The Carnelian Throne (20 page)

“No,” said Laonan very softly. “What will you do?”

“I will put Mahrlys-iis-Vahais at my feet.”

“Will you, now?” The voice was warm, thoughtful. Laonan stroked his burred beard. “I believe you just might. Eviduey, Third Hand, Follower of Mnernaat”—and he spat those words with a venom that made Deilcrit examine his companion anew—“will not like that at all. In fact, he might not live through it .... Deilcrit?”

“I care not for Eviduey. I will make a drum from the stretched hide of his wings, and use it to call my children.” That voice, choked with fury, he hardly knew as his own.

“Deilcrit,” repeated Laonan. If indeed that is what you are about, I can promise you my own sword and some few others. How few, I cannot say. But many I knew twelve years ago would have hewn their way through thrice that many fhrefrasil to win a place on such a battle line.”

Deilcrit turned away, walked among the memnis, ran a hand over the silvery bark.

“Are you saying you could not use my aid?” demanded Laonan, behind him.

“No, I am not saying that. I am saying only this: you speak of blood to fill buckets, and it would be bloodier than even you can conceive. I spoke in haste, in battle heat. Let us first return from Othdaliee; then if you still wish to offer yourself further, offer. We may neither be in the position to offer anything to anyone.”

“You will accept my sword, then, until we have quit Othdaliee?”

“I will welcome it. How not?” But he said it absently, for he heard again the whelt’s words in his mind:
“Allow me to guide you, when that is past, to accompany you, when that, too, is gone, to follow.”

The trail to Nothrace is hard. She lies at Mt. Imnetosh’s foot, in the splay between the giantess’s big toe and her long one, on a coastal cliff so precipitous that she could never make use of the fingers encroaching from the sea. The tide is fierce and the spume breeds fog; and Nothrace’s bare bones gleamed muzzily through her cold, wet shroud.

He was past wonder at his acceptance of Laonan’s aid. He had added the man to his soul’s burden. The matter was a fact, and by the law to which he yet subscribed, immutable. But the rest; his grandiose boasting; his communion with the jewel-hilted sword; his exhilaration in his slaughter! And worse: the creature he sensed himself becoming; he who yet stood at the horizon of his mental line of sight. It was
he
who had spoken of blood in overslopping panniers and of vengeance man must never dream.

He was wet and he was tired and he was hungry and he was numb from flogging himself with his crimes. He said: “And tomorrow you will accept them, as you did the ravishment of women, as you have all else. You are sinking, but into what?”

“I did not hear,” said Laonan, relieved at what seemed the end of Deilcrit’s long withdrawal.

“You were not meant to. I spoke to myself. I am used to being alone. What is that?” He pointed to a more brightly lit patch of fog than that about them.

“Nothrace.” They saw each other by eye-white’s flash and silvered shadow in the gibbous moon’s glow. In that glow Laonan’s teeth glimmered as he grinned and clapped Deilcrit on his left shoulder. Deilcrit winced, and growled at his companion to take care of the arm.

To which Laonan replied that it had not noticeably impeded him in the fighting. “Where did you learn to use a sword like that? Not in Benegua, surely. I have heard and seen that none are allowed there.” The implication was that this was the truth whose difficult lesson he had learned in the bowels of Dey-Ceilneeth.

“I do not know,” said Deilcrit shortly, and answered no further query until Laonan bade him wait in the shelter of the undergrowth while Laonan alone knocked upon the planks of the hut’s door, through which light streamed to slat the dark.

To this Deilcrit would not agree, and after a protracted quarrel in whispers as to whose responsibility to whom entailed what, the door opened on its own.

A hunched figure stood there, backlit, a poker or thin staff in its hand.

“Laonan?” she called softly, as if blessed with night vision.

“Laore’s child. Do your ears hear?” Laonan replied in a singsong.

“I have cut them off and laid them upon the sand,” she shot back without a hesitation.

He whom Deilcrit had known as Laonan heaved a mighty, satisfied sigh. “Blessed be He, some things never change. It’s safe. We can go in.”

“How do you know, after twelve years?” hissed Deilcrit, setting his heels like a recalcitrant draft beast, ready to take up the argument once more.

“She told me: Identification: response. Query for shelter; acceptance thereof.”

He waited a time wherein Deilcrit only breathed and regarded him steadily.

