The Carnelian Throne (26 page)

“But it is all that does matter,” decried Chayin.

“I was approached, and I accepted. And certain things I will do for them, as will we all—”

Sereth spat a word I have never heard him use. His hands were on his hips, and though his fists were clenched, they shook.

It was then that Mahrlys spoke, when I thought they would summarily destroy each other while Wehrdom howled about us:

“No, Chayin, you will do no more. Or you will do little else than what you have done.” With a fluid grace she rose. I allowed it. She sought the cahndor’s side, and he took her in under his arm.

“You did not abrade me for deceiving you, and I thank you,” she said to him, and then to us: “Chayin knew nothing of what I did. And I do not regret it. I sought to kill you in such a way as he might never know. I failed in that, and then was wooed by what you might be able to tell me .... and I lost. But only partly. I needed time, and time I gained.” She bit her lip, and took a deep breath. I knew she held back still additional tears. “All gamble; sometimes, the best of us lose.”

Chayin growled.

“No, beloved, I have lost. You can hear them: Wehrdom fights Wehrdom, and it will not cease until one faction or the other no longer exists. Our only hope now, is what might occur at Othdaliee.”

“I could—” started the cahndor hesitantly, but she cut him off.

“No, brave one, the time is both too late and too early for that.” Sereth looked at me, but I only shrugged. I could make no more than he from that exchange. “I have lost, and I must flee Dey-Ceilneeth. I am unfit to guide her; what you will see when the run rises will attest to that. Nor would I be allowed. Death is my society’s answer for what misjudgments I have made, and death is the only flight at whose end I might find amnesty. I ...”

Chayin whispered in her ear, and she sagged against him and began weeping in earnest.

He looked at Sereth with such an abject plea for understanding that I rose and sought the dharen and ran my hand along his back. His thought touched mine, and it was a thought of what could be lost here and what might be saved.

Sereth said: “Keep your life, woman. Give us our clothes and our weapons and we will go our way. Chayin, you can come or stay, as you please.”

The cahndor’s brow furrowed. “It is to Othdaliee we must go.”

“No!”

“For Se’keroth, Sereth. And for Deilcrit, and for an easy night’s sleep at the Lake of Horns. Owkahen shows it clearly. You do not have to believe me. Look yourself.”

And Sereth squeezed his eyes shut and expelled a deep breath and said: “Estri?”

“Your will, as ever,” I replied.

“Chayin, if I must, I will accompany you to death’s door in search of an explanation for what you are doing.” The flat, cold words hit the cahndor like a backhanded slap. “But I will have one. And I will have it before either of us sleeps again. I have had about all the temporization and forereader’s gibberish that I am willing to take. Now, get us our belongings, and out of here.”

Chayin, in a thick voice, mumbled to Mahrlys to return us our things if she had them. Which she did, in that very chamber. And that led me to ponder how Chayin could have been so completely fooled by her, and even if he was fooled. And consideration of foolishness led me to mark the abrupt change in Mahrlys-iis-Vahais since last she and I had talked, when she had so demeaned such men as Chayin and everything for which they stood.

We used her bath and excused ourselves from her ministrations. I would rather bear my scars than chance some new acquaintance with the drugs of Benegua.

During that time Chayin announced that Mahrlys must accompany us. Sereth objected, and I thought they would, after all, end their lives trying each other’s strength when the black-haired girl herself entered the conversation.

“I cannot go through the forest. The whelts are supreme there right now, and may hold it indefinitely. My enemies—Kirelli—would spend a thousand lives to make me spend mine. I cannot, should not leave Dey-Ceilneeth. My death awaits me here.”

So I glimpsed what forces Mahrlys found herself ranged against, or thought I did, as she pulled a white robe about her and girded it with a child’s dagger and slipped her feet into rope sandals.

“You must go through there,” she said, and pointed to a hanging that could have concealed a doorway. “It is the quickest way to Othdaliee. Indeed, the only way you might survive the journey. And thence, there is no returning.” And she took a slow and wistful tour of her chamber, stroking the bosom of the whelt-headed deity on whose tray I had once sat.

