mundane materiality, these to be physically wielded.

Through it all I managed to keep silent, passive. Let Sereth handicap us in whatever ways eased his ulcerated sense of propriety, it mattered not to me. I had no great trepidation as to how we might fare among the wehrs or the Beneguans, Imca-Sorr-Aat’s curse troubled not one whit my mind. I was resigned, I knew the signs, by now, how not?

Entrapment is only a state of mind. They, the cahndor and the dharen, felt not entrapped. They were better than I at self-deception, and it served them both well. They spoke of burying the fragments of the Aknet’s crew, or firing the few pitiful remains, and I knew it to be Sereth’s way of closing the discussion. He looked curiously at me, and then melted into the dark.

I smelled my father’s breath on the land, and the legacy of Sereth’s predecessor, Khys, was a tight and obdurate band around my throat. We had come hunting a few off-worlders, for sport, for peace and recreation. I had never believed that. From the start I had been suspicious, for I had read extensively in Khys’s writings, and I knew Sereth. And Chayin. And Estrazi, my father, I knew him also. He had promised me certain things: rest, respite. But there is no fitness of Shapers’ scales that I can comprehend, and Estrazi, like Khys, twists truth and in his hands half-truth often takes double seeming. The Spirit Gate had opened at lightning’s stroke; we had, in the normal course of our camp-making, committed importunate acts against the fitness known in this land. By the time the fire was crackling, it was already too late. And I had not been unaware. I never am, in retrospect. Instead I am calm and thoughtless of consequences, but sure in the singleness of owkahen’s purpose. Wehrs? Doubtless we could successfully confront them; and wehr-masters; and Mahrlys-iis-Vahais. It was not these things that had kept me presenting an enquieted facade before my companions, for in lucid moments even I can take comfort in the fact that though the tasks and trials we create for ourselves are oft strenuous and even grueling, purpose is served thereby, greater than ours, underlying all our free will and choice.

No, it was not Benegua, the Wall of Mnemaat, which would soon again enwrap us in others’ dilemmas, nor what I had gleaned from Deilcrit’s memories of the exigencies before us in this most singular land, but Deilcrit himself, lying, if Chayin’s foresight was accurate, wounded yet alive among the carnage we had wrought at the campsite which concerned me. To him, in my sight, we each owed a debt. Yet Sereth’s sharp tone at Chayin’s revelation, his immediate change of subject, had made me quite sure of his feelings. And now he fussed among the disemboweled. He would not hasten to reclaim the blades that glittered by the dying embers at our camp within the Wall of Mnemaat, not with the wounded boy there. This I knew surer than my name, yet I did not understand. His displeasure at my mode of interrogation of the youth came back to me.