“Come, now Deilcrit. Two and two are four, so they say. You’ve surely got me figured out by now. I’m surprised you think I’m this stupid.”

And with that he strode out into the square of light and stood talking with the woman on her thmshold.

The two went in, leaving the doorway wide, and soon he smelled a savory broth on the fire, and his stomach pleaded in low churning rumbles.

He ignored his hunger as long as he could. For a while it was overpowered by his fear of the unknown, a fear that seeped back whenever the commanding assurance that more and more frequently swept him was gone. He had been less than thirty days out of his swath of forest near the Spirit Gate. He fought homesickness like quicksand. Almost, he tore headlong through the woods for his bower. But the impossibility of taking up that life ever again hit him like a cold slap of seawater and left him once more hungry, disfranchised, alone.

With a growl and a mumbled prayer that Parpis’ ghost attend him, he walked into the but of the woman of Nothrace.

Actually, it was women, for there were three. They were all of the same family, three generations of a beauty that slipped almost unchanged from granddam to mother to child. But the child was no child in fleshly measuring, and he steeled himself, lest the lust that had thrice overtaken him catch him up and he dishonor himself and spill his pollution on this house that succored him.

The girl’s name was Heicrey. She had sunset hair and an aristocratic nose and thighs like a young memnis.

Her mother was Lohr-Ememna, and he truly believed the woman to be what her name declared: Vessel of Faith. She was enraptured, transfixed with hopeless hope fulfilled, there with Laonan beside her after an absence most had sworn meant death. The Spirit was in her and she hummed in a soft low voice as her mate told his tale to them, rocking back and forth at his, feet, her head against his knee.

The third woman, Amnidia, was aged as Dey-Ceilneeth’s towers, with a face that had been refolded by Mnemaat’s artistry into a Wisdom Mask the glory of which none possessed in the most orthodox of temples. From hollows deep as the night sky her bright eyes peered out, missing nothing. She rocked back and forth by the hearth on the room’s only padded stool, carding wool and subjecting Deilcrit to a straightforward scrutiny that made him sure to close his mouth as he ate, careful not to slurp.

The lithe Heicrey collected the meal’s remains, preparing to take the bowls outside to wash. He rose to go with her, offering himself. She smiled, and let her eyes flicker against his.

“You will not!”
aspirated the old woman for the first time that evening, in a voice firm and querulous and clipped. “Sit down, Deilcrit, and talk to me. Quendros, walk your daughter to the well.” And the man whom Deilcrit had known as Laonan slid the bar back from the door and pulled it open. Then with a low bow and his daughter’s answering giggle, the two melted into the night.

“Lohr-Ememna, see if you can card wool in the dark,” commanded the hunched and ancient woman.

“Mother!” objected Quendros’ woman, but she took from her dam the raw wool and the started card and pulled the door shut behind her.

“Deilcrit, come closer.” He did, and sat upon the edge of the hearth with his back to the whispering coals, attentive.

Her skin was a chronicle of her days, and he found the settlings of her face majestic. In the dignity of her, he read wisdom. In the sharpness of her, he read knowledge. In the set of her words, he read revelation. And he did not like it.

“Deilcrit, lay hand upon my grandchild, and though you have saved Quendros, I will slit your throat with my own hands. I will ...” And he stared at that gnarled and clawed curl of fingers that shook before his face.

“Old woman—”

“That is right!” She grabbed him by the tunic and pulled him against her sharp knee. “I am an old woman, and I was a Wise Woman once. Do you know what that means, heathen?”

He stammered that he did not.

“It means that I know about you. And I know what kind of living death you have granted my daughter’s mate.” She let go of him. He crumpled into a heap at her feet, stunned.

“Woman, why do you say these things to me?”

“Because you will feed my Quendros to Wehrdom, and plant its awful stigma in poor Heicrey’s belly, if I let you.”

“No!”

“I was there when Imca-Sorr ordered the destruction of every child, woman, and man in Nothrace. I was on Mt. Imnetosh with two others. I was a Wise Woman. I tried with all my might to save what hope we could. Do you know what hope I mean?”

“No.’’

“Imca-Sorr saw dire threat in Nothrace. We supposed it a human nemesis. We tried to save that child whose birth had been foretold, that changer of destinies, unheedful of the warnings that, as seeking became reality, the omens began to provide. But you see, we were very wrong in our interpretation.” She rose, trembling visibly, and got wine from the sideboard.

