Corambis (52 page)

The Usaran rituals preparing a victim for sacrifice were very orderly. I was stripped of my clothing, bathed. A lock of my hair was cut off and burned. The athen who had traveled with Dothaw chanted over me, and I knew enough Usaran to follow most of what he said. He spoke not to the usar, nor to the Lady— in whom the Usara believed, although they did not generally offer her worship— but to a god whom the athen called simply Darkness, the god of the
angverlaint
. It seemed horribly appropriate, and I bent my head and let him trickle water over me, let him prick my finger for blood.

I should, I thought, have died here all those weeks ago. I had had no right to escape. My life should have ended under Summerdown, and I owed it to the Usara, to the people of Caloxa, as much as I owed it to Gerrard and Benallery and the others, to let that error be corrected now.

Someone helped me to my feet again. “We walk the labyrinth now, Cougar- cephar,” said the athen. His accent was much thicker than Dothaw’s, the running- water lilt of the in- dwellers, the Usara who lived deep in the mountains, who might not bother to seek out the sun from one indiction to the next. “Soon the struggle will end for you.”

He understood, I thought. He understood what a struggle it was simply to continue to stand upright from moment to moment. He understood how painful and pointless and lonely it was, and he understood how much I wanted to lay down my burdens, how much I wanted to rest.

His hands, cool with water, took mine, and I followed his urging, first one step, then another, and then there was a terrible commotion, metal and shouting and the stink of wooden torches instead of the Usara’s sweet- burning lamps.

“Fear not, my lord!” cried Geoffrey Trant.

Was a folk song Benallery had been fond of, one of those things with interminable verses and a jangling rhyme, about a man who murders his wife and then is driven mad by her cat, which— even after he kills it again and again, in increasingly inventive ways— persists in watching him so that he encounters its balefully staring eyes at every turn.

I understood how that man had felt.
Damn you, Geoffrey Trant, why couldn’t you just let me die?

I kept my promise. Mildmay didn’t expect me to; I caught him several times watching me with an expression on his face that I could unfortunately read all too easily. I had seen it in the Mirador so often that I had become aware of its meaning without even noticing. It was the look Mildmay had when he expected me to yell at him. Or deliberately embarrass him. Or send him away. When he expected me to hurt him, and it seemed terrible, walking along a Caloxan dirt road with my shoes rubbing blisters on my heels and along my left instep, that there was a par tic u lar and recognizable expression on Mildmay’s largely expressionless face that meant that and nothing else. And it seemed even more terrible that I
knew
that, that I’d known it for years and never especially cared.

I dropped back to walk beside him. He tensed visibly, and I thought, Why do you let me do this to you? Why have you let me do this to you from the moment we met?

What I said was “I’m sorry.”

It was either gratifying or appalling that that made his jaw drop. After a moment, he collected himself enough to ask, “Sorry for what?”
“For . . .” I made a double- handed gesture, frustrated. There were no good words for this. “For making you expect me to hurt you.”
He frowned at me.
“Not physically,” I said, before he could ask me what I thought I was talking about. “But . . . you shouldn’t
expect
me to be cruel to you.”
His eyebrows shot up before he recovered into his stone face.
“You do expect me to be cruel to you.”
He bit his lip, making his face briefly hideous, and then opted to tell me the truth. “It’s— it’s what you do.”
“Oh,” I said. An inadequate response, but it was all I could muster. I felt as if he’d hit me. No, I would have
preferred
it if he’d hit me. That was simple. That, I could deal with.
“You knew that, right?” he said. “I mean, you do it on purpose.”
“I did,” I said, the words heavy and crumbling like ashes in my mouth.
“You didn’t think I knew?” he said incredulously.
“No, not . . . I . . . Of course you knew.”
“You didn’t think I’d ever have the guts to call you on it,” he said. He sounded almost satisfied.
“Why do you put up with me?” The question burst out; I barely remembered to keep my voice down.
He gave me a wary sideways look, very foxlike.
“Please,” I said. “Just . . . you should have left me flat the second you had a chance, and I don’t understand.”
“Never had a hope of that,” he said. “Not from the start.” And he bumped me gently with his shoulder.
It would be useless to push him. I walked beside him the rest of the afternoon and on into the dense violet twilight. We didn’t say anything at first, but then he gave me another gentle shoulder bump and began telling a story, one I’d never heard before, about a hero named Jenico Sun- Eyes. I listened gratefully; after about half an hour, I realized Corbie had drifted closer to listen.
When it was so dark that we were likely to walk into a ditch if we kept going, I said, “Just a moment, Mildmay. Corbie!”
“Yeah?”
“You wanted to come along in case I needed a magic- user. Well, I need one. Witchlights, if you don’t mind.”
Her purple witchlight sprang up, and by its light, she made a face at me.
“We’ll have to walk on top of each other for that to do us any good,” I said. “You can do better.”
“How?” she said.
“You’re still thinking about the candle, aren’t you?”
“Well, yeah,” she said.
“You need to change your meta phor.”
“But a candle ain’t a meta phor.”
“
That
,” I said, pointing at her witchlight, “isn’t a candle.”
Corbie stared at me blankly for a moment, and then quite visibly understood what I meant. “Oh! So what meta phor should I be using?”
“Well, it depends on your personal tastes,” I said. “I like to think of my witchlights as very small stars, but other wizards imagine them as lanterns or mirrors reflecting sunlight or any number of other things.”
“Stars,” Corbie said, her face softening, and from one witchlight, there were suddenly ten, and all of them twinkling brightly as stars do.
“Good girl,” I said.
“It’s all about the meta phors,” she said and winked at me, and we started walking again.
Shortly after that, it began to rain.

