The Mansions of Idumea (Book 3 Forest at the Edge series) (18 page)

“Well then, ‘family man’,” Neeks drawled in
his lazy tone on to another subject, “you might want to recommend
to the Shins to lock up that daughter of theirs for the next ten
years. She’s quite a developing young woman, isn’t she?”

Zenos rounded on him. “How dare you talk
about Jaytsy Shin that way? She’s only fourteen!”

It would take a lot more than that to rattle
Neeks. “Taller than her mother already, although that’s not saying
much,” he chuckled. “But Zenos, I’ve seen some of the soldiers
noticing her. The colonel’s dark eyes and her mother’s features?”
Neeks shook his head. “I’m warning you, Sergeant, that girl’s
getting attention when she comes to the fort.”

“She’s just bringing her father a meal or a
clean undershirt.” But Zenos was visibly disturbed. “That can’t
be,” he decided. “She’s only a girl. Up until a few years ago she
still sucked her thumb when she was nervous.”

“I thought Mrs. Shin said she’d celebrate her
15
^th
birthday in Idumea?”

“So?”

“Many girls get married at sixteen and
seventeen.”

Startled, Zenos said, “What would a soldier
want with a sixteen-year-old girl?”

Neeks sighed loudly. “Zenos, Zenos, Zenos
. . .
How is that you’ve been in this army for so long and
are still so . . . so . . .” He searched for the right word.
“Innocent?”

Zenos regarded him for a moment, puzzling out
his meaning, and scowled when he understood.

“I choose to be, Neeks. And I really wish I
could stay that way. But it’s getting a lot harder. Sometimes it
feels like the world’s out to get me.”

---

There’s a great deal of romantic mystique
that accompanies riding in a coach behind four fast horses on the
way to a huge city and an unfamiliar place. If that mystique lasted
more than five minutes, the trip would be pleasant enough.

But when three occupants of the coach become
ill from the rocking before the coach even leaves Edge, two days
and a night may seem like a very long journey.

And it was.

Under different circumstances it might have
been exciting. They might have remembered to take books to read or
paper to write on. But instead each of the riders in the coach was
left to wonder what lay ahead, besides the headache and nausea of
being bumped around unpredictably.

After an hour of head-banging, Peto
discovered how to hold his body limply enough to roll with the
jostling instead of fighting it. His mind wandered to Idumea and
meandered its way through what he imagined would be crowded roads
and narrow houses to the one place he hoped circumstances and time
would permit him to see: the new kickball stadium.

Sure, he was worried about his grandfather.
And in a way, it was Relf’s fault Peto was thinking about the
massive arena right now. General Shin went on and on last year
about the enormity of the structure, so that Peto was hanging on
his every word, while his father just sneered.

“Why would fifty thousand people want to be
crammed together in one place?”

Peto tried to remember how his grandfather
responded to that. Something about Perrin’s cynicism, lack of
appreciation?

Pangs of guilt hit Peto. Were those some of
the last words he heard his grandfather speak, but now he couldn’t
even remember them?

Nah, he concluded. It’s not like the High
General could be snuffed out that easily. No, he’d be fine, maybe
even take Peto himself to see the arena once he regained his
strength—

Peto glanced over to his father sitting
across from him and staring out the window, brooding so intensely
Peto felt the air around him grow heavy and dark.

Perrin Shin never wanted to go back to
Idumea, but now their entire family was rushing to the hated place.
The Shins wouldn’t be making this journey unless . . . unless—

Peto couldn’t bring himself to think about
the awful reasons, but instead sighed wretchedly about being such a
selfish grandson.

---

Jaytsy, seated next to her brother, stared
out her window but her thoughts were solidly in Idumea and the
dress district her grandmother told her so much about.

It wasn’t that fashions interested Jaytsy
that much. But it would be, well,
interesting
to see what
others were wearing. Maybe she could find skirts and tunics that
were bright and bouncy, but still fitting her parents’ idea of
modest. Maybe she and her grandmother could go—

Immediately she was ashamed. There she sat
fantasizing about shopping in the fashion center of the world,
Idumea, when people in Edge were struggling to clean up, her
grandfather might be near death, and her grandmother was so
consumed with worry that she actually ordered the Shin family to
Idumea.

And all Jaytsy could wonder was if silk came
in orange?

She miserably stared out the window.

---

Across from Jaytsy sat Mahrree, too lost in
her own thoughts to notice her daughter’s eyes filling with
shameful tears, or to notice that her son was unusually quiet.

A part of her had always wanted to see the
city, just to understand what all the fuss was about and why her
in-laws always pressed so hard for them to visit. She wondered if
everything Perrin had dismissed about Idumea was entirely accurate.
He could take things a little far sometimes.

Then again, she couldn’t shake from her mind
that Idumea was founded by the six men who murdered the first
Guide, Hierum.

Then yet
again
, even though evil men
had begun it, surely not everything was tainted by their influence.
Some of it had to be fine, because she knew of good people who came
from there, her in-laws included.

And now she knew why they’d kept popping up
in her thoughts all morning; it was as if the Creator wanted to
give her a little warning, and she was grateful for it.

But what would they find when they finally
got to Idumea, sometime later tomorrow?

Mahrree tried to shove that worrying idea
away, only to find another ready to take its place: she was headed
straight for the city that housed Chairman Mal and the
Administrators.

Over the years, Mahrree had tried to swallow
down her own anger with their ever-increasingly controlling
tactics, and found ways to subtly skirt the teachings of the
Administrators with her students and children.

But what if she came face to face with one of
those men, and he saw the disdain in her eyes? Surely one or two
might come by the home of the High General at some point. At least
she knew a little about each man, thanks to what she had to teach
her students about them.

