Honor's Paradox-ARC (8 page)

“It looks good,” Torisen said, picking up a palm-sized bit of pale rose glass shot with gold filigree and holding it to the fading light, “if nothing like a map.”

“Yet you can read it, lad.”

“Only because you’ve told me what to look for.”

“Ah.” Marc surveyed the abstract swirl of hues, each determined by the native materials that had gone into its making—carbon and sulfur for amber, nickel for rich purple, copper for deep green and brick red. Fragments of glass from the original, shattered window made up much of each piece but somehow failed to dominate its hue. Most of the glass for the Riverland keeps was also mixed with drops of the Highlord’s own blood, making those portions potential scrying portals, or so Marc believed. The Kendar had convinced Torisen to try, but all the glass had given him so far were bad dreams.

Like the one of the pyres. Where had he been staring then? At Tentir? At Shadow Rock?

“I’ve a strong desire to see how the whole looks against the light,” Marc said. “Ebony as a backing gives a poor feeling for color. Then too, starting at the top wasn’t the brightest idea, even if local materials are the easiest to come by.”

“When you’re ready with a section, we’ll get it into place somehow. As a favor, though, can you start next with Kothifir and as much of the Southern Wastes as you can manage?”

He could have ordered it as the Highlord, but Marc had declined to be bound to him even as Lord Knorth. That still rankled, although it did make conversation easier between them.

Waiting for you, lass.

Where had he heard that? Most likely in one of his accursed dreams, not that he believed any of them.

“I’ve unearthed a report from the randon I sent to guard the priests on their way to Tai-tastigon,” he said, changing the topic. “All arrived safely, but they report that the temple is a mess and the city is in turmoil. It apparently never settled down after the last Thieves’ Guild election. Moreover, some say that the dead are coming back, both divine and human, whatever that means.”

“Ah.” Marc looked thoughtful. “Now, that’s a city full to the rafters with power. Some of it comes from our own temple, but there’s more to it than that. Our god and the native forces of Rathillien have become intertwined. After all, we’ve never been on any world this long before or become more involved with it. As Tai-tastigon goes, so I suspect does Rathillien. Eventually.”

Torisen remembered his brief, nightmarish time there. Ancestors preserve them all if Marc was right. He knew that his sister and the Kendar shared a past in that city, but he hadn’t yet brought himself to ask about it.

Sooner or later you have to.

Then too, the thought of Jame thrust into those dire southern realms continued to haunt him. If only he could scry what she was likely to face . . . !

Weakling,
jeered his father’s voice behind the bolted door in his mind.
Afraid to look, afraid to ask, and you call yourself Highlord?

Think of something else.

“Have you had time for that other project I requested?” he asked.

“Oh, aye.” Marc picked up a leather sack which he handed to Torisen. “Here they are: the lordans’ tokens for the presentation ceremony.”

Torisen drew out one, a chunky disc of glass with a house emblem embossed on it—by chance, his own. With this, he would acknowledge for all to see that Jame was indeed his chosen heir.

“Have you had any word of the lass?”

“Only that the college hasn’t yet burned up or fallen down.”

Marc chuckled. “Well, yes, she does have an unfortunate effect on architecture, our young lady.”

“She would spit if she heard you call her that, and the Women’s World would have a collective seizure.”

Among the stack of neglected paperwork through which he was laboring was a request from the Ardeth Matriarch Adiraina that he allow the ladies to return to his halls in the spring. How had they ever come to establish their finishing school at Gothregor anyway? Some former highlord must have agreed in a weak moment. Now, when in residence, they and their guards almost outnumbered his garrison. Over the winter, he had enjoyed prowling that part of his fortress normally out of bounds to male visitors. If there was ever a disturbance there again, he wanted to know where, what, and why.

Still, it would be nice to have the Jaran Matriarch Trishien back. She, at least, he could talk to, even if their discussions sometimes left him feeling that more had been said than he had heard.

Jame’s token was still in his hand.

“I keep thinking of her as the wild-haired child whom our father drove out of the Haunted Lands keep where we were both born. We were inseparable before that . . . most of the time.”