It had been foolish of Dothaw to underestimate Vyell’s initiative, but many men looked at his size and the beauty of his face and assumed that there could be nothing but witless amiability behind such a façade, an assumption which Vyell was not above fostering. Dothaw had judged Leadbitter correctly— Leadbitter did what he was told— but he should not have trusted Vyell. For Vyell, when he went to Barthas Cross to send Trant’s letter to me via its complicated clandestine route, used that opportunity to catch up with the Primrose Men’s allies in Barthas Cross and hence to get messages to all of them who had not died or been imprisoned in the end of the Insurgence. And they had all converged on Summerdown, for while I— equally foolishly, I supposed— was assuming that because Dothaw was honorable, he would not lie, Vyell was assuming the worst. Twenty- five Caloxans against ten Usara: no one even died in the fighting, and when Trant suggested executing the prisoners, I said sharply, “No.”

“My lord?” he said, sounding both bewildered and hurt.

“
No.
There will be no more death, Trant. Not by my hand nor by my order.”
“We can’t just let them go, my lord. You know how the Usara are.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I know. But we will not kill them. Let me sleep on the problem, and tomorrow I will have an answer.”
“Very well, my lord,” he said, and although he was dissatisfied, I knew he would obey me. And by morning, I hoped, the problem would be solved. It was a matter of waiting until the camp was asleep. There would be guards— Trant was far too good a soldier to forgo basic precautions— but one would be facing outward into the dark and rainy night and the other would be watching the prisoners, whom Trant had grouped at the labyrinth entrance as well. I needed merely to find the wall and then to turn away from the fresh wet air. Some labyrinths sought to mislead those who walked them, to turn their feet into dead ends. But the labyrinth beneath Summerdown had but one path and it led inexorably to the engine.
Even a blind man could find his way there.

Summerdown was like a mirage. It got larger but never seemed to get closer. It was only appropriate that as night deepened, the down became indistinguishable from the sky, as if we could walk and walk and neither reach it nor be out from under it.

