Honor's Paradox-ARC (27 page)

“Mother, no.” Kindrie tried to draw her away.

Sodden loops of cord fell over his hands, clammy to the touch.

My son, come to me, come . . .

If he pulled on them, she would unravel. He let go.

Kindrie suspected that she—no, it—was animated by Rawneth. From the first, he had felt her fumbling about his soul, seeking some chink by which to enter. Once the Witch of Wilden and her pet priest Ishtier had shut him out of his soul-image altogether. He shuddered, remembering that terrible time when he could heal no one, not even himself. Ah, the bitter taste of mortality! Moreover, he had been denied his only source of comfort and peace, without which life was a cold, ragged thing and he little better. What his cousin Jame must have thought of him then. No wonder she had treated him with so little respect, for surely he had deserved none.

He was stronger now, he told himself, able to walk his soul even as he regarded the blight on it that days in Randir captivity had brought. He could even unravel the sorry threads of this mock mother, but then he would be truly alone. Let her be.

A cord fumbled around his ankle.

My son . . .

Not strong. Weak, when even such a cold, slimy touch brought comfort. More cords twined up his body.

My son, lean on me. Who else have you?

He remembered riding down the New Road in the dark, nearing Shadow Rock, so glad to see its lights over the shoulder of a hill. Cousin Holly had emerged from the evening mist to meet him. How his heart had leaped, and then fallen at the other’s cold smile.

“Come to me, have you? Fool. Bastards have no family.”

And he had delivered Kindrie to the Randir patrol that followed him.

Something was wrong there. What? Oh, he was stupid, unable to think straight. Had this memory come to him once or over and over, night after night? How often had he felt this clammy touch, dreamed this dark dream.

Lord Danior be damned. Surely Jame, Tori, Kirien or even Ashe would come to look for him.

Fool. Bastards have no friends.

A lifetime of experience told him that. He had been an idiot to believe otherwise.

The cords climbed higher, threading in and out of his skin. Soon they would reach his throat.

Something stuck his shoulder, and the garden blurred.

“Up, you slugabeds, or break your teeth on the charred scrapings of the pot!”

Kindrie groaned and opened his eyes. He lay on a narrow, lumpy cot in the subterranean Priests’ College at Wilden. Before him on the luminous moss that covered the wall were twenty-five thin scratches. He added a twenty-sixth. It seemed to him that he had been a prisoner much longer than that, since childhood even, friends and family only a desperate dream.

Beyond detaining him, however, the Randir seemed to have no other immediate use for him than to throw him back into the routine of the Priests’ College. He had been theirs once; now he was again. Of course, if they had known that he was a purebred, legitimate Knorth, he would have had value as a pawn or a hostage. As it was, he accepted their seeming indifference gladly. Far better that than M’lady Rawneth’s special attention.

He drew his hairy brown robe over thin shoulders. There had been muscle there once—well, a little. Here, however, there was no exercise but the Great Dance and no sustaining food except for that allotted to the high priests, and he was only an acolyte.

Outside his door, he joined the brown-and-gray-clad mob as it shuffled down the spiral corridor past dormitories and classrooms. The subterranean college was built in a spindle shape, narrow at the top and bottom, wide in the middle. Above, the novices and acolytes lived in squalor; below, in unguessed at luxury, the priests, minor and high. In between was the communal dining hall.

Other acolytes shoved and pinched him.

“Thinks he’s too good for us.” “Yah, runagate!” “Are you happy to be home?”

Breakfast was thin gruel, watery milk, and stale bread already spotted with blue mold. All around him, pinched faces bent to their meal, many under the ragged mops of white hair that betrayed those of the despised Old Blood.

One novice, younger and plumper than the others, pushed back his bowl.

“This is awful,” he whined. “I want my mother!”

A Coman, Kindrie thought, about six years old. From the traces of brown dye in his hair, he had been hidden away at home until his Shanir nature had betrayed itself.

“Mommy’s boy, mommy’s boy!” the others chanted at him. Most, like Kindrie, had been delivered to the college as babies. It had been mother and father to them, a lean breast and a hard hand.

The newcomer buried his face in his arms and burst out sobbing.

