The Legend of Broken (58 page)

Chen-lun, too, knows how hard her husband struggles to relieve her pain and cure her disease without revealing the secret of its cause and destroying her name in the kingdom she adopted as her home upon their marriage. Indeed, if the full facts were known, they would likely ruin her even among her own people; and the knowledge of her lordship’s faith inspires the initially happy (if still feverish) attitude that she takes toward him, once she is indeed certain that her perception of his tall form emerging from the shadowy entryway to the bedchamber is more than the mere effect of illness or drugs.

“Rendulic,”
she whispers, attempting a smile and some sense of composure; but her face and body offer living testament to the torment she has endured during the hours leading to this meeting.

For his part, Baster-kin does what he can to disguise the various forms of despair, masked by disappointment, that the progression of her disease causes deep in his soul. He tries to concentrate his attention upon her black eyes, which once shone in enchanting harmony with the long sheets of her utterly straight black hair as it fell across her skin and his own during the short time that they found joyous pleasure in each other’s embrace.
That all too short a time …

The wedding of the newly invested Rendulic, Lord Baster-kin, to the exotic Chen-lun had seemed an entirely brilliant occasion. Only weeks after the ceremony—weeks during which the upper floors of the
Kastelgerd
were often heard to echo with the sounds of swordplay, in addition to bursting crockery destroyed by flying arrows, as Chen-lun (raised to be a most capable warrior, it should be recalled, in her own tribe) and Rendulic punctuated their long bouts of lovemaking with athletics of a wholly different order—the new lady of the
Kastelgerd
was declared by the family’s healers to be unquestionably with child; and a mere seven Moons later, the couple’s first son, a golden-haired boy that they agreed to call Adelwülf,
†
was born. The new scion appeared to be nothing if not a confirmation that Kafra had approved the match of an eastern princess and a loyal new leader of the kingdom over which the golden god had long ago elected to shower his radiance—

And then had come, almost as quickly, another son …

Later pressed by the family’s healers to recall his wife’s physical condition at the time of this child’s conception, Rendulic Baster-kin had replied that if some sign of disease or divine disfavor had in fact been present, he had not detected it. Certainly, the conception had taken place very soon after Adelwülf’s birth, perhaps unwisely soon; but Chen-lun had not experienced any signs of illness until the later stages of her carrying of the creature—and those had not seemed sufficient to explain the thoroughly misshapen condition of the boy; the mass of pustules and ill-formed bones that seemed to mar every part of his skin and body, and worse, to grow only more numerous and offensive during its first weeks and months of life.

The then-obscure Healer Raban had stepped forward to suggest to young Lord Baster-kin—who every day grew more desperate for an explanation that would remove not only some part of the revulsion engendered by merely gazing at the child, but the terrible sense of guilt he felt when he remembered his own sickly youth, and then gazed upon this fruit of his loins—that the child might not be a Baster-kin at all; that, much as his lord- and ladyship may have passed every night together, throughout the period during which the monstrous child was thought to have been conceived, there were nonetheless
alps
†
living in the forests of Broken’s slopes who could make themselves undetectable to men of true virtue. Worse still, there were stronger and more artful such creatures inhabiting Davon Wood: enemies of Broken that might well have made the journey across the Cat’s Paw and up the mountain, if they were certain that a member of a Broken noble house had taken to wife a woman who was, by both blood and nature, less innately virtuous than a daughter of the Kafran kingdom would have been …

At first, this notion enraged Rendulic Baster-kin, causing him to seize Raban by the throat and then use the flat of his short-sword to drive the healer from the
Kastelgerd.
Mysterious as the origins of the infant’s vile condition might be, Baster-kin was by now determined to discover them—for he was a man who had had some experience of the strange and painful paths down which it was sometimes necessary to walk, in order to find true cures for seemingly magical or divine ailments. And he had an advisor who was well practiced at traveling such paths with him, at this moment as at an earlier point in his life: the man he had made seneschal of his household shortly after taking the rank of Merchant Lord, Radelfer. In all the years since the seeming end of his preoccupation with Gisa’s young apprentice from the Fifth District, Rendulic Baster-kin had never asked his old friend and guardian to find either the maiden or the crone; but now, the young lord did beseech Radelfer to undertake that journey, in the interests, not of his earlier infatuation, but of both his wife and his second child. It was, after all, a near-certainty that he would wish to father more children; and if Chen-lun was, for reasons of this world or any other, unfit to allow him to do so successfully, it was necessary that Baster-kin know.

