The False Martyr (6 page)

Two men grabbed Teth’s
arms from behind. They swept her feet out from under her, and she
crashed, face-first, to the stones.
Smack!
They let her fall, forcing
her, if anything, into the rocks. The air left her, her forehead
bounced, her lip was split. Stars spun around her.
Smack!
With bleary eyes,
she looked to the side and saw a man with an axe round on the man
she’d disturbed.
Smack!
A knee came to rest on her back, strong hands
secured her arms at her sides. She barely noticed as she watched
the man a few feet from her mumble prayers into the stones beneath
him as the executioner lifted his weapon.
Smack!

“
Stop. This is not the
Master’s will.” The words were said at little more than a whisper
and held no urgency. Teth was not even sure it was real, but it had
the desired effect. The thick blade stopped just after it had
started. The man holding it stepped adroitly back from his would-be
victim.

Slowly, the offending
Weavers found their feet and formed a downtrodden clump. “Leave,”
the voice ordered. “You have fallen out of the pattern. You will
not be seen or heard. Go.” The man spoke with not a speck of
emotion, and the subjects of his scorn reacted with the same. They
shuffled past with heads bowed. Teth watched the man closest to
her, the one she had disturbed, the one whose head had been saved
by the tiniest breath. He tried to resonate calm, to show himself
unaffected by what had nearly happened, but Teth could tell that he
was shaking, his breaths were pants, his legs were weak.

“
Lift her,” the voice said
in a monotone. The hands on Teth did as requested, bringing her
from the floor as if lifting a board from a stack.

Shaking her head, she
examined the workroom. The looms moved in the same rhythm – smack,
smack, smack – as if nothing at all had happened, as if one of
their number had not just been nearly executed for the simple
mistake of being distracted. Teth tried to turn, to see the man who
seemed to command this lunacy, but her view was blocked by the bulk
of the bodies that held her. “Where am I? Where is . . . .” one of
the men clamped a hand across her mouth, stifling her words. Teth
bit him until she tasted his blood, but he only grunted and
increased his grip on her arm. He made no attempt to escape her
bite.

“
Release her,” the voice
said. Hands fell away. Teth released the one she held in her teeth
and spit his blood onto the ground only to feel her mouth fill
again from the split in her lip. Fists balled, she spun on the man
who was speaking.

He met her rage with
absolute calm. “The Master says you are to be allowed freedom, that
we are not to harm or hinder you, but you need to know that your
actions here have consequences far beyond anything you have ever
known.”

Teth barely stopped
herself from jumping on the scrawny old man and beating the answers
she wanted from him. She wiped the line of blood from beneath her
nose, spit more of the same onto the spotless stones, and glared.
The man did not seem the slightest bit concerned that she might
beat his hairless face to a pulp. He looked at her with controlled
indifference, but there was annoyance beneath that mask, not fear
or anger, just the annoyance of a patient parent wondering what to
do with an especially wicked child.

“
I cannot stop you,” the
man continued in his emotionless whisper. “But I must maintain the
pattern. I saw a way to save those men, but the next time, the
Order may not be so forgiving. Do you understand?”

Teth was not sure if she
did. Were they really going to kill those men for not catching the
shuttle? It wasn’t even their fault. She had heard stories of
Weavers. She knew they were crazy, but that was too much even for
the wildest tales. Considering, she studied the room, saw the men,
over a hundred, move in perfect harmony – smack, smack, smack. She
remembered the look of horror in the eye of the man she had
disturbed. He had known even before the executioner arrived that
his life was over. His had not been the look of a man who expected
to be beaten or expelled. It had been the look of a man who
expected to die.

“
You people are crazy,”
Teth mumbled. She rubbed her forehead where it had hit the stones
and spit more blood.

“
We are the last remnants
of Valatarian’s true disciples. And we are your only hope,” the man
replied with a frown. “Now, can we leave these men to their work?
If you’ll accompany me, I can answer some of your questions.” The
man gestured toward the door.

With a final look back,
Teth led the way into the blinding light of the sun. She stumbled
and blinked against the scorching white, realizing only then how
much cooler it had seemed in the workshop. Shielding her eyes with
her hand, she looked up and found her guide was already several
paces ahead of her. With a grunt, she stumbled to catch up but
maintained some distance as if she had something to fear from the
little old man.

“
What is your name?” she
asked the man. He slowed his pace as they reached the portion of
the path that ran in a circle around the tower.

“
We do not have names
here,” he replied. “We exist only to provide a clear pattern for
the Master. We have no more need for names than do the strands on
the loom.”

“
So this is a Weaver
commune?”

“
As you already
knew.”

Teth walked slowly
alongside the man with her sleeve pressed to her lip. She watched
the area around her, waiting for someone to spring from the bushes
to carry her away and drain her will. Parents often told their
unruly children that the Weavers would get them, that they would
drag them away to their communes where they would have no choice
but to obey. She, in particular, had lived under that threat. As a
willful child with no parents, she had even believed them, had
cowered in her room in fear that she be taken away to someplace
where her will, her very identity was forfeit. Milne had eventually
convinced her that it was all a story, that no such place existed,
and that it could not contain her if it did. The assurance had
dried Teth’s tears, but it had not stopped the threats.

Now, the nightmare had
become true. She felt her breath catch even at the thought. She
forced her lungs to bring in air and considered what she had
already done. Some of the stories said that the Weavers drugged
their initiates or cast spells on them to steal their wills. Had
she been drugged? The water? The bread? She felt her head spinning,
her breaths increasing, her heart thumping. Were these the first
indications of the poison that would soon leave her like the men in
that room? She gasped, certain now that she could feel the drugs
fogging her mind.

