The Carnelian Throne (15 page)

The ossasim beckoned him, and lit an oil lamp, then globed it, with a translucent amber shade.

Self-consciously, holding his borrowed finery about him, he folded himself onto the stool Eviduey chose for him and accepted a goblet full of a dark, sweet juice.

The other studied his polished nails, retracting them nervously.

“You are not Mahrlys,” said Deilcrit when he had gulped the drink, staring into the ruddy eyes of the ossasim.

It ran its long fingers through its mane and leaned forward.

“Deilcrit, I am not here because of Mahrlys, but in spite. When she arrives, I hope she will not find me. I would like to ask you some questions.”

He tore his eyes away from those all-too-manlike lips.

“I have never seen a wehr-master with bearded lips,” he replied. “Are you ... ?” And then he could find no way to frame his query as to the ossasim’s nature, preferred mate, or feelings for Mahrlys, and said instead: “Are you convinced of my guilt?”

The ossasim scratched its beard. “No, I am not. I am convinced of little. I would support an individual such as some ptaiss and whelts feel you to be. I will support anything that advances Wehrdom.” Earnestly, gesticulating so that his limp wings rustled about his wrists, the wehr-master laid his case before him: “Consider my position. I have no allegiance but Wehrdom, no function other than the correlation of such factions as exist within our ranks. Some men are not wehrs. Some beasts are not wehrs. All ossasim are wehrs. I voted for the trial of Imca-Sorr-Aat, as did the majority of us.”

Deilcrit turned his goblet in his hands, inclined his head. “So?”

“It has been long since Imca-Sorr-Aat has asked anything of Wehrdom. It is long since anything has been heard from Othdaliee, exempting the wehr-rages, which grow further and further apart.”

“You do not have to justify yourself to me. It is who wish to justify myself before Mnemaat the Unseen,” said Deilcrit softly.

“Mnemaat? Ah, Mnemaat. Better Imca-Sorr-Aat: he is the intermediary between mortals and the god. If indeed the god still lives. You are surprised?”

He had made the star sign before his face. “Mnemaat is not dead,” he pronounced.

“You have not looked into his Eye, then.”

“That is true,” he conceded.

“Well, you saw me look into it, just today. And the others. And know you what we saw there? We saw what we wished to see. His Eye shows us whatever we choose. Once it commanded us, bade us match our actions to the scenes it displayed. His mouth has not spoken to us for generations. You stood upon it! Did the Mouth of Mnemaat speak to you?”

“No,” he whispered, agonized, finally realizing that there was no love of the Unseen in Dey-Ceilneeth, as there was in the forests.

“Of course it did not. You have been in His most sacred sanctuary. There is nothing else. You have seen the unseeable. And, I hope, seen through it. Some say the god is dead. Some say another is on the way. Some say the three for whom the Spirit Gate opened are that very thing: new gods for a godless age. What say you, who have seen them face to face?” And he took Deilcrit’s goblet, refilled it, handed it back.

“I asked them that,” he said in answer. “I, too, was concerned that they might be gods. But they said that they were not, though one said that if I need him ...” And he stopped, and thumped the full goblet down resoundingly on the stand, so that it slopped over and the red juice crawled along the cane and dropped to the stone.

He sat back, but very slowly, and tried to make his ears stop ringing so that he could decipher the ossasim’s words.

Some while later, when the black-furred one took his leave, it occurred to him that he did not recall exactly what had passed between them, though they parted on good terms.

Standing by the door of tied rushes, it came to him that the drink had been stronger than he anticipated, and that he should drink no more. But when he went to pour out the remaining juice, he found no signs of the pitcher, or the goblets either, though a red stain on the caning and a wetness on the floor proved that he had not imagined it.

He was on his hands and knees by the bench, his finery forgotten, when she entered from a curtained doorway he had thought to be simply curtains, and drew him wordlessly within.

We sat in the crotch of a gargantuan tree overlooking the maze surrounding Dey-Ceilneeth. The ancient titan was hoary with overgrowth but in places the crystal of her cathedrals still shone like jewels in the sun.

I shivered, and wriggled my back more firmly against the forest giant’s bark. Sereth sat on a limb wide as I am long, his feet swinging, Chayin between us. The cahndor’s arms were folded over his chest.

