Master of the Cauldron (29 page)

“I can't lead you,” Cashel said, “because you wouldn't follow me. You need one of your own people to lead, if you mean really lead and not stand out in front till I'm hacked to death and the rest of you turn and run.”

He knew he was being more honest than they were going to like hearing. While Cashel wasn't as bad as his sister about not caring whom his words hurt—nobody else was as bad as Ilna that way—he knew this was one of those cases where folks had to understand the truth. If they didn't really understand instead of just hearing words in a way that let them ignore them, they
were
going to die or face whatever other thing the king and his monsters decided to do instead of kill them.

“We'll lead you!” Herron cried, his right arm raised with the fist clenched. He'd been shouting, Cashel could see. When his voice boomed through the hall, he looked as though he'd been dropped into ice water. Stumbling on his tongue he managed to add, “The S-sons will lead you!”

“You're only boys!” replied the Assembly; the massed faces staring down at Herron. The people sounded irritated but not too much so, much the way
adults would be when a child piped up in the middle of a serious discussion.

They're as old as I am!
Cashel thought, but he didn't say that or anything because the Assembly was right. Cashel couldn't lead Ronn because he wasn't part of Ronn; the Sons couldn't lead because they weren't fit to lead.

“Master Herron?” Mab said, speaking for the Assembly in a tone of cool superiority. “Are you and your friends willing to serve the city by doing something that
is
within your powers? Are you willing to wake the Heroes in their cavern?”

The Sons went slack-faced in amazement. Enfero in particular had the look of a rabbit frozen by the eyes of a viper.

“You said you'd face the king and his Made Men,” Mab said. Her words seemed carved from blocks of ice. “Do you have the courage to face the dark? Or are you little boys who'll shiver in the sunlight till the darkness comes to you?”

“We'll go,” Orly said in an angry voice. “We'll find nothing but dust and bones,
I
think, but we're not afraid!”

“Yes, we'll go,” Herron said to Mab, suddenly calm. “You'll lead us, mistress?”

“Of course,” said Mab. “And I believe Master Cashel will accompany you as well, will you not, Cashel?”

Cashel wished there weren't all those faces looking down at him with desperate expressions, but he couldn't help that there were. “I said I'd help, didn't I?” he muttered, scowling because he sounded ill-tempered when he was really just embarrassed. “Anyway, I will. I'd be glad to.”

And that much was true. If it really was a dangerous place to go, then maybe he could be of some real help for the first time since he came here to Ronn.

 

“Funny,” said Trooper Lires, looking to both sides of the flagstone path with his usual bright interest. He grinned at Sharina to show he was speaking as much to her as he was to his fellow Blood Eagles. “In the old days there'd be half the clerks in the palace camped out here, hoping to get the king to sign something or do who knows what. It just about never happened, mind.”

“Lires,” said Undercaptain Ascor, “the less talk about what happened here in the old days, the better I'll like it.”

“Right, Cap'n,” the trooper said. Perhaps he was mildly abashed, though Sharina couldn't be sure. The Blood Eagles were chosen from the line regiments on the basis of courage, military skills, and complete loyalty to whomever they were guarding. Social graces and the willingness to bow and scrape to their superiors weren't high in the selection criteria.

Sharina and her escort came around a high wall of prickly euonymus to see a low brick residence set near the wall of the palace compound. Two Blood Eagles were at the front door, alerted by the ringing of hobnails on the path. They smiled to see their fellows. “Hey, Ascor,” one of them said. “I thought you guys were off in Carcosa still.”

Valence the Third had retired to this bungalow, within the palace grounds but at a distance from the Chancellery, while he was still as much of a ruler as the kingdom had. In the final days of his rule, he'd turned to wizardry and an alliance with black Evil to preserve his power. When his closest friends had transferred real power to Garric with themselves as his advisors, Valence had sunk into religious mania and guilt over what he'd done and allowed to be done.

“No, we're with her highness the princess here,” the captain said. “She needs to talk to himself-as-was. Any problem with that?”

“Not if he's sober enough to talk,” the other guard said. “Which he generally is, not that he has much call to be. He spends most days with a couple old friends. They're with him now.”

So speaking, the guard pulled the door open, and called through, “Your highness? Princess Sharina's here to see you.”

He nodded the newcomers forward. Ascor and Lires stepped inside ahead of Sharina, while the rest of her escort waited outside with their fellows.

There was no doorman in the anteroom, though with guards outside there didn't need to be. Sharina didn't see servants in the bungalow's single large room either, however.

