Glasswrights' Master (34 page)

Destructive path. Army's wrath. True blood bath.

Hal was startled from the voices by Puladarati coming up beside him. The leonine man looked out at Moren's walls, his shaking head just visible in the darkness.

“It's come to this, then.”

This? Hal wanted to ask. What? That I attack my own city? That I rely on an army of strangers? That I am doomed to failure, even if I succeed, for I have no wife, no heir?

I have no heir. Burden to bear. Why should I care?

When Hal stayed silent, Puladarati stepped closer. “By this time tomorrow, all will be ended. You will be back on your throne, with the Briantans and Liantines fled.”

“You don't truly believe that, do you?” Hal heard the words come out of his throat, but they might have been spoken by another man.

“I believe because I must, Sire,” Puladarati said. “I have served the house of ben-Jair all my life, and I'm not going to stop now.”

Hal thought of a dozen replies, each more saturated with doom and death. He settled for a question. “We can't win this, can we?”

“We have Davin's engines. We have the finest men the Sarmonian king could gather.”

“We can't win,” Hal repeated.

“The players will cause a diversion in the port. They'll keep the occupier busy on two fronts.”

“We can't.”

Puladarati sighed gustily, running a three-fingered hand through his hair. “It's not likely, Sire. Not unless there's an uprising within the city. Not unless something disrupts the occupiers from within.”

Hal nodded, content at least to hear the end of the lies. He turned back to the city walls to watch the final preparations, dim as they were under the moonless sky. To watch, and to wait, and to wonder if death would ever be quiet inside his clamorous skull.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 14

 

A disinterested part of Rani's mind knew that she had never been this frightened in her life. No, she told herself. Her mind was not disinterested. She was very much interested in the outcome of this confrontation.

Not whether she lived or died. Like one of the players that she had sponsored for the past four years, she had worked through the script of what was likely to happen. She was held captive by the Fellowship. Her hands were bound behind her back. She was clothed in white robes, garments that wrapped around her several times, as if she were a swaddled newborn child. A newborn child, or a corpse ready for the pyre.

No. She could not see any way that she might live. Her future truly was with the Thousand Gods. She had learned that they were in her, they were of her, they
were
her, in a way that she had never dreamed before. The Thousand had a plan for all the world, and she was merely an instrument in that plan. She was merely a tool. And Rani knew all too well the fate of tools.

How many times had she left her own grozing irons on her glasswrights' table, the tips dirtied with lead solder? How many times had she ground an edge of glass with a diamond blade, only to toss the knife aside with casual disregard for its edge? How many times had she left lamp black on the bottom of her pestle, soiling the next color that she settled down to grind?

Tools were not given an easy course in this world.

But tools could create beauty. They could create strength. They could create new entities where none had stood before. Tools changed the world, in ways that were ultimately positive and beautiful and good.

So Rani told herself as she stood on a dais at the center of a great chamber, an underground room that she had never seen before, never dreamed of before. So Rani told herself as she stood in the center of the great Meeting Hall of the Fellowship of Jair.

Dartulamino tugged at her bonds, making sure that the knots had not slipped loose as he led her from her holding cell to this chamber. The man had done his work well, though, not trusting to one of the lesser lights in the Fellowship's sky. Each knot was exquisitely tight; each cut into her flesh in such a way that even the tension of her muscles tightened her bonds.

Rani glared her anger, and the priest laughed. “Aye, Ranita Glasswright. You never knew we had this chamber. You never knew the full strength of the Fellowship you served.”

“The very secrecy of this chamber shows that the Fellowship is corrupt. If you cannot trust your members with knowledge of a
room
, how can you trust them with your mission in the world?”

Dartulamino laughed, and the sound echoed off the high ceiling. As near as Rani could tell, they were deep beneath the cathedral, in a chamber that must have been hollowed out by Hal's most distant ancestors, when they first staked claim to Morenia. The room was a perfect circle. The paving stones in the floor traced out a labyrinth, a secret path that led to the dais where Rani stood with the priest. She could make out the twists of black stones on white, see the intricate mosaic that had cost untold craftsmen their vision, their lives.