Thus, it was a surprise to realize that suddenly we were there, that the looming blackness was Summerdown blotting out the stars.
“Huh,” Mildmay said. “There’s a light.”
“Should we talk to them?” Corbie sounded as if she’d rather stay out here in the dark.
“Do we know how to get into the labyrinth?” Mildmay said.
“No.” It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be any question— but then, I hadn’t expected to be arriving in the middle of the night.
“Then we should talk to them.” I couldn’t tell if the edge in his voice was for Corbie or for me or for something else entirely. “ ’Sides, odds are, they’re sitting right on top of it.”
We followed him like obedient sheep into the radius of lantern light, where two harried men were arguing, and Julian Carey was watching them, white- faced with anxiety. It was not exactly comforting to have my deductions and extrapolations and outright guesses proved correct.
“Wilt not listen to sense?” said one of the men, a great, bulky, beautifulfaced ox nearly as tall as I was.
“I would, an there were sense to be heard,” the other retorted. He was older, gray- haired. “But is sheer barking folly to think he’d go in—”
The ox saw us first and rapped out, “Who goes there?” like a sentry in a play. The other man turned: a weather- beaten face and sharp pale eyes. Julian looked around and his eyes got huge. But he didn’t say anything.
My cue. “My name is Felix Harrowgate,” I said and offered them both a smile. “And if you’ll forgive the impertinence, whom have you lost?”
They goggled at me, the pair of them, like indignant frogs. Mildmay said, quite audibly, “Oh for fuck’s sake,” and stepped in front of me. “Don’t mind him. He thinks he’s clever. We’re looking for the way into the labyrinth, and I’m guessing that’s it?” He pointed over the ox’s shoulder at an arch of darkness cut into the side of the down.
“Yes,” the ox said.
The older man looked from me to Mildmay to Corbie, his face becoming steadily more perplexed. “What’s your business with the labyrinth?”
“And in the cereus watch,” the ox said.
“Pilgrimage,” Mildmay said, daring them to call him a liar.
The ox’s face darkened, as if he might take that dare, but another, even younger man emerged from the general darkness and said, “There’s no sign of Lord Rothmarlin toward the trees, and Fowler says—”
“Lord Rothmarlin?” I said. “Is that who you’ve lost?”
“Leadbitter,” the ox said, “if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it ten thousand times.
Watch your fucking trap.
”
“Shit,” Mildmay said. “I got a bad feeling about where it is the guy thinks Lord Rothmarlin didn’t go.”
It took me a moment to untangle that, but when I did, I felt sickly convinced that he was right. “So you’ve lost Kay,” I said.
“Kay?”
said the older man.
“We’re friends of his. And of Julian’s.” I gave Julian a smile, and he came very thankfully around the two Caloxans to join Corbie behind me. “His fiancée is very concerned about his disappearance.”
“Would be even more concerned if she knew what he was doing, the harebrained son of a—”
“Vyell! Take your own damned advice!”
The ox looked blank for a moment, then stricken.
“I must admit,” I said, “I’m a little disappointed that you seem to have lost him.”
“We know where he is,” the ox— Vyell—said grimly. “Geoff just won’t admit it.”
“And am telling you—”
Vyell cut him off. “Could not have gotten past Bazley and Polledge, who were not asleep and
aren’t blind
.”
And they were off again, but Mildmay tugged on my arm and said, “We got to go after him, don’t we?” He had no more doubt than I did where Kay had gone.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid we do.”
“C’mon then,” he said and set out toward the entrance, not hurrying but not waiting for questions or arguments, either. I followed him, and Corbie and Julian followed me. The Caloxans stopped arguing, but they didn’t try to call us back.
The entrance to the labyrinth was elaborately carved with interlocking quartered circles, a natural opening turned definitively into a doorway. The threshold was marked by a wooden bar on which the same elaborate carvings were still faintly visible, worn almost smooth by centuries of use and weather.
Corbie had doused her witchlight, but she called it back now. The floor was level and very smooth; Mildmay was walking more easily than he had all day. I kept expecting the tunnel to branch, but it didn’t, merely coiling back on itself as sinuously as a snake.
“It ain’t a maze,” Mildmay said after a while, “but it sure does feel like one.”
“Are all Corambin labyrinths like this?” I asked Corbie.
“How should I know?”
“Well, at least we don’t have to worry about not finding him,” Mildmay said.
That hadn’t even occurred to me; although I knew that if Kay had been lost, Mildmay would have found him, I still shivered a little, just imagining being blind and lost in a maze. And then it occurred to me that that was not so very different from Kay’s day- to- day existence. That was an even less comfortable thought.
I asked Julian what had happened, how he and Kay had come to Summerdown, and he told us the story as we wound and twisted, until we came around one more corner and abruptly found ourselves in the heart of the labyrinth.