Valence had just thrown the dice and was moving his pieces on the board, playing Bandits with two cronies. One was a former courtier named Geddes who hadn't been important enough either to promote or to imprison when Garric became prince, the other a very old man named Rylon who'd been chamberlain a decade before. At a sideboard stood Lord Lichter—still the royal chaplain, Sharina supposed, since nobody'd bothered to replace him.

The four men looked around in dull surprise. Valence frowned, then reached again for the game piece he'd begun to advance.

Ascor sized up the situation and thumped his heels on the thick carpeting. “Princess Sharina of Haft!” he announced loudly. That brought two startled servants out of a side chamber, tripping over one another. The male still held the jam-filled pastry his face showed he'd been in the process of eating.

Sharina pointed at them. With the anger of a woman who knew from personal experience how servants were supposed to behave, she said, “You two! Report yourselves to the chamberlain
now
. I'll discuss your situation with him later.”

She knew it was a trivial thing to become exercised about, but the room was filthy, and the servants obviously thieves as well as lazy pigs. Part of the reason the kingdom was in its present dreadful state was that for too long people had shown as little concern for mankind as a whole as a ewe has for the pasture where she grazes and voids her bowels.

The male servant opened his purple mouth to protest. The woman, though wearing silk tunics that she couldn't have purchased on her salary, at least showed the judgment to slap him on the ear and pull him back into the room from which they'd come. Presumably there was a back hall to the anteroom.

“Well, well, well,” said Rylon, chuckling. “About time somebody put 'em in their place. Yes, indeedy.”

Sharina curtsied to the king. “Your majesty,” she said, “please forgive this intrusion. I want to ask some questions about your father.”

“Do I know you?” Valence said, blinking at her. He leaned back in his chair and finally took his hand off the game piece.

The room was dim, though it'd be hours before there was a need to light the hanging lamps. The windows were shuttered, but the large skylight was open; the cypresses planted around the bungalow screened but didn't block the westering sun.

“Of course you know her, Valence,” Lord Geddes said. “She's the sister of the boy who's running things now, Prince Garric.”

Geddes' bland face clouded. “That's right, isn't it, dear?” he said. “Prince Garric's sister?”

“Yes, milord,” Sharina said. It wouldn't do any good to lose her temper in frustration. Besides, the situation was better than she'd thought it
might be: Valence could've sunk too deep in prayer and flagellation to respond to her at all. He'd certainly been headed in that direction when she'd seen him most recently, some months earlier. “A man claiming to be your half brother Valgard is stirring up trouble. Witnesses say he looks very much like Stronghand. Did you ever hear your father speak of another son?”

“Another son?” Valence said, frowning. “I don't think so. But to tell the truth, I kept away from my father as much as I could. He was an angry man. He threw things a lot, though he couldn't throw them very well.”

He tittered. “‘Stronghand' indeed!” he said, lifting the wine carafe from the tub of water on the fourth side of the table where they were playing. “Half the time he trembled so badly he had to have a servant hold the cup to his lips. Stronghand!”

The carafe was empty. “Lichter!” Valence said peevishly. “Dip us some more wine, won't you? That's a good fellow.”

The chaplain took the carafe in his left hand and with the other pulled open the lower portion of the sideboard. It was a large drawer instead of a door panel. Inside were two open storage jars with wine thieves, narrow bronze pitchers with vertical handles, hanging from their rims.

“More Caecuban, Valence?” Lichter asked. He began to dip red wine into the carafe without waiting for an answer.

“Stronghand,” Geddes said in a musing tone. “Goodness, it's been years since I thought about him. And you say”—he turned quizzically to Sharina—“that he had another son, dearie? Goodness, goodness.”

“I asked if you'd ever
heard
of Valence Stronghand having a son named Valgard,” Sharina corrected the courtier firmly. “Even a rumor or a joke about a younger son. Supposedly Valgard was born to a female prisoner captured after the Battle of the Tides, though those present say all the People were men.”

“
After
the Battle of the Tides?” Rylan said. “Oh, my goodness me! Well, it wouldn't really matter if the prisoners were men or women
after
the battle, would it? Oh my goodness, no!”

The old chamberlain started to laugh but quickly collapsed into a paroxysm of coughing. He raised his goblet; it was empty. Patting his chest with his left hand, he held the goblet out demandingly. Lichter took it from him, poured wine from the refilled carafe, and set the goblet in front of Rylan before passing the carafe to Valence.