She never thought she’d be
almost
grateful for the fifteen minute government appreciation lecture she
was required to deliver each day, included in the teachers’ scripts
which she normally ignored. Along with reciting the dry homilies
which emphasized dubious improvements to the world and the need for
loyalty, she also had to read out loud about the backgrounds of
each of the Administrators. Naturally, Mahrree was suspicious about
those, and intrigued that the author of the scripts had, behind his
name, the curious words “public relations.”

At first, Mahrree’s students were almost
genuinely interested in the tales of each man, but by the time they
reached the sixth Administrator, several boys pointed out they had
heard the story before.

Mahrree had to agree the similarities of
their backgrounds were opportune. All twenty-three men had been
conveniently raised in poverty, suffered great hardships, lost one
parent or both, worked up to three jobs twenty or more hours a day
to afford a university education—although they must have reckoned
time differently back then—and then later made an amazing
discovery, or single-handedly fought and killed a Guarder, or
rescued a woman/child/kitten in distress and was so moved by the
experience that he now wanted to rescue the world.

One remarkable Administrator—the only one
Perrin said was worth more than a sliver of silver, Dr.
Brisack—even made a great discovery about the effects of noxious
gases on the human body while fighting a Guarder near a bubbling
mud volcano in order to rescue an old woman who was holding a
kitten.

The woman was a widow, naturally. And poor.
And it was raining. And then it turned to a blizzard,
naturally.

After reading that story to her skeptical
students, Mahrree concluded the words “public relations” meant
“professional, if unoriginal, story teller.”

Perrin had merely scoffed at the story. “I’ll
bet Brisack hates cats. And old women. And snow.”

Mahrree grudgingly had to admire the
calculated manipulation of the Administrators to assure the
citizens that they were “one of them.” The students were to share
the stories with their parents, and after that year all the
citizens felt some odd kinship with the Administrators.

She wasn’t surprised, then, when Relf Shin
later read through the scripts she showed him, raised an amused
eyebrow and said, “So Giyak’s parents drowned when he was just
thirteen? How tragic. Perhaps I should tell Gadiman to investigate
the old people that live in his mansion that he calls Mother and
Father.”

Remembering Relf Shin’s words brought
Mahrree’s thoughts back to why she was in the coach, which was
shockingly quiet considering it held four Shins. She glanced around
and noticed each member of her family stared gloomily out the
windows.

She sighed. The day had started out rather
promising. Well, except for raccoons stealing her stockings, and
her dismal evaluation of their food supplies, and facing her ruined
bedroom . . .

All right, nothing about today had been going
very well.

Still, she tried to think of something
mundane as the fields flashed past, but instead other concerns
filled her mind, keeping her from seeing anything but blurs. She
watched her husband, hoping he might give her a comforting wink,
but he seemed exceptionally sullen as he scowled at the window.

There were a few things Perrin and she never
discussed. When she occasionally attempted to bring up those
subjects, Perrin would send her a calculated glare which meant just
drop whatever she was trying to express, and she always did. But
now, thinking about what happened with the High General, she
couldn’t.

What would happen if someday Perrin went off
to stop a raid or investigate a threat on the edge of the forest
and never returned? What would their family do in the event of his
. . . no longer being there?

Even though all the gold and silver hidden in
the cellar would undoubtedly provide for them, she could never
bring herself to ask him. Nor did he ever bring up the topic
himself.

But a competing concern was the fact that
Relf Shin was only two years away from retirement, and that a new
High General would be appointed.

If they reached Idumea and found the worst
had transpired, a replacement would be named in the next few days.
Chances of it being Perrin were slim. He was only a lieutenant
colonel and had enjoyed that ranking for nearly eight years since
it was two rankings away from general.

He didn’t want to be High General. He rarely
said that to Mahrree, but she could read it in his eyes. They grew
even darker and more brooding when Relf and Joriana visited each
year and told their son about Idumea and their expectations.

One small part of Mahrree wondered if there
even was a real emergency in Idumea, or if this wasn’t some
elaborate trick Perrin’s parents were playing in order to get him
to bring the family to see them. But Mahrree quickly dismissed that
thought. As sneaky as her mother-in-law could be at times, she’d
never drag her son away from a real disaster in Edge
unnecessarily.

Still, Relf Shin had been actively
campaigning for his son to become a High General ever since Perrin
enrolled in Command School at age eighteen, but Mahrree couldn’t
imagine a life away from Edge. Even though the topography of
Idumea, with its massive hot pools, intrigued her, it could never
be home.

But as the coach raced south, she couldn’t
ignore the dread that she might be rushing to her new home. She had
even hurriedly packed Perrin’s dress uniform littered with medals
and ribbons, not really sure why.

She watched Perrin again, trying to discern
what he might be thinking, but he just glowered out the window.

---

Perrin knew his wife was looking at him, but
he wasn’t in the mood for one of her “What are you thinking?”
conversations. She didn’t understand what every man knew: there
were times he just needed to let his thoughts wash over him.

And so he sat, mile after mile for hours,
mulling over two thoughts.

The first: How would he react when he came
face to face with Administrators he’d successfully avoided for
sixteen years? Masking his contempt from eighty miles away was
easy. But in the same room as them? A bit harder.

The second thought: Mother, why’d you wait so
long to send for me?

---

Two men sat in the dark office of an unlit
building.

“Not that I would ever profess belief in an
intelligence greater than mine,” Mal said, “but I dare say that
Nature had a far better idea than I did for revisiting Lieutenant
Colonel Shin. Magnificent set of circumstances: Relf, hanging
limply on the edge of death, and his son rushing to Idumea, unsure
of what he’ll find. I can almost taste the tension!”

Brisack chuckled. “Every now and then the
random forces in nature seem to almost gain a consciousness to
conspire together for a remarkable result. We couldn’t have done it
better ourselves.