The Three Lands Omnibus (2011 Edition) (54 page)

"It is not the same one, of course," said the Jackal. "The one you threw lies buried in the ashes of your birthday fire. But I thought it would remind you of what I gave you and of what you promised in exchange."
I felt my stomach lurch in a sickly manner as I continued to stare at the blackroot nut before me. "I never told anyone about that, not even Fenton," I whispered.
"You told me," the Jackal replied succinctly.
My hand curled into a fist so that the jagged edges of the fire-burnt nut cut into my palm. "I asked you to give me the strength to do something that would please Fenton," I said firmly. "Killing his murderer wouldn't have pleased him; Fenton would have hated that. He would have wanted me to break my blood vow to murder."
"I know," said the Jackal. "That is why I gave you the strength to do so."
One of the slit windows above was casting down a shaft of light that illuminated the swirling golden dust before landing on the hair of the Jackal, which was black and tawny gold, like the fur of a beast. A second thought I could not place stirred within me, but I set it aside for the moment, saying, "You can't make me believe that you wanted me to break the vow."
"Why should I lie to you?" The smile on the Jackal's mask remained. "You are under my power; I can do with you as I wish."
"You can't make me worship you," I said. "That's what you're trying to do: you're trying to make me believe that the gods are good and that I should return my allegiance to you. It won't work. Whatever you do to me—" My breath failed me for a moment, and I had to swallow hard to chase away the tears before I said, "You can say what you like, but you can't change this fact: Fenton was sacrificed to satisfy your bloodlust. He was my friend, and I will never forgive you for that."
There was a pause, and through the window slit I could hear the sound of men and women passing and talking. I thought to myself,
This is the last sound I will ever hear.
The Jackal bore no weapon on his belt, but somehow I knew that he did not need one.
Finally, the Jackal asked softly, "What are the last words that Fenton spoke to you?"
Not all that men will in the gods' names is the will of the gods.
The memory of Fenton's blasphemy whispered in my memory. I could think of nothing to reply. The Jackal took several steps forward, and I tensed. Halting a short way from me, he said, still softly, "I did not will Fenton's death. I would have prevented it if possible. Both as a god and as a man, I loved him."
I felt my breathing grow heavier, and I wished that he would kill me now, before the tears became too painful to contain. "How can I believe that?" I said with fury. "Fenton told Siward that it was your will that he die. Do you expect me to believe your word over his? I don't believe that you care about Fenton or anyone else."
I waited to see whether he would laugh again, but he simply stood motionless for a moment. Then his hand reached up, and he pulled the mask from his face.
"Then accept this as your proof," he said. "It is the only one I have to give."
I stared dumbly at the brown face before me, set with a plain snub nose and a dented chin and the same golden eyes I had noticed before and which were now pressing frantically at my thoughts. Then his lips curled up like a leaf weighted with dawn dew, and I saw the human smile I had heard in his voice.
"You don't remember me, I see," he said. "Well, it has been many years. I am your cousin Emlyn, and Fenton was my blood brother."
The twenty-first day of May in the 943rd year a.g.l. (continued from yesterday)
I continued to stare at the face of the man before me: the snub nose he and I shared, the dented chin he had acquired from a misbegotten childhood prank played with his blood brother Griffith, and the golden-brown eyes I remembered now so clearly from our days spent together on the mountain.
I found my tongue finally and said, "You were always the best Jackal."
"And you were the best prey. I had Griffith trace where you had gone after you left the border mountain patrol, but it has taken me this long to trace your movements in Koretia as a spy. I think that my thieves were beginning to have some doubts about my abilities as a god-man."
The lines about the edges of his eyes, which had not been there when I had last seen him, were crinkled with humor. Slowly, I was beginning to retrace my final conversation with Fenton and to recognize the hints he had given me. I took a deep breath and said, "I never knew. I never guessed when I was a child."
"Nor did I. I thought for many years that my visions meant I had a demon within me and that I would be killed by stoning – another of those religious barbarities you assumed I approved of." He placed the back of his hand against his forehead and swept his hair back, a move so achingly familiar that I could almost forget the mask that was in that hand. "It was Fenton who helped me to discover what was within me and to join myself fully with the god. He stayed with me even after I foretold that he would be murdered because of me."
