Storm Warning (12 page)

Karal soaked his sore muscles, then wrapped himself in one of the towels and followed Ulrich into the bedroom. Valdemaran sleeping robes were laid out for them, a nice touch, he thought. He found his baggage, rubbed in his salve, and fell into the cot in the next room in a complete fog. Once his head touched the pillow, the fog became total darkness that did not lift until the servant woke them in the morning.

After three days of what could only be described as endurance riding, Karal was finally getting used to the pace. He was also getting used to Rubrik, and it seemed that their escort was getting accustomed to them as well. His formal manner loosened a bit, and during the fourth day of travel, he began to talk with Karal directly.

At that point, Karal had to revise his opinion of their escort sharply upward, for Rubrik was even more of a scholar than he had guessed. He spoke four languages besides his own, and his rattling on about the geography, husbandry, and economics of the places they passed was no mere prattling to fill empty ears. He knew this area and the conditions in it as well as its own overlords did.

And that only made Karal more curious than before. Who was this man, that he had so much information at his very fingertips? Surely he had not memorized it just to impress or occupy them.

When they left the home of the lady Guard Commander, clad in riding gear that had been freshly washed and cleaned by the lady’s servants, gray skies threatened rain. The rain did not actually materialize in the morning or even the early afternoon, but toward late afternoon the clouds thickened, and the wind picked up. Ulrich’s joints hurt him quite a bit at that point, so they actually stopped
early
for once, at least two marks before sunset.

Their stopping place was yet another inn, this one with a courtyard surrounded on three sides by the inn itself, and on the fourth by the stable. A gate in the middle of the stable led into the courtyard, and this arrangement cut the wind completely. Ulrich descended from his saddle with a gasp of pain, and Rubrik was concerned enough to ask the Priest if he thought he would require the services of a Healer.

“Not unless your Healer can give me the body of a man three decades my junior,” Ulrich replied with a ghost of a smile. “No, this is simply the result of old age. I shall retire to my bed with a hot brick and some of your salve, and with luck, this rain will move on so that we can follow suit as soon as possible.”

But the rain didn’t move on: in fact, no sooner had Karal seen his master settled into a warming bed than it began to drizzle.

The taproom of the inn was mostly empty; the miserable weather was probably convincing people to stay by their own hearths tonight. There was a good fire in the fireplace, though, quite enough to take the chill out of the air, and on the whole it was a pleasant place, all of age-and smoke-blackened wood. Heavy beams supported the ceiling, and below their shelter, gently curved tables and benches polished to satin smoothness were arranged in an arc around the fire. As the drizzle turned into a real thunderstorm, Karal found a perch at a window-seat table and watched the lightning dance toward the inn through the tiny panes of a leaded window.

“Impressive, isn’t it?”

The eyes of Rubrik’s reflection met his in the dark and bubbly window glass. The man smiled, and Karal smiled tentatively back.

“Would you prefer I left you to your meditations?” Rubrik asked politely.

Karal shook his head. “Not really,” he replied. “You can join me, if you like. I’ve always been fascinated by storms; when I was a boy at an inn like this one, I used to sneak away and hide in the hayloft to watch them move in.”

“And let me guess—you used, as an excuse to go to the stable in the first place, that the horses were frightened by the thunder and needed soothing, no doubt,” Rubrik hazarded, and grinned, taking the seat on the other side of the table. “My father never believed that one, either, but his stableman was always on my side and backed me up with specious tales of how I had kept the prize mounts from hurting themselves in a panic.”

Karal realized that at last their escort had just let something fall about his own past. Up until now Rubrik had been very closemouthed about anything of a personal nature.
His father’s stableman. So that means he comes from a well-to-do family, if not of noble blood. So his father was no mere farmer as he implied.
He responded in kind. “My father never minded too much; there’s less work at an inn during bad weather. It’s a lot easier for people to stay at home, watch their own fires, and drink their own beer. And of course, once the few travelers who wanted to try and beat the storm got in, no one else would arrive until it was over, so we stableboys didn’t have much to do either after we’d dealt with their beasts.” There. It was out. If Rubrik was going to be offended by his low birth—

“That’s probably the
only
time you didn’t have much to do,” Rubrik said, with a conspiratorial grin. “I’ve always felt a little sorry for inn folk during wonderful weather. They never get a holiday like the rest of us do. It hardly seems fair, does it, that in the very best of weather, when everyone else is out enjoying themselves, people in an inn have to work three times as hard tending to the holiday-makers? I would guess that storm watching was the closest thing to a holiday you ever got.”

Karal chuckled and brightened. “I never thought about it, actually. It wasn’t as bad as you might think, so long as you like horses. Father never made it easier on me than it was for the other horseboys, but he was a good and just taskmaster.” He clasped his hands together on the tabletop and stared out at the rain. “I never really saw the heavy work, when it came to that; I wasn’t old enough for anything other than light chores, like grooming. The Sun-priests took me at the Feast of the Children when I was nine, so I was never big enough to do heavy work.”

Rubrik looked at Karal for a moment, then stared out at the lightning. The silence between them grew heavy, and Karal sensed that he was about to ask something that he thought might be sensitive.

Probably something about us, about Karse and the Sun-priests. That’s not a problem; Ulrich already told me what I can’t say. No reason to avoid his questions, especially not if the information he wants is common knowledge at home. I think he’s been looking for an excuse to talk to me alone, figuring that I will be less wary than Ulrich.
He felt himself tense a little. He would have to be very canny with this man. It would be easy to trust him; hard to remember to watch what he said.

Rubrik coughed politely. “I—ah—suppose you realize we have all kinds of stories, probably ridiculous, about the reasons why the Sun-priests took Karsite children—and what they did with them afterward—”

Karal only sighed, then rested his chin in his hand. “The stories probably aren’t any worse than the truth,” he said at last.

