The Legend of Broken (55 page)

His distraction is interrupted when he suddenly hears a shriek, the human cry that he most dreads—a desperate, pained sound that might once have belonged to a woman, but surely cannot be made by any mortal throat now. It comes from one of the largest bedchambers in the northernmost corner of the
Kastelgerd,
opposite the northwestern face of the Merchant Lord’s octagonal tower. Listening to the sound with no more than a passive, even a downcast, reaction, Baster-kin comes to a conclusion:
The heralds of death and rebirth ought to have a voice,
he tells himself,
and no one could deny that such a cry would more than suit their purpose
 … His own behavior certainly gives little evidence of such momentous change: as the voice shrieks on, only the fingers of his right hand move, slowly and forcefully grinding the fragile seed of grain held within them against his palm, until it has become but dusty bits.

There is little about this scene that can be called new, a fact that does not stop Baster-kin’s patience and temper from wearing away, as if the voice were in fact some sort of demon’s lash striping his very soul: for it is, in truth, the sound of his own wife’s voice, and it continues on and on, echoing through the halls of the
Kastelgerd
like a loosed fury. Assuming an accusatory tone, it screeches just one word over and over—and that one word is his name:

“Rendulic!”

But Baster-kin only moves to a basin in the tower room’s corner, remembering Sentek Arnem’s urgent warning that he wash his hands after handling the tainted grain.

{
ii
:}

Hoping that one of Lady Baster-kin’s ladies or her healer will soon control her screaming, his lordship paces about his high retreat, studying the only ornamentation in the room: four enormous tapestry panels that cover the walls between the eastern and western doorways, all depicting an earlier time in Rendulic’s life, the celebrated moment when he had completed his transformation from a slight, sickly youth into the strong, manly figure that he is today: the time when, though only eighteen years old, he had embarked upon a panther hunt. This had been the kind of hunt about which the scions of Broken’s merchant families dreamt, in the days before the city’s stadium became their haunt: before, that is, less hazardous sport replaced the dangers of battling wild beasts and pursuing Bane criminals and Outragers into Davon Wood.

During his hunt—which was led by that same tireless guardian, Radelfer, who had ever been the boy’s only true friend and counselor—Rendulic, riding ahead of his men, had encountered a group of four adolescent panthers, offspring of no less than the fabled white panther of Davon Wood. Although seemingly doomed to a most savage death, Rendulic had nonetheless demanded, when two of the animals were already dead and their mother disabled by a deep wound to one thigh, that he be allowed to engage the final brace of beasts.

The youth who braved death in what seemed so reckless a fashion that day had long been treated as a disappointment by his exacting father, then lord of the
Kastelgerd.
Rendulic had dared to believe, with a passion that made him so bold as to be utterly unconcerned with his own safety, that the outcome of the hunt would change his father’s low opinion of him; and, fueled by such thoughts, the brave young man and ever-faithful Radelfer succeeded in tricking and caging the young female panther, after which Rendulic flatly insisted that he be allowed to battle the last male alone. And alone, with arrows, pike, and finally a long, elegant dagger, Rendulic had indeed fought that animal, in the same clearing beyond the Cat’s Paw where the rest of the battle had taken place. Having mortally wounded the young panther with his pike, Rendulic gripped his dagger tight and used it to administer the
dauthu-bleith
to the still-defiant beast—all within clear sight of the animal’s living but helpless mother.

Doing thus, Rendulic had made this hunt, the last of its kind, a legend among the people of Broken. Even so, his father had not proved as readily persuaded of his son’s worthiness as Rendulic had hoped: a result, the youth chose to believe, of a bout of the pox that was returning to torment the aging lord with ever greater frequency. Then, too, the Stadium’s athletics were fast on their way to eclipsing woodland blood sports, and young men and women would, from that time on, turn almost exclusively to such activities for excitement, and as a way to prove themselves to the citizenry. True, their exhausting amusements still included contests against the great beasts of the Wood: but now those animals were captured and safely chained upon the sands of the Stadium, so that death was never a real danger for any young Broken athlete who entered the lists.