“You take nature’s whim as a personal affront,” he growled at Sereth, who had not spoken since we had seen the children in the forest the day before.

“What affronts me is my own concern.”

“So be it!”

“Stop this!”

Sereth tossed me an indecipherable glance, and came in from the branch, to lounge against its parent trunk. “How long do you propose to sit here?”

I looked at Chayin, who studied the memnis’ bark. I, wished it could be otherwise between us. Especially now when we entered what could easily be a dangerous situation. So my forereading showed it. Chayin and Sereth were each keeping their own counsel. There had been entirely too much of that from all of us, but not even I would be the first one to stop it. No, I would not do that. I looked at Sereth, and at Chayin, who had not yet replied.

“You know we are going in there,” I implored him. “You will go for Se’keroth. I will go for Deilcrit. He will go because he cannot stay away.”

“You are wrong, Estri,” said Chayin. “Sereth will go for Deilcrit. You go for him. And I in one sense for Wehrdom, and another for Mahrlys-iis-Vahais.” The veil was heavy on him. Sereth, enmity wiped from his frame like dust by the wind, crouched down, leaning forward, intent on Chayin’s face.

“When Deilcrit is no longer Deilcrit, and a blackened Se’keroth lies across the arms of a carnelian throne, we will depart this land. Not before; and failing that, not at all,” came the cahndor’s singsong from the far side of the abyss.

“Chayin,” I said softly, “please—”

“Estri, you do not talk to Sereth of Wehrdom. Why? Because he will no more accept its hegemony than that his own skills wield over his actions. Truth?”

“Yes,” I admitted, as much to keep him talking as anything else.

“Do not forget that. He is hase-enor, of all men: that, too, recollect.”

“Chayin,” said Sereth evenly. “See your way into the maze, and out safely. See the moment of entrance, and its perils.”

“Surely,” said the cahndor in that same bemused voice, and reeled off the turnings. After a time, his voice became more normal and his observations more tentative.

I studied Sereth covertly. He and Chayin were barely speaking, yet he had not wasted this opportunity to benefit us. Whether Chayin would deem what had just passed an invasion of his privacy, a use made of him while he was indisposed, I did not know. It seemed likely. They were more and more wary of each other, and as a consequence, more wary of me.

Chayin had spoken with me once of Benegua in genetic terms. It is a science of which I am not totally ignorant. What he had had to say disturbed me. But I had not mentioned it to Sereth. He would not like what Chayin’s theory portended.

As of this sun’s rising, we had been thrashing about in the forest for eighteen days. Eighteen days of their growling at each other, of shields snapped tight, eighteen days within the wall of Mnemaat. How long we lost in the obviation of space that spat us out at a cold campfire strewn with our carnage, I could not determine. Long enough for no Deilcrit, no Se’keroth, nor my blade either, to be lying there when we arrived.

We had expected nothing different, and so were not disappointed. We spent one uneasy night listening to the forest’s mutters. Chayin got very drunk on a miraculously spared skin of kifi-a, and said a number of things better left unsaid, and he and Sereth did not speak except in monosyllables for three days. Hence their pace was hard, and I, too, turned surly trying to keep it.

On the morning of the fourth day since the obviation, which we undertook directly after a day-night vigil for Chayin’s dead there by the sea, Sereth came to me as I wakened.

I had, since he overheard Chayin offer me asylum in Nemar, found it prudent to sleep with neither one of them. Prudent but difficult. Abstinence is for me a weighty yoke, and I was only too glad to slip into his arms when he extended them.

And I was heartened, lying in the grass with him as of old, that so easily might I chink the breach growing between us. It had been a couching full of promise and promises, one of new beginnings. So I started to speak to him of Chayin and the strains I knew lay upon them both, but he rolled over onto his belly and said:

“Watch.” And with a distant little smile on his face, he traced my name with his finger in the grass. As his nail moved along the blades they seemed to shrivel, then smoke, then the very ground beneath began to run together. Still with that faraway little grin, he laid his hand flat beside the letters of my name branded a finger’s-joint deep into the earth.