I felt myself staring once more at the flames of Fenton's sacrificial fire, holding his letter to Emlyn in my hand, the one that spoke of Fenton's coming departure. "But he said that he was going to meet with you again," I said. "He must have known that he was going to die – he must have known from the moment our blood feud started with Cold Run. Why did he think that you two would be reunited?"
Emlyn's smile had slowly slid away, but his voice continued to hold its innate lightness as he said, "He told you that himself, with his final words of life. 'The Jackal must eat his dead.'"
I felt myself growing hot, as though the gold in Emlyn's eyes was the flame I had stood before in my memories. "No," I said. "No, how could you do that? How could you . . . take him like that if you loved him?"
Emlyn sighed as he let the mask pivot beneath the gentle hold of his fingers. "It is hard to explain – hard to explain even to myself at times like this, when my godly powers are hidden deep below, and I am little more than a man. My powers are limited at most times, but even the god with whom I am united has limited himself in his dealings with men. The gods will not take away men's freedom of will; therefore they cannot take away men's freedom to will evil. The best I can do is to take what men will, make it my own will, and use the evil event to do good. Fenton offered up his sacrifice to me; therefore I was able to use his death to bring about good."
"What good?" I whispered. "What good could be worth his life?"
"His death sent you to Emor."
I was still a moment. Then I shouted, "No! Don't say he died because of me! I'd rather have been on that pyre myself, dying conscious of the pain, than be alive in Emor because he died."
"Adrian, he would have died in any case. Would you have his death be useless to ease your conscience?"
For the first time, his voice turned stern. Feeling as though Quentin had brought me forward for disciplining, I stared at the floor and mumbled, "What does it matter whether I live in Emor? It makes me happy, but it's of no importance to anyone else."
After a while, I looked up. Emlyn was smiling again, a smile that looked oddly old for such a young face. "I know so little about you, Adrian," he said. "Some things I learned from Fenton, some from Griffith, and some things – a very few things – have been shown to me by my powers. Many years ago, I saw that you would one day be in danger. Later I saw you sitting in a snowbound cave, talking to an Emorian, so I knew that you would one day go to Emor. I sent Fenton back north to prepare you for that. He could not tell you who I was – I bound him from letting anyone know my dangerous secret until the time came for me to wear my mask – but I know that you and he were friends, as he and I were. I am no longer your god, but we share a blood brother and so are doubly kin. Will you therefore trust me enough to tell me what you have been doing in Emor?"
I shook my head. "I cannot betray the Chara. I have given my oath to him."
"You need not break it. I would just like to know what caused you to flee to Emor and why you have decided to stay there."
I hesitated, but what he asked was not unreasonable, so I told him what he wanted to know, even about Carle, though I did not give his name or hint that he had become a spy as well. By the time I was through, Emlyn and I were seated together on the room's floor-pallet, as though we were no more than cousins catching up on each other's lives. In a way, I suppose we were.
When I had finished speaking, Emlyn was silent a minute, fingering the strap of his mask. Then he said softly, "Carle."
My breath hit the back of my throat. Emlyn must have heard me, for he looked up and said in a matter-of-fact manner, "Fenton told me about Carle when I was a boy. It was easy enough to guess, from the way you described him: a young man who joined the patrol against his father's wishes, who had ties with an older patrol guard before entering the army, who knows Border Koretian and is familiar with Koretian customs. . . . I'd wondered why it had to be Fenton who prepared you for Emor. Now I know."
I felt an uneasiness growing inside me. Emlyn had been bright-witted as a child; his guess about Carle was evidence of his continued intelligence. How much of our conversation was the result of his cleverness rather than of godly powers? Most of it? All of it? I tried to remember back. The nut he had shown me . . . I had been the one to tell him the promise attached to it. He had said nothing more than that I had tossed a nut into the fire on my birthday. Fenton might have told him that much. Perhaps there was even a simple explanation as to why Emlyn knew Fenton's final words to me. And the presence that I had felt when Emlyn entered the room – might not that be a product of my own certainty that I would be facing a god? Or, at best, a sign that Emlyn had received the priestly training that all orphan boys do in the priests' house? Was the Jackal in fact no more than what Carle thought, a keen-minded fraud?