For who would have permitted workers to live, once they had seen the secret chamber? Who would have let the iron workers survive, once they had set brackets into the walls for the score of torches on the perimeter? Who would have let the stone carvers return to their ordinary lives after they had decorated the room with the ornate grill that traced the perimeter of the circle?

The Heavenly Gates, Rani realized. The grill was supposed to represent the Heavenly Gates. As she looked around the chamber, she could see that symbols for the Thousand were woven into the stonework, standard iconography made ominous by flickering torches.

There, directly ahead of her, almost mocking with its clarity: a grozing iron. Clain, the glasswrights' god, was recognized. Rani nearly laughed aloud at the familiar sigil, even as a flash of cobalt light momentarily blinded her.

To the right of the grozing iron was a candle. Tren. Rani heard the clang of a master smith hammering out a bar of molten metal.

Beyond the candle was a carved quiver of arrows. Bon, the god of archers, made his presence known with the whinny of a stallion, heard from a distance, as if Rani stood upon a windswept moor.

Even now, she was comforted by her knowledge that she was in the hands of the Thousand Gods. As she looked at the screen, she recognized friends, companions, fellow spirits who had journeyed through all the kingdoms of the world. She remembered how she had called upon the gods when she lived in Amanthia, when she was dragooned into the Little Army. She recalled how she had felt their presence in distant Liantine, in the kingdom that held fast to the old goddess, to the Horned Hind. She thought on how the gods had become real to her in Brianta, how they had come to live within her eyes and ears, her nose and mouth, every inch of her skin.

Her struggle against the Fellowship had brought her to all those places, had led her to lands where she could learn the true source of power within the world.

For that was the lesson that she had mastered, the truth that she had learned more completely than any of her other lessons: the Thousand Gods reigned supreme. The Thousand Gods watched over the lives of men, influenced the paths that individual humans chose to tread.

The Gods had not ordained those paths; they let men choose their own ways. The Thousand could be surprised by the choices that their worshipers made. Individual gods could be saddened, angered, even driven to despair, by humans' decisions not to honor them as they should be honored. Among the Thousand, some were stronger than others, some had more influence over the lives of men.

But one truth dominated among the gods. One truth controlled. Every individual god was stronger than any individual human. Every god could defeat a man or a woman. Every god could dominate a worshiper if he chose to do so.

Accepting her inferiority to the Thousand brought Rani a sense of peace. She might lose to the Fellowship now, but in the end, the gods would be supreme. In the end, the gods would control the world.

 

* * *

 

Hal tugged his arm away from Puladarati. “I can't stay here! What will my men think? What will Hamid think?”

The councilor shook his head, his long white hair flowing about him like a mane. “I don't care what they think. Your mission is to stay alive, Sire. Your goal is to survive today's battle so that you can ride back into Moren victorious.”

“And what good will victory do, if every man I meet thinks me afraid?”

Thinks me afraid. Safe plans all made. Ducking the raid.

Puladarati's three-fingered hand was firm on Hal's arm. “If our maneuvers are to work, you must control two separate forces. From here, you can see both the harbor and the city walls. You will guide your men in every step they take.”

“I should be beside them, not hiding like the women and children!”

“Which force would you go with, Sire?” For the first time, Puladarati's voice broke. “Will you go to the harbor and watch the ships taken there, abandoning your soldiers on the field? Or will you go to the gates and ignore the brave men who walked on water for you?”

Hal shook his head. “It's not like that! I'm not forsaking any of them.”

“Not if you stay here. Not if you wait for the gates to open. Not if you command the battle from this vantage point and join us in Moren when you can.”

Hal's eyes filled with unwanted tears. “This is not how it was meant to be, my lord. This is not what my father would have done. This is not the manner of an honorable son of the house of Jair.”