Rubrik nodded and waited for him to go on. Encouraged, Karal told him all about his own childhood, what there was of it—how the Priests had taken him, how he had been educated, and how, finally, Ulrich had singled him out as his protégé. He told their escort about the Fires, too, and caught an odd expression on his face, as if what Karal had told him only confirmed something horrible that he already knew.

“The children taken are either extremely intelligent, intelligence that would be wasted in a menial position, or are children with the God-granted ability to use magic, of course. Ulrich told me later that I had both qualifications, but my ability to use magic is only a potential, rather than an active thing. He called me a ‘channel,’ but I’ve never found out what that means, exactly. I was absolutely terrified that at some point I’d start showing witch-powers like my uncles did, and a Black-robe Priest would come for me and that I’d end up going to the Fires,” he concluded. “But I never did—though in one sense, I suppose, a Black-robe Priest
did
come for me.”

Rubrik waited for him to say something; out of pure mischief he held his peace. Finally the man gave up. “Well?” he said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Karal grinned; at least this would be one thing he could surprise the man with. “Ulrich was a Black-robe—that is to say, a Demon-Summoner—before Her Holiness Solaris made the Black-robe nothing more than a rank. And now, of course, there
aren’t
any Fires. The Cleansing ceremony has gone back to what it
used
to be. Ulrich and I found the original Rite in one of the ancient Litany Books.” He didn’t make Rubrik ask for the answer this time. “It’s a Rite of Passage, that’s what it originally was, before it was perverted; children who are about to become adult bring something symbolic of their childhood to be burned as a sign that they are ready to take on adult responsibilities. Ulrich says it’s easy to change holidays and rituals to suit a purpose, since they’re usually subjective anyway. Harvest festivals and fertility rites are coming back, too, the way they were a long time ago.”

Rubrik took all this in thoughtfully. “Solaris has made many changes, then?”

“Her Holiness certainly has! Mostly she has reversed changes that had been made by corrupt Priests seeking nothing more than power,” Karal corrected. He wasn’t certain why, but for some reason he felt that point needed to be absolutely clear. Solaris was not some kind of wild-eyed revolutionary, despite what her critics claimed; what she had done in the Temple thus far was restoration, not revolution. “Ulrich is not precisely certain how long things have been wrong, but we know that it has been several centuries at the least. True miracles ceased, and the illusions of miracles were substituted. The God-granted power of magic that
should
have been devoted to the well-being of Vkandis’ people and to His glory was perverted into the use of that power to bring temporal power and wealth to the temple and the Priests. And Vkandis is very real, not an imaginary God like some people have!”

Rubrik smiled, but not mockingly. “I know.”

Oddly enough, Karal believed him. “Ulrich believes we will know the date the corruption started when we learn just when the rank of Black-robe Priests was created. They were the heart and soul of the corruption.”

Lightning lashed the top of a tree not too far away; Karal winced at the thunder but enjoyed the atavistic thrill it sent up his spine. And
I am
glad to be in here, and not out there.

“I thought you said that Ulrich was a Black-robe,” Rubrik replied, slowly. “Your robes are still black, in fact.”

“He was,” Karal agreed. “His duty in the former days, according to the Writ and Rule, was to summon demons on the orders of the Son of the Sun and send them against the enemies of Karse. It was not a duty he took any pleasure in. He also frequently brought danger down on himself by refusing to counterfeit miracles.” He turned his head a little so that his eyes met Rubrik’s. “He showed me every counterfeit he knew, so that I would not be taken in by the tricks of the higher-ranked Priests,” he told the man, whose eyes widened at his serious tone. “And that alone might have gotten him burned had I betrayed him. Some of the tricks were so simple anyone who paid attention could have seen through them—but that’s the power of belief.”

He turned his attention back to the storm. There were other things Rubrik might do well to learn about Ulrich, but Karal would rather that it was his master who told the Valdemaran.

“You said something about Solaris changing all that,” Rubrik ventured, after several long moments filled only by the boom of thunder and the pounding of rain on the roof. “Was that when she became the head of Vkandis’ religion?”

Karal nodded, and smiled a little.
This
was the part of the tale he really enjoyed. “That was what gave her the office, in fact. It was a miracle—a real one, and no fakery. I was there, I saw it myself. For that matter, so was Ulrich, and
he
is certainly an expert at spotting something that was not a God-produced miracle. I do not believe that there is any kind of fakery, either slight-of-hand and illusion, or magic masquerading as a miracle, that he cannot detect.”

It had been a very strange day to begin with; the day of the Fire Kindling Ceremony at Midwinter, when all the fires of Karse were relit from the ones ignited on the altars of Vkandis. It should have been bitter cold—

“It was the strangest Midwinter Day I have ever seen,” he said slowly. “Hot—terribly hot and dry. Hot enough that the Priests had all taken out their summer robes for the Fire Kindling Ceremony. There was not a single cloud in the sky above the city, but outside the city the sky was covered with dull gray clouds, from horizon to horizon. Ulrich and I were at the front of the Processional; Solaris was no more than three people away from Ulrich.” He closed his eyes for a moment, picturing it, and chose his words carefully, trying to set the scene for his listener. “We Priests and novices surrounded the High Altar in a semicircle; the beam of sunlight—called the Lance of Hope—shining through the Eye in the ceiling above us slowly moved toward the pile of fragrant woods and incense on the Altar. The golden statue of Vkandis-In-Glory, wearing the Crown of Prophecy, shone like the sun itself behind the Altar, and Lastern—the False Son—stood beside it, ready to kindle the flames by magic if the sunlight didn’t do the trick promptly enough.”