I realized that several moments had passed since Emlyn had spoken. Trying to avoid Emlyn's light-filled eyes, I ducked my head and pulled the back-sling closer to me, saying, "Carle thought it was an understandable coincidence that he and I met. He was able to help Fenton past the patrol because he wished to join the patrol, and I was able to impress the patrol because Fenton had taught me the signals that Carle had taught him—"
"Yes," said Emlyn, "that is one explanation."
I looked up quickly to see that Emlyn was smiling at me; his eyes were bright under the noonday light. "Your meeting with Carle could have been a coincidence," he said, "as could Fenton's meeting with me. For that matter, our meeting today might be due to nothing more than the alertness of the Jackal's thieves, while the Jackal himself might be no more than a man who learnt a great deal in childhood about tricking people. All that could be true."
A passing cloud cast a shadow into the room. It fell upon Emlyn, shading his smile. Only his eyes, by some trick of the light, continued to glow. There was a pause of sound, for nobody outside the storehouse was passing at that moment, while the thieves in the next chamber, whom I had heard faintly while telling my story, had chosen this moment to fall silent. Under the shadow, Emlyn's smile did not waver.
I knew then what I had only suspected before, that in certain ways I will always be Koretian. If Carle had been sitting in that room, he would have witnessed no more than a change in shadows, a quiet spell – nothing unexpected or out of the ordinary. As for myself, my heart was beating as rapidly as it had in the moment that I was faced with the choice of fighting Quentin or throwing away my blade. I heard myself say, as I had said many months before, "The Jackal is the trickster god."
There was a sigh in the world, and the cloud continued on, withdrawing its shadow from Emlyn's face. He said, as though nothing of importance had occurred, "I've never known whether it was the god who decided that Fenton and I would become friends, or whether it was a decision the three of us made together, but having him as my tutor as a child made all the difference to me. Because he was Emorian-born, he was able to recognize evils in the Koretian religion that no other priest could, evils that the Jackal has come to this land to fight."
My breath flew inwards. "Is that what you're planning to do? Fight against the gods' law?"
"Against the corruptions in the gods' law, yes."
It took me a moment to recover from this stupendous announcement. My spirit was still dwelling upon what I had seen before. I was remembering the angry priests who demanded that the Jackal show him their powers, and the borderlanders who had been invited to be his thieves and had failed the test. Had the Jackal indeed refused to show his powers to these men? Or was it instead the case that the Jackal's proof had gone unnoticed by men who had already convinced themselves that he was not a god because he did not fulfill their preconceptions of what the gods must be like? And I, who had been so sure that I knew what the gods were and what they wanted . . . how close had I come to failing the Jackal's test?
I felt a shiver go through me and forced such thoughts away, saying, "But why this way? You're not even fighting the priests. You and your thieves have been playing pranks against the nobility. How will that cause them to change the gods' law? Wouldn't it be better to go directly to the King—?" I stopped; Emlyn's smile had returned. I said slowly, "That wasn't the way the Jackal God fought. He never fought his enemies directly."
"Nor did I, as a child," said Emlyn. "You're not the first person to think I'm mad for fighting a war this way, but Griffith and I have much experience in this. Children can't fight their elders directly; Griffith and I found ways to fight them through pranks, ways that were more effective in the long run. Griffith and I forged the weapons for this war, but it was Fenton who taught me the reason for this war. I believe that the god brought him to this land for that purpose."
I thought about this awhile, as the shadows shifted to afternoon. Emlyn was seated cross-legged beside me, still fiddling with his mask as though it were simply a toy to be played with. He looked at the moment like nothing more than a young borderlander of four and twenty years. Once again the incongruity of our conversation and of what Emlyn was supposed to hold inside him tugged at me. Carle had dismissed that incongruity as evidence of the Jackal's falsehood, but I wondered now whether the incongruity was instead a clue to the Jackal's nature.