The Palace (Bell Mountain Series #6) (11 page)

“Ellayne went out on a horse? In the middle of the night—with soldiers? To chase pirates?” Just saying it made it seem all the more incredible.

“I’m sure I don’t know what this world is coming to!” Aunt Lanora shook her head, completely baffled.

The next day, late in the morning, Grammum came over to fetch Enith. “The baroness would like to meet you,” she said. “Your aunt never should have told you that story last night, so please act like you never heard it. Don’t ask any questions! It’s their personal family business, and we have no right to pry.”

So Enith went across the yard with Grammum and was introduced to Baroness Vannett in the parlor. They’d been sewing, Enith noticed, but the baroness had put her work aside.

“Thank you, Nywed,” she said. “And thank you for coming, Enith. I’m happy that you’ve come to live next door.”

She was a very handsome woman, Enith thought, and a little dainty, birdlike, in her mannerisms. Ellayne had inherited most of her looks but little in her way of speaking or carrying herself. Enith remembered just in time to curtsey.

“I’ll be going to the market now, ma’am,” said Grammum. “Lanora’s making tea.”

Alone with the baroness, Enith answered questions about her home in Obann, and its neighborhood, and city life in general. The baroness admitted she had always hoped, someday, to have a townhouse in the city.

“Usually, around this time of day,” she said, “I sit down with Ellayne and Jack, and we have a lesson from the Scriptures. We have one of the very first of the new copies that they’re making in the city—a present from Queen Gurun. Did you ever see her while you lived there?”

“Oh, yes—she’s lovely!” Enith said—with a fleeting pang of homesickness. “Everyone in Obann loves her. She came to us across the sea.” That was something that people in Obann considered miraculous. No one ventured out on the sea.

Vannett sighed. “You’ve probably heard that our boy, Jack, is in some kind of trouble and that Ellayne went out with a patrol the other night to try to find him. I hope you’ll pray for both of them.” With a visible effort, she set aside her fears. “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind reading the lesson with me today.”

Enith had never read, or been read, anything from the Scriptures. She knew no one in Obann who had a book of Scriptures. Her tutor took the lessons from dull books about commerce and silly stories about talking animals. Not until after the Temple was burned down, and the new First Prester started holding assemblies wherever people could get together, had Grammum shown any interest in religion. None of it had ever made much sense to Enith; none of it had ever seemed to have much to do with anything. But of course she couldn’t turn down the baroness’ invitation.

“Yes, ma’am, I’d like that,” she said. So Vannett got up and took down from a shelf a big, thick book with beautiful calfskin covers and bade Enith join her on the settee so they could look at it together. The baroness opened it to the flyleaf.

“See? That’s Gurun’s own handwriting.”

It was a peculiar kind of writing, very hard to read: something about “best wishes to my dear friends.” Enith had no way of knowing that Gurun was only just learning to write in modern Obannese script, which is very different from the islanders’ old-fashioned way of writing. The page on which she’d written was of the most beautiful, cream-colored sheepskin vellum. The book, thought Enith, must have cost a fortune.

Vannett opened it to somewhere near the middle. “We’ve been studying the Book of Thrones,” she said, “and the life of King Ozias—our own King Ryons’ ancestor, and the last anointed king of all Obann.”

Enith prepared herself to be politely bored. But when the baroness began to read aloud of the young king’s life in Lintum Forest and how he escaped his many enemies, Enith discovered that it wasn’t boring at all.

Unknown to anyone else in Silvertown except for Mardar Zo, Goryk Gillow had received his coded message from the self-appointed Council in Obann, inviting him to come to the city under cover of peace talks and then be recognized by them as First Prester. The thing could not possibly be done, wrote Merffin Mord, unless Goryk was there in person.

“The College of Presters has elected this man Orth,” Merffin wrote, “but there are those who hold that, College notwithstanding, the election cannot be valid because there is no Temple of the Lord. And as for this rigmarole preached by Orth about an imaginary Temple not made by human hands, we know not what to make of it, & neither do most of the people in the city. Better a Temple at Kara Karram, we say, than no Temple at all! But for us to prevail in the argument requires your presence in the city.”

Goryk had not yet decided what to do. Just to go to Obann would be difficult. There was an army in Lintum Forest that might come out and attack him. It was King Ryons’ army, and Goryk feared it. Had it not annihilated two invasion forces sent into the forest to defeat it? To say nothing of what the people of Obann would think if he came to the city with Obannese blood on his hands and a Heathen army at his back!

“You worry needlessly,” Zo said. “Let the Lintum army come out after us—we have the means to destroy it.”

He was referring to another secret, the most closely guarded secret he and Goryk had: a power against which there could be no defense.

“I would rather not have to use those means against King Ryons’ army,” Goryk said. “If Obann recognizes me as First Prester and submits to our master the Thunder King and to his New Temple in Kara Karram, we shall have won a decisive victory without the risk of a battle. I would rather not have to stake everything on a power that I don’t understand.”

“But how will you get to Obann, except escorted by your army?” Zo said. “That new baron controls the traffic on the river, so we cannot go by boat, nor march along the River Road. As for any risk involved in battle, it seems very small to me!