Radelfer disliked the notion, without question; but he understood the importance of the matter, both to his former charge and to the clan he served. It was never wise for a house of such importance to rest all its hopes upon one heir alone; and so, departing alone at nightfall of the next day, Radelfer ventured into the Fifth District.

Not very far down the Path of Shame, as it happened, Radelfer encountered a fellow veteran of the Talons, and learned that Gisa was in fact living, not in the small house near the southwestern city wall in which she had tutored and raised the orphan Isadora, but in the latter’s very fine home nearby. Isadora, it seemed, had become a bride, herself, only a few years earlier, marrying one of the most promising young officers in the Talons, a man that Radelfer had only met once or twice during his years of service: Sixt Arnem.

Finding that Arnem was on guard duty atop the city walls that night, but that Gisa and Isadora were at home and willing to receive him, Radelfer next learned that his luck would not carry him very much farther: both women were adamantly unwilling to involve themselves again in the affairs of the illustrious Baster-kin family. However, Gisa did suggest a solution that seemed, as Radelfer made his way back to the
Kastelgerd,
ever more adequate to Rendulic’s dilemma.

Gisa knew of only one healer in Broken whose knowledge rivaled or surpassed her own; and, now that her former patient had become Rendulic,
Lord
Baster-kin, he had every right to call upon that illustrious figure’s talents and resources. She was referring, of course, to the Second Minister of the realm, the foreign-born scholar called Caliphestros. Provided the God-King Izairn was amenable, Caliphestros could hardly refuse the appeal for assistance; indeed, everything that Gisa knew of the man suggested that such a request would appeal to his scholar’s vanity. With this seemingly sound plan formulated (and truly relieved that there would be no risk of Rendulic ever crossing the path of the crone’s former apprentice again, having seen that the maiden Isadora had by now grown into a truly beautiful woman who had thus far mothered no fewer than three irrepressibly healthy children), Radelfer reentered the
Kastelgerd
in fine spirits, and relayed the substance of Gisa’s suggestion to a very curious young lord.

{
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Radelfer determined, when making his report that night to his master, to deny ever having seen any member of the Arnem family; and he was quickly given reason to be glad that he had taken such a decision, when Rendulic Baster-kin made it apparent, through a succession of ill-disguised questions, that he had used a series of disreputable spies from what was now
his
Personal Guard to discover just whom Isadora had married and when, just where she was currently living, and even that Gisa was a part of the Arnem household: all facts that, if the young lord’s soul had been truly healed, he could have told Radelfer before the latter’s departure.

Such considerations, however, were quickly set aside, that the delicate arrangement of a visit from the Second Minister of Broken to the Merchant Lord’s
Kastelgerd
might be arranged. From the first, and despite the advice of his trusted old advisor and friend, Rendulic Baster-kin proved resentful, even combative, concerning the entire affair: never mind the fact that it was
he
who was requesting a service of the Second Lord, under conditions of secrecy so strict that most of the household staff, as well as Chen-lun’s healers, were successfully kept unaware of the proceedings. It gradually became clear that the success or failure of the meeting depended on the reactions that these two men—now the two highest secular officials of the kingdom—would have to one another. Both possessed pronounced characters and the same strong unwillingness to suffer argument from any person they dubbed a fool. Radelfer steadily lost his early enthusiasm for the meeting, the more he considered the idea, realizing that, while there was a chance that Caliphestros’s visit to the
Kastelgerd
Baster-kin would offer the young lord and his wife a way out of the present dilemma, it was at least as likely that the meeting would end in most calamitous failure.