“What do you mean about it not mattering whether the prisoners were men or women?” Sharina said. She didn't let her voice rise, but she knew her tone had lost the pleasant warmth with which she'd begun the conversation. “Your majesty, gentlemen, this is really very important. There's a serious danger to the kingdom. And thus to your lives, you see.”

Lord Lichter cleared his throat, turning toward one of the frescoes set in the center of decorative frames. This particular one was a male centaur carrying a woman over his shoulder as he galloped away. The woman, bare-breasted, with the remainder of her garments streaming behind her, reached out desperately toward the viewer.

“Well, you see…,” he said. “It's not the sort of thing that got talked about, of course, but many people knew. In a palace, well, things get around. The
place
Stronghand was wounded, you see…”

Valence drank deeply. When the chaplain's voice trailed off, the king looked directly at Sharina.

“Whatever else my father might be doing after the Battle of the Tides,” he said in a harsh, challenging voice, “he wasn't fathering children. Because that spearpoint didn't leave him anything to father them with. Do you understand?”

Lord Geddes shook his head sadly. His eyes were on the game board, but his mind was in a distant place. “You can't really blame the old fellow for being angry most of the time, can you?” he said.

“By the Shepherd!” said Lires. “You sure can't.”

Ilna finished warping the table loom she'd borrowed from Malaha and Mostera, the sisters who squatted across from her staring. They were the chief weavers at the manor—the Abode of Ramelus, according to Ramelus himself and his henchmen, though Ilna'd heard others call it only “the big house.”

The sisters were short, dumpy women past middle age, dressed in hooded black robes. There was little to choose between them in appearance, but Malaha seemed excited by the chance to see what the outsider was going to do, while Mostera glared with the fury of a priestess watching her altar defiled.

Ilna smiled faintly. Though she wasn't going to defile anything, what she planned to make fabric do that day was at the edge of what she considered proper. She'd promised to bring a feeling of joy in those who viewed the result, and so she would, but…

The manor house was a sprawling thing that tried to look like more than it was. Originally it must've been a rectangle of one story and perhaps a loft. Ramelus had built it to two stories and a false front to the north with pillars all the way up; wings had since spread to either side. Ilna couldn't imagine who Ramelus expected to impress, but perhaps it was just for himself. He seemed like a man who thought about himself most of the time, if not all of it.

The courtyard behind the house was formed by lines of stables and workshops rather than colonnades like the front. Women in a line under a pole-framed tile roof were preparing food for the evening meal, while across from them other women washed clothing in large vats carved from limestone. The blacksmith was repairing tools in his forge at the back of the court, near the bread ovens. The
cling
of his hammer and the wheeze of the bellows worked by two of his assistants were regular interruptions to the chirps of playing children.

The gray yarn Ilna was using for the warp was of goat hair. The individual strands were longer and finer than the sheep's wool she'd more often worked with, but—like human hairs—they weren't as tightly coiled. The difference in texture was part of the pattern. Everything was part of the pattern, the height of the sun, the haze of dust in the air, even the noisy flutter of sparrows squabbling for grain fallen in the courtyard.

Ilna checked her weft yarn, touching each loaded bobbin instead of merely looking at them. The feel told her things that eyes, even her eyes, couldn't see. She smiled as her fingertips read the future.

She didn't fit in with other human beings. Either they saw too little truth, or their world held truths that were merely fancies to Ilna os-Kenset. But threads and fabrics spoke to her, and they never ever lied.

The weft threads already on the bobbins were wool of various weights and colors: bleached white, indigo blue, and three different shades of gray.
The grays were each the natural color of a particular sheep, the darkest nearly black.

A final hank of weft thread was drying in the sun. Ilna had simmered more of the gray goat hair in raspberry pulp, the waste left in the bag after the kitchen staff made jelly. The yarn was now a soft pink that seemed to cling to the eyes even after one looked away.

She touched the yarn she'd dyed. It was dry already: though bright, the sun wasn't particularly hot, but the air sucked all moisture out of the thread. Ilna took the hank from the cleft stick on which she'd hung it and began to wind it onto a bobbin.

“You're a fool if you use that for your pattern, woman,” Mostera growled. There was worry as well as challenge in her tone.

“Now, maybe the foreign lady has a trick we don't know of, darling,” Malaha said, pursing her lips into a fishlike expression that apparently was meant to be a smile. “Is that so, Mistress Ilna?”