“As easily can I destroy him. And I will, if owkahen serves me up your loss.” Sereth always whispers death. “Is that clear?”

And I nodded, for he was watching me out of the corner of his eye.

“Good. Now, look.” And he waved his flat palm over the letters singed deep into the turf. His forehead furrowed, and grass reappeared where my name had been. Or rather, other grass appeared: it was of a lighter green, and more densely packed, than that around it.

“What did you do?” I queried, hushed.

His eyes flickered sidelong at me, he tucked his chin in and stared at the lighter-green
ESTRI
written in sod among the darker grasses.

“I borrowed it. The first sod, that I burned away, became smoke and ash. This is from a year hence. I took it from the same spot.”

“So my name is gouged in the ground a year from now, in this place?”

“Something like that. I thought the technique might help you with your time discrepancies. Do you want it?”

“Do I want it,” I echoed dumbly, sufficiently chastised.

“There is a condition,” he said, turning his narrowed eyes full upon me. “You will teach this to none else.”

I knew whom he meant, but I agreed. So began the taking of sides.

And the nursing of the tension that crackled around us in the tree’s crotch like owkahen’s own lightning.

What can I say in excuse for myself? In retrospect one dredges up alternatives that seem more workable than those that have come to be. But only if I were other than myself, and they also some other folk, could it have gone differently. Chayin alone inherited from our progenitors that talent for existing always in the selection of consequences some call the sort. Sereth and I grit our teeth and wrestle with the moment, drawing (at the best times) a sufficiency of what we desire therefrom, so that with the aid of what we have already gained we can repeat the process. My forereading is a mass of tantalizing obscurity which like some diabolical instructor leads me into truth by way of error. From which I emerge, I hope the wiser, and with a wry understanding of what my visions earlier portended. The best I can say for myself is that I seldom make the same mistake twice. Seldom, but not never ....

The mistake I was then concerned with not making was of being the last so high above the ground in the crotch of the huge memnis, as I watched Sereth’s head disappear between the branches. He would not wait for Chayin’s indisposition to pass, but swung out and down like some sucker-footed tree-kepher, leaving me to talk Chayin back from the land of veils.

I sat and fumed and choked back curses, and then, asudden very conscious of the winds that blew around the tree and shook its fronds so that they whispered, turned to the task at hand.

It had been long since Chayin spoke from beyond the abyss, long since the veils held him entrapped. Once he had been sorely afflicted by this manifestation, called by some forereader’s disease, and I had used my skills to ease him out from its grasp. It was a measure of owkahen’s tumultuousness I saw there in his inward-staring eyes, in his boneless form melted against the memnis’ trunk.

I inched toward him, uncertain of my footing though it was more than ample, and made the error of peering out into space, where Sereth scrambled ever downward, far below.

Then I put concerted effort into returning the cahndor’s attention to what we call the present.

It took some extensive laying-on of hands, there on the swaying branch.

“Dey-Ceilneeth awaits,” I murmured, when his membranes snapped back and forth tentatively and he uncrossed his arms and at my urging slid inward to the safety of the memnis’ cleft.

He looked, for a moment, all of his father’s son, staring at me from across the abyss. Then he shook his head and rubbed his eyes with his palms, and said: “Now?”

“No time better,” I affirmed.

“That is not strictly true, but”—and he yawned and stretched, and gathered his legs under him—“I am anxious to retrieve Se’keroth from that jungle boy of yours .... Where is ... ?” And he himself peered between the memnis’ uplifted arms to spy Sereth, descending.

“Se’keroth?” I wondered. “Then you do not recollect what you said?”

“No.”

So I told him what he had said to us, and at the retelling’s end, with a wail I could not suppress, sought the shelter of his arms. “How has it come to this, that we use each other so ill?”

“Ssh, little one. Things are not as they appear. It is Wehrdom whose distrust we feel. It is the very air which divided us, the echoes of their converse which make us like strangers in our own minds.”

I shivered, my face pressed to his leathers.

“It is as it was with the children: He thinks I obstruct him. But it is not me.”

I nodded. I well recalled the children we had seen in the forest, strewn about like discarded rag dolls, their stuffing spilling out onto the ground. And the live ones, all huddled in a group that wandered helpless in the wilderness.