Shadow Over Kiriath (27 page)

“There will be no purge,” Abramm said firmly. “No persecution, no seizures, no legal sanctions nor fines. Each man answers to Eidon for his choice of faith, and I have no intention of interfering with that.”

“But the people . . . do not know you well enough to rest in that, sir. Especially when you continue to hold their spiritual leader unheard from and unseen . . . and even if your intent is otherwise, you know there will still be persecution. There are Terstans who will take it upon themselves to drive out the heretics or avenge themselves for past wrongs.”

“And the persecutors will be punished. Which has already happened, I note.”

“Yes, sir. That’s true. You have been . . . quite fair.” Belmir’s eyes dropped to the mark on Abramm’s chest again, held there a moment, then dropped further to his own hands now folded in his lap. He sat there for some time, and when he lifted his head again, he looked deeply grieved.

“I don’t understand,” he murmured. “You were the most worthy novice I ever discipled. After you disappeared, I prayed for years for your deliverance, rejoiced when you returned last fall to think my prayers had been answered. Only to find you had . . .” He glanced again at Abramm’s shieldmark, then returned his gaze to Abramm’s, his brow furrowed with bewilderment. “What happened to you, son? How could you have been so strong and been turned so thoroughly?”

For a moment Abramm hardly knew what to say. In the first place because of his surprise at the sudden radical turn the conversation had taken. In the second because it was the first time any of his Mataian brethren had asked him why he had changed. And in the third, how could he possibly express it all in a way Belmir would understand, and even more important, accept? If he told him the first and strongest reason: that a former High Father had actually been possessed by a rhu’ema, one of the very creatures the Flames were supposed to ward, the man’s ears would close immediately and the conversation degenerate into cries of “Blasphemy!” and “How dare you!”

Better to emphasize the positive—the reality that Abramm had found at the end of all the lies and illusions.

He sighed and rested his elbows on the chair arms, clasping his hands before him. “I suppose, if you boiled it all down, it was because from the first it was Eidon I sought, not the Mataio. I wanted with all my heart to know Eidon. And in the end I came to see that he wasn’t in the Flames.”

The old man frowned at his fingers as they traced the grooving on the chair’s wooden arm. “And you think you’ve seen where he really is?” Belmir couldn’t quite keep the dryness out of his voice.

Abramm smiled. “I know I have. He lives in me. He speaks to me—”

His words sent a jolt through the other man, who looked up wide-eyed. “You claim the divine lives within your own flesh! Sweet Elspeth have mercy, sire! Do you hear what you are saying?”

“Blasphemy to you, I know.” He smiled again, ruefully now to think for all his care he’d provoked the cries of blasphemy anyway. “I thought the same thing at first. But I know differently now. There is no way to come to know Eidon on our own terms. Shadow cannot wipe away Shadow, not with soap and water and not with endless sacrifices of wooden slats.” He looked down at his fingers and was surprised when a Star of Life took form on them, hardening as he caught it between thumb and forefinger. “It was a long and painful road,” he said. “On which everything I’d ever thought was presentable and righteous about me had to be stripped away before I would admit the truth. But in the end I did, and it was the wisest decision I have ever made.”

He rolled the Star between his thumb and forefinger, then leaned forward to set it on the table beside the empty juice glasses.

Belmir stared at it, pale-faced. Then his eyes darted up to Abramm, and the look on his face was one of disapproval and utter disappointment.

“I see I have made you uncomfortable,” Abramm said. “Forgive me. Some find it repellent. Others see but a dull and harmless pebble. I hoped you might see at least a glimpse of what it really is.” He reached forward again and took it back, closing his fingers about it and feeling it dissolve into his palm. “I came back changed because I found him, old friend. These scars are but the testimony of that fact . . . for they remind me that it was his Light that slew the beast that made them.” He paused, and then his brows lifted in sudden understanding. “You saw the morwhol suck up your holy flames that day, didn’t you? Saw them make it stronger when they should have driven it away. Maybe you even felt the pulse of Light that destroyed it. That’s why you’ve closeted yourself all these months, isn’t it?”