Ilna sniffed. “Whatever I may know about dyes and yarns that you don't,” she said, “doesn't matter. The pattern I've chosen is probably beyond your ability to plan, but I suspect either of you could weave it yourselves if you watch me carefully the first time.”

“Such a fine lady,” Mostera sneered. “I don't think! A vagabond come traipsing up to the big house without so much as a spare tunic.”

“Watch and learn, mistress,” said Ilna mildly as she twisted the shed and ran her shuttle through the warp for the first time.

Davus stood in the center of a group of house servants, each wearing a headband of wool dyed with indigo. He was juggling fist-sized stones, more of them than Ilna could've counted easily even had they been lined up on the ground before her. He had at least three separate sequences in the air at the same time. She couldn't predict the patterns Davus was weaving, but she could
see
them clearly.

The indigo headbands were rank insignia as well as a uniform to set the indoor personnel off from the field hands. The highest servants present, the steward and chief cook, had bright blue bands of first-quality dye. Ordinary servants had duller bands from the second quality of the plant, while the scullery maids and potboys wore bands the color of gray mud with only the slightest hint of blue.

Ilna brought her shuttle across the loom, moving as swiftly and gracefully as Davus was spinning his stones skyward. She'd noticed that
he not only kept within sight, he always had at least one eye on her—though his audience probably thought he was wholly focused on his juggling.

Ilna doubted that Davus watched what the stones were doing at all—or needed to, any more than she needed to look at the yarn as she fed it through the warp. She smiled, feeling the future as it wove onward.

“I suppose that's where your Lord Ramelus sits when he addresses you?” Ilna said, nodding toward the ornate chair in a three-walled kiosk behind the house proper. The shelter had blue-glazed tiles on the outside and a tree-of-life pattern enclosing the throne. The roof was of ordinary terra-cotta roof tiles, their faded orange color a painful contrast with the walls.

The kiosk's workmanship wasn't very good to begin with, nor had it been kept up well. Where tiles had fallen off, Ilna saw they'd been laid over a core of wattle and daub.

“Oh, yes,” Malaha said cheerfully. “Every day at midday. Everybody gathers here in the courtyard, and he dispenses justice. Well, the herdsmen and the men working in the New Fields in the north, they don't come in except on every Ninth Day, but everybody else does.”

What he calls justice,
Ilna thought, and thought also that Ramelus' version of justice wasn't something she'd care to count on.

“He likes to have people whipped,” Mostera said. “Sometimes he whips them himself. If he doesn't like the cloth you weave, mistress, he'll have you whipped.”

“I expect that he'll like my pattern,” Ilna said with a faint smile. She glanced toward Chalcus, singing to the women doing laundry and to many of the children besides.
And I don't think Ramelus or any man will whip me while I live and while Chalcus lives.

The breeze shifted from east to west, bringing a snatch of his song, “…
in its worst despair, still ponder o'er the past
…” Chalcus was accompanying himself on an odd little instrument that he must've borrowed here, a lyre of sorts made by stringing gut across the humped shell of a tortoise.

Ilna's hands slid across the loom, beating the fabric at the short intervals required by the speed at which it was growing. “Oh, she's wonderful, Mostera!” Malaha murmured. “Mistress, you're a wonderful weaver.”

Ilna smiled faintly. She didn't need these women to tell her that, but she wouldn't pretend she didn't like to get praise. Her eyes were unfo
cused, while in her mind she watched what would happen to the fabric in a few weeks or a month.

“She can weave, I'll grant,” Mostera said. She didn't share Malaha's enthusiasm, but neither was the statement grudging; and for that Ilna felt a tinge of respect. She'd praised others for the sake of truth, even when it tore her heart out to do so. A weaker person might've deluded herself that Lady Liane bos-Benliman wasn't a worthy mate for Garric, but Ilna hadn't permitted herself to do that…

“Lord Ramelus could have you or me or any of us whipped,” Mostera said in a distant tone. “He's a great man, and he'd be the first to tell you so. But he couldn't, I think, do anything so great as weaving the cloth on your loom, Mistress Ilna.”

Across the courtyard Chalcus sang,
“For mem'ry is the only friend—”

Ilna said nothing, but she smiled more broadly.

“—that grief can call its own.”

 

Cashel had thought that if he maybe squinted a little, he could imagine that the Sons of the Heroes were really soldiers. It didn't work. Sure, they wore swords and armor as they listened to Mab explain what they were getting into, but they didn't hold themselves right. They weren't poised like people whose job was standing shoulder to shoulder and killing other people. That's what a soldier was, after all, and by now Cashel had met his share of them.