Radelfer’s concerns ultimately proved well grounded. A most discreet, late-night visit from the Second Minister of the realm was soon arranged; and on the appointed night, at the appointed hour, a plain litter appeared at the
Kastelgerd
’s lowest and most hidden entrance. Scorning the protection of Lord Baster-kin’s Guard, Lord Caliphestros arrived with no more significant protection than his litter bearers, men who were less servants than acolytes, it seemed to Radelfer. Humbly introducing himself to the Second Minister—whose long beard, scholar’s black skullcap, and silver and black robes of state did not disguise the fact that, while of an age that matched Radelfer’s own, this Caliphestros was also in nearly as vigorous health—Radelfer remarked that, while he could see that the two bearers had good sword arms and fine blades at their sides, they nonetheless seemed a very limited party of protection with which to go abroad in the city at night. To this, Caliphestros replied that, having calculated from the Merchant Lord’s petition that the fewer persons—particularly servants—that knew of the meeting, the better for all involved, he had brought only two of his stronger assistants. Radelfer could find no flaw in his reasoning and, ushering the litter bearers into the gardens that led up to the
Kastelgerd
Baster-kin’s somewhat overawing main entrance, the seneschal asked the men to wait there, among the tastefully arranged fruit trees, flowers, and few pieces of statuary, promising that food and wine would be brought to them. The two men expressed thanks, after which Radelfer led Caliphestros, not further up the terraced grounds to the main entrance to the
Kastelgerd,
but down, through a long tunnel that eventually ended in one of the building’s more remote cellars.

As the builders of the
Kastelgerd
had spared no effort or expense in either the design or execution of the building, so the cellars that they had constructed beneath the palatial home were wondrous and extensive creations in their own right. There were many long-since-forgotten chambers and hallways below the residence of Broken’s most powerful merchant clan, places unknown even to the
Kastelgerd
’s servants, Radelfer explained: some were even outside the ken of the present master of the house, since so many generations of secretive lords (such as Rendulic Baster-kin’s own father) had needed discreet places in which to conduct their less than noble personal affairs, and had destroyed all records of their locations.

Caliphestros followed as Radelfer, having lit a small torch, led the way up narrow, winding stone steps that opened out into a shadowy remove below what proved the main staircase of the reception hall. Radelfer held his dim torch close enough to the illustrious visitor that he might read the Second Minister’s reaction, when he saw the great hall for the first time, lit by the Moonlight that streamed through high windows in the western wall that faced the gardens of the Way of the Faithful. What he saw in those aging features was less awe than fascination, of a type that the seneschal found pleasing. Wandering into the center of the hall, Caliphestros glanced about as if to make certain that no witnesses were anywhere nearby; and Radelfer, assessing the older man’s expression, quietly announced:

“This night, I have instructed all servants to remain within their quarters, Minister, unless called for, using Lady Baster-kin’s distress as my ploy. Meanwhile, members of my own household guard are stationed at various positions throughout the
Kastelgerd,
to make certain that the orders are obeyed, discretion is ensured, and no miscreants can take advantage of the lack of general activity to attempt any crime or mayhem.”

Caliphestros smiled, amiably and knowingly. “Yes, Radelfer—I have heard talk of your ‘household guard,’ as have the God-King and the Grand Layzin. Veteran soldiers, assembled quietly from the moment you became seneschal of the
Kastelgerd
? It almost seems you oppose, even distrust, the activities of the Personal Guard of the Merchant Lord … But fear not. We all—Izairn, the Layzin, and I—share your disdain for that force’s increasingly troublesome behavior. Indeed, I have yet to meet a soldier or veteran of the regular army who
does
approve of those effeminate, violent louts—and rightly so.”

As soon as Caliphestros had satisfied himself that there were indeed no ordinary servants stirring in the great residence, he placed his hands upon his hips, and nodded: less, again, impressed than he was interested. “I have heard stories of the interior of this greatest of all the
Kastelgerde
—yet only being here can make one understand the endless gossip.” He glanced about the hall once more. “It is truly a structure worthy of kings …”