“You must go,” repeated Chayin. Mahrlys made a motion of denial.

“My very thought,” agreed Sereth. “If nothing else, she will make a good hostage.”

At this Mahrlys, whose circuit of the chambers had drawn her near the outer door, dashed for it. Sereth, who was closer, dived after her, and I heard a muffled scream and in a moment she was stumbling toward the cahndor, lips drawn back from clenched teeth.

“You want her. She is your problem,” said Sereth, giving Mahrlys a final push that sent her sprawling against Chayin’s chest.

We withdrew then, to arm ourselves in what we had reclaimed and leave them to their muttered argument.

I was much strengthened by the simple act of pulling on my boots, in whose tops eight razor-moons nestled, and my belt, which held, beside the empty scabbard, a knife in sheath. Sereth had the twin of it. We have had them a very long time. They are talismans, the manifestation of our bond, and though occasionally we have lost them, each time they have been returned to us. Stroking the single red jewel set in the knife’s hilt, I was greatly eased.

There are many truths that elude me, but the truths of that day, life or death, are those with which I am most comfortable. It is the decision to do battle which is hard. The battle, seemingly, would come to us, which suited me. I readied myself and took stock of my internal strengths as the drug residue faded away.

I was not wrong. Neither was I so innocent as to imagine that Sereth did not know what approached while we lingered there, dressing at our ease, and Mahrlys engaged Chayin in an interminable altercation. If Sereth had wanted to avoid what then occurred, we would have forced an earlier exit. As it was, he leaned against the jamb of the arch that divided Mahrlys’ inner, less formal chamber from the outer, statued room of ruby and purple while Mahrlys detained Chayin most artfully. He even went so far as to whisper me to silence when I proposed to him that we hurry them. It is possible that he wanted Mahrlys to reveal herself, or that he sought to determine how deeply enwrapped in Wehrdom’s mists Chayin really was, or even only whether Chayin was a party to this delaying action. Sereth keeps his own counsel, still, upon those affairs.

Then, he only stiffened slightly against the jamb as the wehr-howl rose and the door, battered, reverberated and burst inward, sending debris flying, and Mahrlys in a wondrous imitation of surprise froze as Chayin dived for his sivord.

Inward burst the slavering throng, and Sereth grunted and the oncoming wave of fang and claw and six-fingered hand flowed around the edges of the hemispherical barrier that they could not see, but against which they bludgeoned and clawed and bit and butted in vain.

I heard a moan within Sereth’s periphery’s silent center, and I saw Mahrlys: no longer did she dissemble calm. She took upon her knees. Her nails clawed the carpet. Her eyes rolled.

She spat and hissed in some sibilant tongue and threw her head savagely. I almost softened to her then, as she fought so valiantly to shake off the wehr-rage all around. Louder and louder ululated the shrieks of the wehr-wind. She held her ears. Sereth dragged her rudely to her feet and slapped her thrice, and shoved her stumbling before him toward the hanging-obscured wall she had earlier indicated. The noise of the frustrated wehrs was deafening, half a thousand throats crying. And suddenly I was alone, facing a crowd of creatures who climbed the invisible barrier, their bodies describing its dimensions. Mouths pressed against it, distorted as if by glass. I turned once, full circle, and then fled to Chayin; who was himself swaying, transfixed, near the inner door.

I pulled him by the arm, and he snarled. I dropped my grip and stepped back.

“Chayin?”

Slowly, from a long distance, his taut stance loosened and he unclenched his fists. Behind his back a red-eyed ossasim leered at me

And fell inward, along with a score of others, as Sereth’s barrier flickered. And died in that instant, severed exactly in half, as Sereth regained his hold upon the molecular construct that served him.

Chayin and I stumbled through a rain of appendages and body fluids, and then we saw why Sereth’s field had flickered:

The hanging at the chamber’s back wall concealed a featureless door of black metal, which even as we spied it drew up into itself.