Puladarati's face softened. He swallowed hard, and then he held his hand before Hal's eyes. “Do you see this, my lord? Do you see the three fingers that remain to me? Do you know how I lost the others?”

Fingers lost. Count the cost. Lost. Cost. Lost.

The rhyme seemed too tired even to try to control his mind, and Hal merely shook his head. Puladarati lowered his voice, offering up his greatest confidence. “I lost them on campaign with your father, may all the Thousand keep him safe beyond the Heavenly Gates. We were in the Eastern March, and we became separated from the main body of our troops. Your father stayed behind, secure, while I scouted out a safe path. I found it, but not before those mongrels had launched their bloody ambush.”

“You must have hated him then! You must have resented his staying safe while you came near death!”

“It was nothing like that,” Puladarati said, and his voice was soft as an old nursemaid's. “He was the rightful king. He was my lord and master. I served him proudly, and the greatest day of my life was the day I led him back to safety. Back to safety, and the rest of our army, and sweet victory in the end.”

Hal stared at the maimed hand, wondering at the simple devotion, the massive loss. He tried to imagine that fidelity, multiplied by the dozens of men who stood ready to fight for him, even now. Swallowing, he forced himself to meet Puladarati's expectant gaze. “Very well, then. I'll stay here and command the forces.”

Puladarati smiled, the sly grin of a feral cat. “Very good, Your Majesty. May all the Thousand keep you.”

Hal let the blessing hover in the air as he watched King Hamid march their soldiers toward the Moren gates.

 

* * *

 

Even as Rani felt the peace of submission to the Gods, she realized that the chamber was beginning to fill with people. Clad in black robes, swathed in dark masks, members of the Fellowship flowed into the room. First there were a dozen, then two score, then more than a hundred.

Rani looked about the room openly, no longer feigning to follow the Fellowship's absurd precepts. There was nothing to keep her from staring at their faces, nothing to keep her from trying to discern individuals beneath their dark robes.

There. That tiny form must be Glair, the Touched woman who had long led Moren's Fellowship. She walked with a characteristic limp, twisting to one side as she made her way to the dais. She stopped before Dartulamino, clearly recognizing the priest, even as he stood sheltered in his robe.

There were others that Rani knew. Somewhere in the room was Borin, the leader of the Merchants' Council, the member of her birth caste who had helped her to flee certain death when she was only a child. Borin had been friends with Mair, had extended the Fellowship's open greeting to Rani at Mair's request.

Could Mair be in this room even now? Had she followed Rani to the city, made her way inside the gates?

Rani had no doubt that Mair knew of secret passages in and around the cathedral, even as she had known the hidden corridor they had used to escape so many weeks before. Mair knew all the Touched ways to navigate Moren; she had gotten the better of nobles and soldiers, of guildsmen and merchants dozens of times over the years. It would be like her to don a black robe, to cover her face and move among her enemies, laughing, plotting, planning painful deaths.

Rani felt an itch between her shoulder blades, a nagging suspicion that a knife stood at the ready. She told herself to ignore the sensation, that she was imagining things, imagining Mair reaping the revenge that she had promised. Despite Rani's firmest instructions to herself, the feeling persisted. She closed her eyes and made herself count to ten, closing out the shimmering images of the gods at the carved screen, shutting off the whispers and the flavors and the scents that were so distracting.

When she opened her eyes, though, the sensation persisted, as if someone were holding a stinging nettle just above her flesh. She swallowed hard and let her neck turn, bracing herself for the sight of Mair's grim revenge.

Of course, the Touched woman was not there. Dartulamino was, though. He was, and in his hand, he held a whisper-sharp dagger, a blade that glinted like golden fire in the torchlight. The message was clear. The Holy Father would not hesitate to shed her blood. Not here. Not now. Not in the midst of the secret fraternity that longed for her death.

Dartulamino nodded once, and the-shape-that-was-Glair climbed onto the dais, struggling to take the single high step. She looked out over the assembly, as if she, too, were measuring who attended, as if she, too, were wondering at the members of the Fellowship that filled the chamber.