He drew a small, wooden figurine out of his pocket—a cat, perhaps an Arrin-ken judging by the power of its head and shoulders, caught in mid-leap. Like most Kendar work, it had astonishing vitality. However, one of its hind legs had been snapped off.

“Our nurse Winter carved this for us, or rather for one of us, I forget which. We were very young at the time. Of course, we fought over it . . .”

Two young savages wrenching the carving back and forth between them, as if it embodied the love that each of them craved.

Mine, mine!

No, mine!

“. . . and it broke.”

“Yet you kept it.”

“Yes, all this time, tucked away in my gear. I only came across it again the other day.” He looked from the damaged carving to the glass token and back, holding one in each hand as if weighing them against each other, the past versus the future. “And now she is to be confirmed as my lordan. Can we share such power without breaking everything?”

“You’ve grown, lad. So has she.”

“True enough.” He returned the token to Marc and dropped the cat back into his pocket.

Marc drained a scooper of water through heat-chapped lips and shot a sideways look at Torisen. “By the way,” he said, carefully offhanded, “I’ve heard a bit of news from my Ardeth friends. Lord Adric’s grandson Dari wants to be made lordan regent. That would effectively make him Lord Ardeth, wouldn’t it?”

“In all but name, yes.”

“And you can do that?”

“Under certain conditions, if the health of his house demands it. As I confirm lords, so I can unseat them. Damned if I want to, though.”

Everyone knew how much he owed to Adric. If the Ardeth lord hadn’t hidden him in the Southern Host, he would never have survived to claim the Highlord’s seat. The current breach between them made things doubly awkward, but what could Torisen do? The Highlord must not be an Ardeth puppet as the commander of the Southern Host had felt himself to be. Still, he had promised to look after his former mentor’s interests.

“I also hear,” said Marc, emboldened, “that Lord Ardeth is on his way north to attend the High Council meeting.”

“Is he, by Trinity?”

He should have known that, Torisen thought, chagrinned. Ironically, it was because Ardeth had used Torisen’s friends to spy on him in those early days that he had such an aversion to spying on anyone now. As a result, the Knorth possessed the poorest intelligence network in the Kencyrath, and Marc knew it. No wonder the Kendar was trying to impart his information so diplomatically. Torisen glanced at the stained glass map. Somehow, the thought of using it didn’t agitate him the way using human agents did. How valuable it could be, if only it worked properly. Instead, he was reduced to allies casually passing on news.

“I thought Adric was going to wander the Wastes forever,” he said.

“Not now that he believes at least one of Pereden’s bones is in the Riverland.”

Torisen stared at him. “Why in Perimal’s name would he think that?”

Harn had put the boy’s body on the common pyre at the Cataracts, he thought. It should be ashes on the wind. He had felt guilty about Ardeth’s futile search of the Wastes and wondered how to end it. Now, however, he remembered his dream and was chilled. This was an ending unlike any he had ever envisioned.

“Well,” Marc was saying, “the thing is that Lord Ardeth found the site where the central column led by Pereden clashed with the Waster Horde. Where else should he look for his son’s bones? But they weren’t there. At the same time, his Shanir sense told him that at least one still existed. Frustration was like to drive him mad, and his people with him. So he took one of his strongest potions to enhance his powers. They thought it was going to kill him. But after spinning around like a mad douser until everyone with him was falling-down dizzy and fit to die, he ended up pointing north toward the Riverland.”

“And now Adric is coming here to find it? Sweet Trinity.”

The mere suspicion that Pereden had joined the Waster Horde had nearly given his father a fatal heart attack. If Adric did find a bone in the Riverland, now, how in Perimal’s name could Torisen explain it when he didn’t know himself?

Somebody cleared his throat near the southwest circular stair. Torisen lowered his hand from the collar of his coat where he had instinctively reached for one of his throwing knives.

Don’t kill the messenger.

It was, of course, Cousin Holly’s courier, whom he had told to meet him here.

The Kendar approached looking uneasy, handed Torisen a pouch, and backed away.

“Highlord, my lord asks that you treat this as urgent, not to go on your to-do pile.”