“Up, you motley rats, up!” cried the stewards, passing among them, thwacking with rods. “To class with you all!”

Kindrie touched the boy’s shoulder in passing and found himself for an instant in the other’s soul-image: a small, bright chamber with childish drawings on the wall and a woman’s voice speaking in the next room.

“Mother!”

The boy leaped up, but his face crumpled when he saw the dank stone that surrounded him. Throwing off Kindrie’s hand, he blundered after the others.

Had it been kind to remind him? Kindrie wondered, following. Already shadows were gathering in that childhood nursery and the beloved voice was fading. It took the strength of innocence to cling to such an image, and there was little of that in this dark place. Was he himself still innocent? In an odd way, yes. Under the circumstances of his childhood, he had never really grown up. Here and now, that was the only strength that he had.

He filed into his first class, where those of pronounced Shanir power met in a claustrophobic room lit only by garish lichen murals of unpleasant designs.

“Who is our lord?” demanded their instructor, a minor priest disparagingly behind his back called a priestling.

“No one!” chorused back the assembled acolytes from the circle that they made around him.

“Who is our patron?”

“Lady Rawneth.”

“Whom do we serve?”

“The high priests.”

“Who is our family?”

“Each other.”

“On whom do we spit?”

“On our cruel god”—each except Kindrie turned to mime spitting over his shoulder—“who has forsaken us.”

The catechism over, the instructor turned to his class. “Remind me. What can each of you do?”

“I can make dogs howl, master.”

“I can start fires with a touch,” said a boy with a hideously scarred face.

“I can shake the earth,” said another who himself couldn’t stop trembling.

“I can madden birds.”

“I can make snakes dance.”

“I can carve stone images that move—all right,” the acolyte added, to the jeers of the others, “very slowly.”

“And you?” the instructor said to Kindrie.

“I heal.”

“No. You can manipulate soul-images and walk the soulscape, as our Lady Rawneth does. Are you greater or lesser than she?”

“That isn’t for me to say.”

“Then I will. You are lesser because you can only heal, not destroy or create. Now, show us your power. Hinde, stand forth.”

The twitching cadet nervously crossed the circle to face the Knorth.

“Well? Touch him.”

Reluctantly, Kindrie did.

In his soulscape and in the room itself, not the acolyte but his entire surroundings began to quake, to the startled protests of the other students. Dust rattled down from the ceiling. Stones groaned. Standing still in the midst of growing chaos, Kindrie focused. In his soul-image, someone huge was shaking the boy, now a mere infant.

“Oh, you little Shanir bastard . . .”

Kindrie gripped those enormous, tormenting hands.

“You’re killing him,” he said. “One more seizure and he will die. You are nothing but a memory, to torment him so. Go away.”

Then they were back in the classroom, the boy quiet and bewildered in his grasp, the stones settling around them. Angry shouts came from neighboring rooms.

“What did you do?” demanded the instructor.

“I sent away a baleful influence.”

“You destroyed it!”

“No. Only he can do that. See. It has him in its grip again.”

The boy broke Kindrie’s hold and backed off, shaking, sneering. His thoughts echoed in the Knorth’s mind:

“I deserve it, I deserve it, I deserve it . . .”

“Try me,” said the fire-boy, suddenly before him, gripping Kindrie’s sleeves.

Kindrie felt heat. The dank wool smoked and stank. His hands in turn gripped the other’s wrists. He was falling toward fire. No. The one falling was a child on a hearth, ignored by his parents as they argued about his fate. That had been decided long ago but still he fell, only to be thrust away by Kindrie’s will.

The acolyte looked at his hands, aghast. His ruined face crumpled on the side not fixed with scar tissue. “I can’t,” he said, almost in tears. “What have you done to me, you bastard?”

Nothing that would last, thought Kindrie sadly as the other, blundering, withdrew. Not without his consent. That was one of the bitter lessons he had learned over the past three weeks: those here below in the Priests’ College had been made to embrace their wretchedness. Earth shaker and fire-touch both might have turned their talents to more constructive ends, but not under the college’s direction.

For the rest of the lesson, the instructor ignored him while the burnt boy wept scalding tears and the trembling boy complacently jittered in place, occasionally gulping back foam.