“No one understands the power of the ancients. No one remembers what spells the ancients used to bind demons and make them obey. But I have seen that power: you know I employed it to put down a rebellion on the Great Lakes. It would have taken a mighty army a long time to put down that rebellion, but the demon did it in the blink of an eye. It caused men to drown themselves in the lake. Those who weren’t driven mad were struck blind. All in an instant! You should have seen them throwing themselves out of the canoes and into the water, never to come up again.”

So far, the terror of the Thunder King’s name, and Goryk’s liberal application of the gallows and the whipping post, had been adequate to keep the peace in Silvertown. So far, he’d been afraid to use the power that Zo had brought to him in a box, all the way from Kara Karram—a gift from the Thunder King, infinitely rare, beyond all price.

“We’ll defeat the Lintum army,” Zo said.

“Only to have to fight again, under the walls of Obann!” Goryk said. “I’d rather win without fighting. These foolish councilors in Obann have offered us a golden opportunity.”

Zo shrugged. “I’m only here to serve our master, side by side with you,” he said. “Perhaps between the two of us we’ll find the perfect plan.”

“Perhaps,” Goryk said. And now, he thought, he had this boy from Ninneburky, whom Ysbott thought to be the king. Was this a new piece on the board, Goryk wondered, that he could use to his advantage? How many people in Obann would realize that this boy was not the king? It seemed to him the Council would be eager to say he was the king, even knowing that he wasn’t. “We must think on this, Zo. We have our chessmen in position for victory. It’s just a matter of finding the correct moves.”

Zo didn’t play chess, and the analogy was lost on him, but he wasn’t averse to devoting more thought to the matter. He was the most easygoing mardar, Goryk thought, that he had ever met.

Jack did know how to play chess, but that knowledge wasn’t doing him any good in Silvertown.

They hadn’t mistreated him, beyond locking him up in a windowless room somewhere inside the chamber house. In the evening someone brought him supper, and in the morning, breakfast. You could eat the food and not get sick, but that was about all you could say for it. The people who brought it were Obannese, servants or slaves, and Jack hadn’t been able to get a word out of them.

“Oh, well,” he thought, “if they were going to kill me, they wouldn’t bother feeding me.” Now that they knew he wasn’t the king, he supposed they would hold him for ransom. But did they know he was Baron Bault’s adopted son? If they didn’t, he might be of no use to them at all, other than to sacrifice to an idol. If all they were going to do was to make him a slave, he thought, they’d have done it by now.

Around midday, when he was getting hungry again, someone opened the door. Instead of a servant with food, the great traitor himself, Goryk Gillow, came in and sat down. Someone outside closed the door after him. No point in even trying to escape, Jack thought.

“I won’t ask you how you like it here,” said the man, “but I hope it hasn’t been unbearably unpleasant for you. I’m not a cruel man, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. Had Ysbott not ignorantly mistaken you for King Ryons, you wouldn’t be here. It was none of my doing.”

“Yes, sir,” Jack said. He had no idea what else to say, and he was thinking of all those dead bodies hanging from the gallows. One or two of those hadn’t looked much older than he was himself.

“What’s your name?”

“Jack, sir.”

“You have good manners, Jack.”

“That’s because I’m afraid, sir.”

Goryk smiled. Jack didn’t like his smile. It was probably the last thing some of those people saw before he hanged them.

“Try not to be afraid,” the man said. “I have no plans to hurt you.”

“Not yet!” Jack thought. But he only said, “Yes, sir.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“They called you First Prester, sir. That’s all I know.” That was all Jack would admit to knowing. He’d heard the baron talk about this man and his infamous deeds, but now was not the time to mention Goryk’s treason. And to call yourself First Prester, when you were no such thing—that was treason against God.

“Well, Jack, that’s what I am—the First Prester,” Goryk said. Jack wondered why the man dressed all in black. It was supposed to be Temple colors, like Martis used to wear, but it only made him look like a villain. “There’s another man in Obann City who calls himself First Prester, but I’m the only First Prester with a Temple. The councilors in Obann understand that very well, and if they and I can come to an agreement, the world will be at peace again. I think everybody’s had enough of war—don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He’s studying me,” Jack thought. “What’s he looking for? He knows I’m not the king; I heard him say so. What is he going to do to me?” Some moments passed before Goryk spoke again.

“I’ve been thinking, Jack,” he said, “thinking very hard about how to bring peace to Obann. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do, you know. I think that’s what most of the people in Obann would like to see. And they miss the Temple! I think the New Temple in the East would make them happy, if only there were peace again. People could go on pilgrimages to see it. And you and many other people could all go home again.”

Jack didn’t know how to answer, so he waited.

“To bring peace, Jack,” the man in black said, “it will be necessary to engage in a few small deceptions—just to make the process nice and orderly, and only for a little while. Only until the people’s minds can be put at ease. It’s the kind of thing that’s part of life. If you know the Scriptures, it’s like when King Irod married the princess of the Kephti. That was a small deception that brought peace to Obann, long ago.”