His former discipler’s wrinkled face had become cool and hard. “You see things as you wish it, son, not as they are. It was the
Flames
that delivered me that day. And how the morwhol could have—”

The man’s frown deepened as his eyes focused on something at Abramm’s back, even as the sense and flicker of movement at the corner of Abramm’s own visual field drew him around. To his amazement a cleaning girl had just entered the room and was now busily dusting the sideboard.
What the plague? Haldon knows better than to let cleaning staff wander in while I’m receiving guests!
He frowned at her and said sharply, “Miss, you may leave us now.”

The girl gave a start, half turned in his direction and bobbed a curtsey. With her face turned toward the carpet, she mumbled, “Aye, sir,” and fled into the adjoining study. Leaving him stunned and breathless with recognition.
What is
she
doing here? And dressed as a servant again! Does she have no sense at all?

But this was not the time to unravel that mystery. He turned back to Belmir, who unfortunately used the interruption to return his focus to the matter of the High Father’s imprisonment.

“Bonafil is the High Father, sir,” he said as if the other conversation had never occurred. “So long as you continue to detain him, the people will grow increasingly fearful. If you release him, however, or even allow him visitors who might testify of his well-being, it would go a long way toward allaying the people’s concerns.”

Abramm had to bite his tongue, tempering his disappointment with the observation that the other topic had likely run its course anyway and was just as well left as is. Still, it was hard to let it go.

“If you just allow him to be seen at his window, it would help,” Belmir went on. “I think most people, in their hearts, will acknowledge he was wrong to confront you as he did. . . . But after a reasonable time of punishment . . .”

“It was always my intent to release him eventually. When the time is right. Whether that be sooner or later, I cannot say yet. Though I am far from convinced that having him returned to his place of authority would have the kind of calming effect you suggest. Nevertheless, I will take your counsel under advisement.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Abramm stood. “If that is all, then?”

“Yes, sir, I believe it is.”

CHAPTER

15

As soon as Belmir left, Abramm turned his attention to Lady Madeleine. He expected that, having been discovered, she’d have taken her cue to escape down the back stair, but when he stepped into the study to make sure, she was waiting for him.

“My lady, have you lost your mind?” he asked as he shut the door behind him. “What are you doing here—and pretending to be a servant no less?!”

“I didn’t want anyone to see me come in. I’ve cloaked myself. No one recognized me—”

“
I
recognized you.”

“But only because you were angry that I interrupted your discussion with Master Belmir. And you know me well.” She turned back to the small wooden table she had been in the process of pulling out of its niche, the marble figure of a water nymph playing with dolphins set aside on the floor. “Did you conjure a Star for him?”

He refused to let her sidetrack him. “The others know you well, too.”

“Yes, but they don’t look at me like you do.”

“Like I do?” Alarm sharpened his voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean you actually look at me. The others don’t.”

He felt his brows rise. “You expect me to believe that I’m the only one who actually looks at you?”

She rolled her eyes. “No. But you’re the king. You see me. The others— they just see a high lady. If I’m not wearing the right clothes they can’t make the shift because, you see, you’re either a high lady or nothing, and the nothings are never allowed to look closely enough at the high ladies to actually
see
them, nor are the high ones allowed to look—”

“Yes, yes, I’m aware of how that works,” he interrupted, relieved to know it wasn’t more of Trap’s
“I’ve seen the way you look at her”
nonsense. “That still doesn’t explain—”

“I
had
to do it.” She seemed barely able to contain her excitement. Her hair floated in wisps around a face that was flushed and eyes that fairly glowed with energy.

“You
had
to.”

The story tumbled out of her: how she’d found the book tucked between the shelves, brought it back to her apartments to make her map, only to have book and map both stolen while she was at Graymeer’s yesterday.

“Thankfully, I’d had Jemson make a copy of my work in progress, and once I had the newer plans you sent over, I saw where it had to be and came up here to confirm.”