But it should not be thought that the tale of Rendulic Baster-kin’s panther hunt was forgotten: indeed, its memory would later form the basis of much of his unquestioned personal authority in the city.
And most of all,
he broods as he stares at the tapestries,
it had virtually eliminated talk of an earlier incident in his life, an incident that was rumored to have involved a romantic quest after a young beauty from the Fifth District who was but two or three years older than he, the assistant to a renowned healer who had been summoned to help when, as the first signs of manhood matured in his young body, a terrible malady from which Rendulic had always suffered, that of the
megrem,
†
had worsened cruelly. This crippling pain in the head and illness of the gut had proved beyond the skills of all Kafran doctors, just as it had, since ancient times, outwitted so many such feckless healers around the world, who knew it by different names. Any such men or women worth their fees, however, could recognize its symptoms instantly: the healer Gisa, for example, had been able not only to name it, but to ease it, with treatments that secretly took place at one of the Baster-kin family’s lodges on the lower slopes of Broken, whence one of the Merchant Lord’s younger brothers, an uncle who was near alone in having sympathy for the boy, tended to the herds of cattle upon the Plain that bore the family’s name. To such a place, Radelfer knew, the lord himself was unlikely to venture; and in this safe and shielded place, the ancient healer who was a legend to most of Broken, but a boon to many others in her native Fifth District, had set Rendulic Baster-kin on the road to a healthy manhood.
†
But while Gisa prepared the tinctures and infusions herself, keeping the ingredients kept jealously secret, the actual doses were administered by the soothing hands of the crone’s lovely apprentice, the orphaned girl called Isadora. Golden-haired and tall, Isadora possessed a comforting touch that had burrowed its way deep into young Rendulic’s heart and mind, and had been the source of his scandalously desperate efforts to find her in the weeks that followed her departure from his bedside. The boy’s father, meanwhile, either ignored or threatened to remove all such wagging tongues: and once his latest bout of the pox had passed, the sight of a son growing healthy had made the relentless Lord Baster-kin take horse, and begin the search for a politically advantageous wife for his heir …

Suddenly, Rendulic Baster-kin notices that another figure has appeared in the room: unannounced, remarkably, by any knock or other request for admission to the chamber. In a silent, eerie manner, this figure makes its entrance through a door opposite that to the terrace. He is clad in a black hooded robe of the lightest cotton; but what should be the exposed parts of his body—the hands, feet, and face—are wrapped in white cotton bandaging, continuous save for narrow slits that reveal the eyes, nostrils, and mouth. The brief opening and closing of the door to the high tower room brings the shrieking voice below all the more clearly into Baster-kin’s sanctum, and he hears the cruelly suffering woman shout distinctly,
“What is it …? No! I will not, I have told you, unless my husband comes and puts the cup to my lips himself, I will not …!”
Then, as the black-clad figure closes the iron-banded oak door, the sound fades somewhat, and Baster-kin sighs in relief, before turning back to the table, obscuring Lady Arnem’s note with his hands, and leaning upon the maps and correspondence as if he had been studying them closely.

“Well?” the Merchant Lord says quietly, in a strangely uncertain tone: disdain is present, and brusqueness, too, but something else tempers these harder sentiments, creating an opening for both tolerance and—what is it? Affection? Surely not.

The voice that speaks in reply, although it attempts discretion, is helplessly unpleasant: words poorly enunciated, accompanied by bursts of spittle that escape from one corner of the mouth, and the sound itself hoarse, grating, and displeasing. “My lord,” it announces, “the infusion is being administered. The crisis should soon pass, says Healer Raban
†
—although it would pass the quicker, he begs me inform you, should you yourself administer the drugs, and wait by her side as they take effect.”