“
All those here
participate of their own volition,” the man said from beside her.
Did he show a smirk as he said it? “The stories you have heard are
lies. Our monks are not drugged. We do not cast spell upon them.
Their freewill remains, but they strive always to suppress it, to
align themselves with the Order and the pattern the Master is
working to maintain. Only through perfect alignment with the Order,
though a perfect structure to our lives, can we provide the Master
with the clear strands he needs to create the pattern that will
preserve the Order from chaos. It is a calling that requires
tremendous sacrifice and extraordinary discipline. We could never
achieve it if all our members were not wholly
dedicated.”

Teth took a slow breath,
realized how silly she was being, how she had allowed imagination
to outpace logic. She opened her mouth to speak, but the man lifted
a hand, and the words seemed to leave her as if the very air had
been snatched from her lungs. He examined her with rheumy grey eyes
without seeming to see her, as if he were trying to look through
her to something inside.

“
And now you come.” He
pondered that. “What you saw today is beyond rare. Not for
generations have we used the axe, but the Master has allowed us no
room for error. It is stretching us to our limit. We are allowed
not the slightest step from the path, not a heartbeat out of
rhythm, not a breath out of sequence.” He considered again,
speaking as if to himself. “But he orders you brought from the
river, gives you free rein.”

Teth opened her mouth
again to speak, but as she drew the breath, a huge wasp appeared
before her. It hung in the air inches from her nose, stinger
extended toward her as if in warning. She watched it hover, frozen
in place for fear of inciting its anger. She had been stung many
times by honey bees, but only once by a wasp such as this. It had
stung her cheek, and for days, her eyes had been swollen to
slits.

“
We do not allow outsiders
here,” the man continued at the same time the wasp lost interest.
Teth recovered just in time to catch what he was saying. “Not in
years and not a woman ever. I do not know that one has set foot on
this path in the two hundred years of its existence. Had the Master
not ordered it directly, we would have left you and your companion
to the river and the Order that controls it. But he knew that you
would be there. He sent us to find you, told us that you are to be
protected, to be given all deference even as we struggle under the
strictest possible requirements.”

He paused to let that sink
in. “Obviously, you are important to the pattern. And so it must
be. But you must know that you can cause great harm here. If you
act as you did today, I cannot stop you, but I will have no choice
but to remove those that you disturb from the pattern, and next
time meditative exile may not be enough. Do you understand? If you
disturb our patterns, the punishments will fall not on you, but on
those you have disturbed. The men around you can be afforded no
mercy, no break from the pattern they must maintain. They must
remain silent, show no emotion, work in perfect unison unless the
Master orders otherwise. If they do not, they are to be removed
from the Tapestry. Better the death of a few than to ruin a pattern
generations in its creation, than to see us all cast to the
Maelstrom.” The man paused, studying Teth again. “I will leave you
to ponder that.”

He turned to go. Teth reached for him – she
had to know about Dasen – but was distracted by a movement at her
feet. A squirrel darted between her and the monk, close enough that
she could have kicked it. A bird called out, with a screech that
sounded like a child’s scream. She searched for the sound, found
nothing. When she turned back, the man was gone.

Chapter 4

The
14
^th
Day of Summer

The door was locked. Ipid
turned to Eia surprised and a bit embarrassed. Where was the butler
that should be manning the door, the maids that should have been
bustling around inside, the gardeners that should have been
patrolling the green expanse around them? He could not remember
ever seeing the house so quiet. Again he tried the door. Still
locked. He flashed a half-smile to Eia and brought his hand up to
knock.

His fist struck the carved
oak three times. The sound echoed. There was no answer, no
shuffling of feet, no shadows moving in the windows. The house was
empty. Ipid remembered the letter he had sent just a few days ago.
He had ordered his secretary to gather everyone and everything and
leave as quickly as possible, to escape what was about to happen in
the city. At the time, he had not considered that the outcome would
be so horrendous and fortuitous. For as terrible as the devastation
of Thoren had been, the lavish estates on this side of the river
had been untouched. But there was no way that Paul could have known
that, and obviously, he had taken Ipid at his word.

“
Well this is something,”
he turned to Eia with a smile, “locked out of my own
house.”

“
Or is it your house?
Maybe all this lordship talk has been a lie. Are you trying to
deceive us regarding your standing,
Lord
Ronigan?”

Ipid stuttered to defend
himself before he saw Eia’s smile. Of course she was joking. He had
worked constantly to keep his true identity hidden. “If only I
were,” he mumbled. The thought had brought back the load of
responsibilities that his position carried with it. He had somehow
forgotten what Arin had piled on his shoulders – the fate of an
entire nation – and now wished more than anything that he were
actually just another man, just another piece of flotsam caught in
this storm.

Eia rubbed his arm. “Then
you would not be in this position to help your people. Surely, you
have known responsibility before, have felt the pressure of men
dependent upon you. The Belab would not have sent me if he did not
think you could succeed.”

Ipid thought about the
people who had been placed in his care. His first thought was for
all those dead on the field across the river, of those buried under
the remnants of the city he called home. Failure. He thought about
his workers, saw them now as Dasen had. How was it that their
haunted eyes had never registered before? Their dirty faced? Their
broken bodies? Even if he claimed that they were better off than
the serfs working the fields, did that mean he had helped them?
Could he say he had taken responsibility for them? And if so, could
it be called success? Suddenly, he felt sick. He had betrayed his
people long before the battle of Thoren. His profits had been
astronomical, his wealth legendary, yet he had spared none of it
for the men in his care, for those who made it all possible. And
now he wanted to protect them from the Darthur? Were they really
any worse off under the yoke of that master than under
his?