The next class was wind-blowing Senetha as practiced for the Great Dance. Ah, the freedom to move, almost to fly, but here one also felt a touch of the power that the dance was meant to channel. It streamed in at the top of the college from the Kencyrath’s wide-flung temples and spiraled down through it, bound for the catch pool below, the cloaca of divinity. From whence did it come? Different currents had different scents—the musk of Tai-tastigon, the jungle sweat of Tai-than, the spice of Kothifir, the dust and ashes of Karkinaroth—and there were other flavors there too, including one very strong like simmering brimstone. Kindrie was gingerly trying to backtrack this last when the class ended.

Next(without any intervening lunch) was elementary runes, taught by a former randon whose eyes kept straying to Kindrie.

“Not like that. Here. Look.” He bent over Kindrie’s wax tablet and drew on it. Kindrie noticed that the back of the priest’s neck was scarred, but not heavily enough to disguise the swooping lines of the rathorn sigil. On Kindrie’s pad he had written, “Wake up! She has her nails in you.”

She . . . who?

The cords, climbing higher and higher, obscenely burrowing in and out of flesh . . .

For a moment he knew what was happening to him, and then it was gone. The priest had scraped clean the slate.

Last came potions and powders.

“Today we will compound a dust to stop an enemy’s breath,” announced the instructor, “something so simple that even our esteemed Knorth Bastard should be able to master it.”

The other students tittered and shot him sidelong glances, but Kindrie had his doubts. Nothing that he tried in this class ever came out as planned, perhaps because most of it was meant to harm.

Throttle-weed, ash-berry, powdered bilge-beetle . . .

The instructor was right: what could be simpler—assuming that he really did want someone to choke.

The priestling gingerly sniffed at Kindrie’s concoction, the antidote clutched ready in one fist. His breath caught and his eyes bulged.

Trinity,
thought Kindrie, dismayed,
did I really do it right?

Then the man drew a whooping gasp and began convulsively to sneeze. His explosive breath scattered the powder throughout the room. Some bent double helplessly as if about to blow their brains out. Others keeled over chairs and table, sending their own ingredients flying to add to the confusion. Kindrie stood back in alarm, holding his breath.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to face a senior priest holding a cloth to his face. “Of course, it would be you,” he said in a tone of muffled exasperation. “Come along. Someone wants to see you.”

Kindrie went with him, but not before surreptitiously sweeping what little was left of his experiment into a pocket.

His guide led him up the spiral ramp to the foot of a stair, then up into the stone building, hardly more than a shed, that masked the college’s entrance. Outside was Wilden’s high, windy terrace looking down over the fortress’ many barred family compounds full of steep, narrow buildings like so many pinched, inward-turning faces. The shadow of the Witch’s Tower fell across the flagstones, turning puddles to ice where it touched.

Kindrie hesitated on the tower’s threshold, loath to enter, and looked out over the clean world denied to him. Beyond the sweep of buildings, down on the river flats, he saw a large tent flying a black flag with white tracery on it, too distant to make out.

“Who is that?” he asked his escort.

The priest laughed. “The Highlord, come to settle our little border dispute, or so he thinks.”

Torisen, so close . . .

Clean air seemed to blow through him for the first time in weeks, but the priest’s hand closed on his arm as he took an involuntary step toward the terrace’s edge.

“Do you think that we don’t know?” the man breathed in his ear. “You could call him ‘cousin,’ but wait: bastards have no kin, do they, even so high-blooded a one as you. Aren’t you glad that we took you in? This way.”

He pushed Kindrie into the Witch’s Tower.

“Now climb.”

The shadows struck him cold as he mounted the twisting stair and his breath smoked. Kindrie remembered the first time, as a child, that he had come this way, not knowing what awaited him.

“Let me see you, infant.”
Oh, that chill, caressing voice.
“Come close. Closer. Close enough. They say that no one can do you lasting harm. How . . . intriguing. Shall we see?”

Another more recent memory:
“What a pretty chart. Here are all the Highlord’s dependents lined up so neatly. Does he really need such an aid to memory? Dear me. The written word is so easily destroyed, though, isn’t it?”