It was not as large a room as I had thought it would be. Almost claustrophobic, with the great brooding mass of the engine reflecting dull gleams of Corbie’s witchlight off its angles and in the glass globes that clustered at its center— glass globes and arching metal struts and gearwheels, small and large, that were a dull yellow white and did not reflect the light at all.
Bone.
“It’s a Titan Clock,” I said, the words escaping involuntarily. They echoed vilely. And a clot of shadows on the far side of the room twitched and shifted and revealed itself to be Kay.
He looked as bad as he had when I first met him, ashy sallow, lines of strain and despair etched deep into his face. “Who’s there?” he demanded. Corbie’s witchlights brightened, and I saw that the darkness on his hands was not a trick of the shadows, but blood.
“It’s me,” I said. “Felix. You’re hurt.” I picked my way carefully around the outthrust limbs of the engine.
“Felix?”
“Like a plug centime,” I said, forcing my voice to cheerfulness. “Always turn up again when you least want me.”
“Or a yellow cat,” he muttered; I decided against asking him to explain.
He was trapped in a thicket of metal thorns, his clothes snagged in several places. His hands— palms and backs— were bleeding from several long narrow gashes, and as I knelt carefully beside him, I saw that his forearms were bleeding as well. He had been fortunate, though; none of those knife- edged spines had found his face. Or his throat.
“Hold still,” I said. “I’ll have you free in a moment.”
“I have to find the center,” he said. “There’s a plate, shining silver. Will you help me? Will not take long for a sighted man.”
“And what’s your plan after that?” I said, keeping my voice light. “Or are you going to leave me to guess? I must warn you, my guesses are going to be shockingly accurate.”
He flinched. “Is the right thing to do,” he said, his hand reaching forward and then pulling back again, as if he thought I would not let him touch me. “I should have—”
“No, you should not,” I said, knowing how that sentence was going to end:
died with Gerrard.
“Kay, do you know what this thing does?” “Gerrard said it would save Caloxa.”
“How?”
He frowned. “I know not. Gerrard . . . Gerrard said to trust him. He knew it would work.”
My opinion of Prince Gerrard Hume had not been high to begin with. “Yes, well, I’ve been to talk to the magician you hired, and I’m not convinced ‘save’ is the right word.”
“What do you mean?” The frown was deepening.
“This engine feeds on death. It is unlikely in the extreme that it gives anything but death in return.”
“Am a soldier. I expected nothing else.”
That rattled me more than a little, but I pressed on: “Whose death?”
“What?”
“I understand that you’re ready to sacrifice yourself— and we can talk later about whether that’s noble or just
stupid
— but whose deaths are you buying? Who has to die to save Caloxa— and how many?”
“I—”
“Because if you think this thing can be aimed so that it only kills Corambin soldiers, I’m afraid I have to disabuse you of that idea. As far as I can tell, it can’t be aimed at all.”
“No, I—”
“And I have the nasty suspicion that, in fact, it’s designed to ‘save’ Caloxa by making it so undesirable that even Corambis wouldn’t want it. Like disfiguring your sister— or killing her— to ‘save’ her honor.”
He shuddered hard. “But Gerrard wouldn’t . . .”
“Wouldn’t he?”
He was silent for a moment, and then his shoulders sagged. “Ah, Lady, have mercy on us all. I know not. We were all half- mad at the end. Perhaps is but fond delusion to think I know what Gerrard would or would not do. He led us all into death from the moment he raised his banner.”
“Then stop following him,” I said sharply. It was the right thing to say, because Kay lifted his head, and this time when he reached out, he let his hand find me, those blunt fingers closing on my forearm.
“That’s right,” I said. “I’ve got you disentangled, but you’ll need to move exactly as I tell you, or you’ll just get tangled up again. How you got in this situation . . .”
“It trapped me,” he said, his voice hard and perfectly certain. “I could hear it moving.”
“Mildmay,” I said, raising my voice, “Kay says the engine is moving on its own. Will you watch, please?”
“Me and Julian are already on it,” Mildmay called back. “And Corbie’s taking notes.”
“Good,” I said, and then to Kay, “We’re going to do this slowly, because if you do get caught again, I don’t want you getting cut. We don’t want to give the engine any more of your vi.”
He nodded, then went still, his hand tightening on my arm again. “But, Felix, the Usara said— the only way to stop it stealing vi from everything it can reach—”
“Kay.”
He subsided, though his grip was going to leave bruises.
I said, “Something has to be done, yes. But your vi— your death— is not the answer.”
“They said—”
Obstinate as a mule. “Are the Usara going to care how many Caloxans it kills?”
“Oh,” he said, and his grip on my arm loosened again.
“We’re going to think of something,” I said. “Which will not involve you dying. Okay?”
His mouth quirked in a smile. “Okay.”