“The queen's power is from the air and light,” Mab said, standing as the others watched in a half circle around her. The Sons were on crystal benches under a canopy of ferns; Cashel squatted at the right end beside Herron, where he could see all his companions out of the corner of his eye. “The king's power is strongest in earth and water, so it was natural that when the queen drove him out of Ronn, some remnants of his influence would linger in the lowest levels of the city.”

Mab made an angry gesture with her left hand: red sparks danced angrily in the air.

“Natural,” she repeated, “but very unfortunate. Because the queen was exhausted from the battle—and I have to say, arrogant with her victory—she failed to wipe Ronn clean of contamination when she could've done so with relative ease. She didn't, and by that she failed her duty and failed the city.”

“The queen's a great wizard and a great
person
.” Orly said in glowering discomfort. “She's kept Ronn safe for a thousand years. You shouldn't talk about her that way!”

“If she hadn't vanished,” Herron said, “then we'd still be safe.”

“You weren't safe while the queen was present, Master Herron,” Mab said with a dismissive snort. “Or she wouldn't
have
vanished, would she? If you're afraid of straight talking, then how do you expect to face the things you'll meet on the way to the Shrine of the Heroes?”

Cashel smiled though he knew he shouldn't have. Right then Mab looked like she was a girl no older than the Sons themselves. She had blue eyes and fluffy blond hair, just as cute as you could ask for. Her tongue and her temper hadn't changed from what they'd been earlier, though.

Herron grimaced and hung his head. “I just meant…,” he muttered; but what he'd meant was obvious—“The queen didn't fail us!”—and obviously false. Herron had sense enough to swallow the remainder of his words.

“The armies of Made Men are a spectacular threat, but perhaps not the most dangerous one,” Mab resumed in a softer tone. “The king's power has been increasing
in
Ronn ever since he was driven out. The Heroes have defeated his creatures repeatedly, but those defeats don't change the way darkness and night have slowly spread upward from the living rock beneath the city. By now they lurk at the edges of the crystal plazas open to the sun.”

“Mistress?” said Enfero. His head was bandaged from where Cashel'd smacked him with the quarterstaff. “How can we fight that? How can we fight things that I don't even see?”

Mab twisted her face toward him like a hawk sighting prey; then the cold anger in her eyes melted. “You can't fight a fog, Master Enfero,” she said mildly. “The queen will have to burn that away after she returns. Perhaps she'll have learned to do it properly this time, to sear the very rock clean of the taint of evil. But before the queen can return, the citizens of Ronn must defeat the army of Made Men massing on the plain outside. And to do that you six, and Master Cashel, and I, must wake the Heroes.”

Cashel cleared his throat. “What's to stop us going down to this cavern, ma'am?” he asked, concentrating really hard on the wad of wool he rubbed along the smooth length of his quarterstaff. “Just bad feelings, like you were saying? Or are the Made Men going to be waiting for us when we get lower down?”

Mab looked at him and laughed, though the sound didn't have much joke to it. “You don't believe in bad feelings, in a miasma of evil, is that it, Master Cashel?” she said.

Cashel shrugged. “I believe, I guess,” he said, “if you tell me it's so, ma'am. But I don't”—he raised his eyes to meet hers—“figure it's going to stop me.”

Cashel looked down the line of the Sons, all of them staring at him. “Look,” he said, then paused to frown. It was
really
important that they understand what he was about to tell them, but he'd never been good at words. “A lot of times it's really hard. The sun's hot, and you ache all over, and it doesn't seem like anybody really cares anyhow. But you've got to go on and finish it anyway, just slogging on.”

He shrugged, his hands spread on the quarterstaff. “You've got to finish it,” he repeated, “because otherwise it's still there to do. For you, or anyway for somebody, and you're the one whose job it was. Right? Because we've told everybody this is our job, going down to wake the Heroes.”

“If there's any such thing!” Orly burst out. “If the Heroes
are
sleeping, if there's even a cavern! Nobody of all the people alive in Ronn today has seen it, you know.”

“We don't need to worry about that,” Cashel said.

“Don't worry?” Stasslin sneered. “Of course it's a worry! If there aren't any Heroes, then we can't wake them!”

“
We
don't need to worry,” said Cashel, raising his voice just a little more than he had to so that they could all hear him clearly, “because that's not our job. Our job is to go down and do what we can. If there's no cavern or no Heroes, that's not our fault. So we don't need to worry about it.”