Trinity, did everyone know that he was behind in his paperwork? Of course they did.

He flicked a knife out of his collar and sliced open the lumpy packet. Something black fell out. Yce snapped it out of midair and retreated with her prize, growling. Marc went after her under the table, like a large bumblebee in a small bottle. The table rocked. Glass slid.

Torisen shook out the rest of the packet’s contents, consisting of a note and a heat-cracked moon opal signet ring in a tarnished silver setting.

For a moment he stared at the paper. It reeked faintly of burning. Writing on a page . . . This was the message that he had been looking for all along, in the wrong place.

Dear Tori, he read. I took this at the Cataracts, just in case we ever had to prove that Pereden actually was there. I didn’t mean to cause trouble. Now I don’t know what to do with it, so here it is. Sorry. Love, Holly.

Marc emerged from under the table with something in his big hand. He held it out to Torisen—a finger shriveled by the pyre, half its flesh seared away.

“Your family does make a practice of carrying around bones, I’ve noticed. First your sister with your father’s finger and then you with my sister Willow’s remains. So what’s this?”

Torisen slid the ring over the bone and stared at the resulting combination. The former bore the Ardeth crest.

“Now my head really hurts.”

CHAPTER V
The High Council

Winter 90–100

I

Now came the harshest days of winter.

Everyone huddled close to the fires at night under mounds of fur, and still an exposed finger or nose might turn ominously white by morning. Bare bodies threw on clothes in a hopping frenzy. Sheets of ice sealed wash basins. Food arrived at the breakfast table already cold. After the morning rally in the square, cadets hustled back indoors to make their way to classes by the interior hallway. Lessons proceeded as normally as possible if rather fast to generate heat for chilled limbs. Weapons, strategy, history, the Senethar, the dread (and freezing) writing class . . .

Nonetheless, everyone worked hard, all too aware that with spring would come the final tests that would determine not only if they passed Tentir but where their posting would be the coming year.

“Oh, let it be the Southern Wastes!” groaned many a miserable cadet. “No more winter, ever!”

At first, horses plunged about outside in drifts up to their shaggy bellies, muzzles clumped with ice, while cadets floundered out to them dragging sleds full of hay and ice-mantled water.

Soon, however, they had to be moved inside. The subterranean stable filled to overflowing; the extras were quartered in the great hall under the banners of the major houses. The air thickened with their steaming breath and droppings while the horse-master moved among them checking for strangles or any other deadly, communicable complaint. In passing, he patted the dappled flank of the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi and wondered how her companion was doing out in the snow. The last time he had seen Death’s-head, the rathorn had grown a pelt as shaggy as a wolf’s, but still, all that cold, cold ivory . . . !

Jame missed working with the colt and felt his aching cold through the bond between them enough to deepen her own shudders.

However, she was also glad not to go outside Tentir more than necessary.

For one thing, she had proved to be more susceptible to frostbite than most Kendar, not surprisingly given her slighter build. Bits of her froze almost casually, over and over, and each time had to be reawakened to throbbing life.

For another thing, she didn’t want to encounter the Dark Judge, if he really was haunting the college’s environs. The colt’s senses gave fleeting suggestions of this, but in general, rathorn and giant cat kept their distance from each other. Some nights Jame thought she heard that terrible voice pleated with the wind, wailing wordlessly. Such hunger, such desolation! Was he only lashing out in his eternal pain, or did he think that judging her would make him whole again? Certainly, he longed to pass judgment on such a nemesis as she had proven to be, however innocent. What really drove him mad, however, was that he couldn’t strike at the root of evil itself, Gerridon. In an agony of self-revelation, the great cat had told her that no Arrin-ken could enter the halls of the Master’s monstrous house swallowed by Perimal Darkling until the coming of the Tyr-ridan.

Another memory, another voice, this one harsh and halting: Ashe had said that, according to legend, only a Kencyr could kill one of the Three. Jame feared that she was becoming the incarnation of That-Which-Destroys, the Third Face of God. It would be ironic if the Judge were to blast his last chance at revenge by destroying her, and it would indeed be the last: once there had been many potential Knorth nemeses—now there was only her.