Baster-kin only grunts in ridicule—but it is ridicule prompted by the thought of the traditional Kafran healer called Raban, and not by the messenger who brings it, that much is clear. He continues to stare at the map before him. “I trust you told that idiotic butcher that I am far too busy with matters of state to undertake a nurse’s work?” Baster-kin’s head remains determinedly still, but out of the corners of his eyes he nonetheless catches, by the light of torches held in iron sconces on the walls, a brief glimpse of the black robes and hood, as well as the white bandaging carefully wrapped around the near-useless hands, their fingers bound as one to oppose each thumb. The creature’s feet, as his lordship can more easily see without moving his head, are similarly bandaged, and shod only in soft leather sandals lined with thick lamb’s wool; but this is all Baster-kin will even glance at, for he has plainly seen this strange vision, in all its detail, before. He needs, above all, to avoid the bound face, in which the two azure eyes and the mouth are visibly surrounded by bits of deteriorating flesh marked by moist, pus-filled sores and leathery cracks in the visible skin. And yet, the voice that emerges from this pitiable human wreckage produces speaks, not with an air of criticism, nor even with a servant’s obsequiousness, but in a tone much like Baster-kin’s: with a certain familiarity, even intimacy.

“I told Raban as much,” the voice explains. “But he bid me warn you that, if you cannot find a moment to visit with her, he will not answer for her behavior when the effects of the drugs subside.”

Baster-kin draws in a deep, weary breath. “All right. If we can make some greater sense of this business with Arnem, I shall do as Raban requests. But if not, you must simply tell my lady’s charlatan to administer
more
of his cursèd drugs …”

“Raban says he has already treated her with as high a dose as he considers safe. Any more, he says, and her heart will slow so that death will draw near, and perhaps overtake her.”

A part of Baster-kin would like to give voice to the passionate but silent response that is plain on his face: that it might be better for all concerned (and particularly for him) if such death
did
write an end to the unfortunate woman. But then duty and, perhaps, some trace of true concern abolish all such thoughts and set the jaw once more. “Very well,” is all that he answers quietly.

“There is more,” says the black-clad figure. “Lady Arnem is here, once again. As she said she would be …”

“What?”
Baster-kin finally looks up at the peculiar man opposite him. “But she was not to arrive for another hour. Does Radelfer know that she is here? Has he placed her somewhere—?”

“I have taken the liberty of consulting Radelfer,” the slurring, spitting voice answers, “and it was our decision that he show Lady Arnem into the library, and keep all its doors firmly closed. I have also suggested to him that he might entertain her, for they are known to each other, and they seem to have genuine affection for one another. His service in the Talons also coincided, it seems, with at least some of the sentek’s early years in those ranks—they may have known one another then. And if any room is safe from the cries coming from the north wing, it is the library, particularly if conversation is taking place. Finally, Lady Arnem has been informed that her early arrival cannot be expected to have more than a slight effect upon your own urgent schedule.”

Baster-kin looks uneasy at this statement: another uncommon reaction to draw from him. “And how did she receive all this information?” he asks.

“I would not report that she was pleased,” the spectral figure responds. “But as I have said, she trusts Radelfer, and that trust induces her to make every effort to manifest understanding and respect. All should yet be well—or so I would hazard.”

A shadow of gratitude quickly passes over Baster-kin’s face. “Very wise, Klauqvest,”
†
he says, suddenly and imperiously. “There remain moments when I am reminded why I spared you the fate of the Wood—and yet, when you have so little contact with properly formed persons, how is it, I wonder, that you can be so deft at dealing with them?” The rhetorical question, and the sentiment beneath it, is not meant to be as cruel as it sounds; and if it is received as malicious, the man Klauqvest exhibits no sign of it. But then, beneath so much bandaging, as well as the wafting black robe, it would be nearly impossible to distinguish one response from another …

Baster-kin shifts the position of several maps on the table, affecting a control of his own passions that is, for one who knows him as well as this Klauqvest apparently does, plainly transparent: the coming of Isadora Arnem has disordered his confidence. “And does she offer any explanation for the liberty she takes by arriving so early?” the Merchant Lord inquires.