She allowed him to pour it for her, and the normalcy of the action helped him ease the dizziness he felt. His mouth was very dry, and the wine slid down his aching throat like salvation. He took only a taste, remembering his previous faring with wine, but it warmed.

She, too, seemed bettered when she had drunk.

“Ah,” she whistled and laid the diminutive cup on the hearth, “things will right themselves. To each comes one chance to erase an error, repair a fault, pay a debt.” Her eyes seemed to wander, and her breathing quickened.

“Ipheri, explain to me how you were wrong, what interpretation I should see for these facts that yield no knowledge. Please.” He pressed her hand, hearing the chatter of Heicrey and her father’s maundering tones and the musical one of his mate.

“Please,”
he begged as the door scraped slowly, cautiously open.

“What interpretation, wehr? Even on the doorstep of your death you jest with me? Do you not seek Othdaliee and the carnelian throne? I—”

“Mother, this is enough!” announced LohrEmernna, sticking head and shoulders through the doorway. “You are ... Mother?”

Deilcrit, black lights obscuring his vision, tried to stop the old woman’s body’s insensible fall. Then he tried to stop his own. Then he only listened from a great distance.

“Quendros, that vial there, quickly!” Sobs. “What possessed her?”

“Hush your tears, Lohr. She felt no pain. She chose her own time. Be as brave. Here, open his mouth, quickly. He is breathing. He is large and strong.” He felt his head lifted, something poured between his teeth, choking him with its dry powder. It was bitter. Water followed. He swallowed eagerly, glad to wash the salty sludge down.

When he could see again, the insect buzz in his ears resolved into a grieving Lohr-Ememna and Quendros’ low service over a shrouded corpse that took up most of the hut’s floor.

That was when it hit him: Quendros was not
Laonan,
but
a
Laonan; an infidel; devil-demon; a mage. But as the antidote took hold and he struggled erect in Heicrey’s solicitous arms, he reasoned that the man was no more threat then he had been before. The Laonan sect was so long ago swallowed in the mists of time that even faced with a household of them, he could not recall its tenets.

The body was buried, in its own faith, out beside the hut.

He enjoyed the digging; it was thoughtless, healing work, good for his arm. In that thoughtlessness he felt elation that the woman was dead and he lived. He felt no sorrow, no distress over what she had done and said. She was a demented crone who sought suicide. Nor would he let Quendros—he struggled over attaching this new and foreign name to his cellmate—slip from his service. He coveted Quendros’ usefulness too much to balk at the man’s religion. Then he heard himself, that cold and utterly capable self with whom he battled, and grated aloud: “Quendros, I need help.”

“I had thought you might,” rejoined that one in a hoarsened voice from the pearly mist across the grave, “but I had not figured the cost this high.”

Deilcrit did not immediately answer. He looked at the two women strewn like leaves upon the new-turned mound, weeping. “It is not fitting to grieve so for the dead,” he said very softly.

“I will tell them,” snapped Quendros, and threw down his pick. “You are at times a difficult man to like,” he added, and motioned Deilcrit toward the hut.

“I am not in any way admirable,” Deilcrit agreed.

“I would not say that,” demurred Quendros. “You are an admirable tactician, a good fighter, charmed beyond belief. I said you are difficult to like.”

“I am sorry.”

“You would be.”

“What of the women?”

“They have fended well enough for twelve years. Shall I now insult them with my pretense that their survival was only luck? Or are we expecting something, say, a wehr-rage?” He thrust his face toward Deilcrit’s. Mist swirled between them, lit by the hut’s door. “Are we?”

“No,” said Deilcrit with utter and complete certainty. And: “Why do you not kill me?” The miserable bleat sprang out of him, unsummoned.

“Over Amnidia? Only one who has never been espoused could ask such a question.” Quendros chuckled, shoving the door closed until only a crack admitted the night’s moist mist. He fussed with the fish-oil lamp, refilled it, then set to stirring the fire’s embers. “Deilcrit, what did you mean? Just what kind of help do you think you need?” And when that elicited no reply, he twisted around, hunkered down on the balls of his feet, saying, “I can help you fight Wehrdom: I know that battle well. But sometimes you look to me to be fighting
for
it. In that I will not, indeed cannot, aid you. If in truth you are fighting to extricate your soul from Wehrdom’s grasp ... ?” And he let the question hang unfinished, as if, having voiced the horror, he regretted it.