Dressed as a servant, she said, to avoid inciting new gossip. “Though . . . I thought you would be out riding, sir.”

“And when you saw that I wasn’t, it didn’t occur to you to back out, I suppose.”

She frowned. “Well, no. Actually, it didn’t.”

“So someone stole your book and map because he didn’t want you to find something, yet you continued your search for it and told no one.”

“Of course.” She tossed her head. “He might just as well have said ‘You’re on the right track, keep at it.’ I certainly wasn’t going to back down then.”

He shook his head, aghast at her audacity and knowing it would do no good to reprimand her for it. “And so what is it you believe you have found?”

“A hidden library. Just like with the pictures in the gallery.”

He stared at her, uncomprehending.

“You know how I’ve been telling you there are supposed to be records? Journals, histories, memoirs, and such in the royal library that I cannot find? Yet the librarian there tells me they were sent to the University. And when I go to the University they swear they never received them and suggest they were moved to a private library on palace grounds. I seemed to be getting nowhere. Well, that book showed me they were right. There is a private library. Yours. It’s just that there’s more of it than we’ve realized. See?” She gestured toward the niche between bookshelves that she’d uncovered by moving the table. “You can see the spell quite clearly if you put your mind to it,” she said, stepping toward it.

He turned as she did and watched her disappear into the wall with openmouthed astonishment. Moments later he followed her, stepping through the cold-lard sensation of illusion into a narrow chamber lined with books and lit by the weak daylight filtering through the window embrasure at the room’s end. As in the main study, the stacks soared past his head, accessed by a narrow ladder whose top end ran along a rail fastened to the upper shelf. Years of dust covered the floor, the drapes, the books, the single table and chair at the room’s midst, the benches of the window embrasure, and even the windows themselves. Its scent mingled with that of mildew and aged books, tickling his nose.

He gazed around avidly, his mind seizing at once on an oddity he’d long noticed without consciously remarking on it: how the outer study’s narrow L-shape embraced a mysterious rectangular space that had no entrances—not even in the adjoining bedchamber. It had been there all along, and no one ever noticed.

Maddie stood beside him as one stunned, even though she’d been the one to theorize the room’s existence in the first place. “It really is here!” she breathed.

“I’m amazed it could be hidden all this time and no one realized it.” Abramm stepped farther into the room. “That window’s not even boarded up.”

“Of course not. Someone would have noticed that.” She turned her attention to the dusty shelves. “But look at all the books!” She started for the wall in front of them, then stopped, turned back, and flicked her fingers. Abramm heard the faint chiming sounds of a cloaking spell. Then she bloomed a kelistar to life and began to brush the dust off the ranks of book spines, tilting her head to read their titles.

No sooner had she begun than she let out a squeak and pulled a volume from the shelf. “It’s
The Histories of the Hollyhock
! So Master Dewes was right all along. It was here.”

If she’d barely contained her jubilation before, now she gave up trying, hopping up and down, turning to squeeze his arm with both hands in her excitement, then turning back to the book. “I believe this will see a lot of your questions answered!” She blew the dust from its cover and opened it, paging gingerly through the age-yellowed leaves. “Look at all this—firsthand accounts!”

As he started toward the table for a look, the sole of his shoe crunched something on the floor, drawing his attention downward to a pile of curling shreds of parchment. Squatting, he made a kelistar and saw at once that it wasn’t parchment but the desiccated remains of the bags in which staffid had been planted.

“So this is where all the staffid were coming from,” he muttered. Haldon and the others would be glad to know the infestation wasn’t due to any failures of housekeeping.

She squatted across from him to give his find a closer look. After a moment she looked up at him gravely. “That means someone else knows about this place.”

“Likely whoever took your book.”

“And it’s someone who has access to your quarters. Plagues, Abramm! If he could plant
these
. . .”

“It could have been one of my servants under Command.”

“But they all wear shields now.”

“Not all of them. And just wearing a shield is no guarantee of immunity anyway.” A fact he knew from hard experience. “Just as there are those without one who can resist.”