Sereth held a key of black metal in one hand and Mahrlys-iis-Vahais at arm’s length with the other. She struggled vainly, furiously, and I made sense of their interchange only briefly above the wehr-rage. It seemed Mahrlys had succumbed to her fellow creatures’ influence at last.

And then Chayin urged me within and Sereth dragged Mahrlys by the hair. With a soft hum the metal slab began its descent. When it was half down, the wehrs surged inward, no longer impeded by Sereth’s will. But none reached the descending iron slab but one, and he left his hand within, only.

I saw the ossasim hand severed; heard the scream, and then all was silent and dark as the space between the worlds.

I picked out Mahrlys’ ragged breathing, heard a rustle that clanked and by that identified Chayin. I was on the verge of speech, having decided that we must make our own light, when Mahrlys’ laugh, throaty, triumphant, rang in the dark space.

“Now it is done,” she chortled. “There is no way out of here, save Othdaliee. I have died, but Dey-Ceilneeth might yet live.”

I reflected that had we not been able to obviate space we might indeed be concerned by whatever unknown danger lay ahead.

There came to me in the dark a feral snarl, and a scratching sound like chalk on slate, followed by the sound of bodies grappling.

I did not ask, but closed my eyes and concentrated on enclosing some suitable constituents of the air in a circular pocket I conceived above my head. In making a miniature sun such as the one I constructed there, one utilizes emotion, almost as if thought were the catalyst for the controlled incandescence which technically is achieved by splitting a paired particle and not allowing the halves to form another pair by the spinning motion that the particle-pair conceives as balance. Instead, the halved particle rotates more and more frantically in its space, striving in vain to throw off a replacement twin. But instead of allowing the recreative force to culminate, we drain it off, and use the energy we thus milk for our purposes. This is the Shaper way.

The miniature sun, bobbing calmly above my head, twinkled brightly in the square, regular tunnel whose angle led downward and whose end was not in sight.

Mahrlys, crouched against the wall, had her face buried in her hands.

Chayin stood over her, nursing a bloody arm.

Sereth looked at them, shook his head, and gestured that we should continue down the corridor.

Chayin started to speak, thought better of it, and raised the girl. The corners of her mouth were dotted with froth.

I sidled past them in that corridor barely wide enough for three to stand abreast. My minuscule inferno bobbled behind me, throwing long distorted shadows down that rectangular channel driven deep into the earth.

I was just about to say that it seemed not a fearsome place to me, only dull, when on Chayin’s very heels a second rectangular slab thundered downward. When it hit the stone, the ground quivered.

Mahrlys, leaning heavily on Chayin’s arms, giggled.

“Cahndor, before I walk another step into this, I would hear some answers,” said Sereth. In his anger, he seemed to loom huge against the green-black stone. The tiny sun drifted toward him and rose to the ceiling behind his head.

“As you wish, Sereth,” said Chayin stiffly, distracted, his attention and concern upon Mahrlys, who drew away from him and turned her face to the stone.

“Wehrdom,” said Chayin, “is a society whose price of admission is first the ability to perform as a wehr, and second the severance of all other ties. A wehr who is a ptaiss has no kin altruism for other ptaiss, but for Wehrkin.”

“Chayin,” Sereth said warningly. “I am no supporter of Khys’s catalysis genetics.”

“Nor of Wehrdom. I can excuse the one no more than the other. You are catalysis genetics. Estri called you an atavist. That is true, in part. You are an altruistic atavist, so admixed that kin altruism predisposes you to all men; since few hold stronger relatedness to you than a total stranger. But you are deaf to truth. The catalysis cycle hinges upon the concept that man becomes progressively more gregarious until he has outstripped evolution’s ability to suit him for living with the restriction of such an altruistic overload. Then he either destroys that culture or leaves it by means of more accelerated technology that he may satisfy his mounting xenophobia, his territoriality, and the need to own and dominate which is ever paired with the genes which predispose to creativity. In a society of warriors, the pacifist may become for a time successful, for he will not be killed by the warrior by reason of his very reluctance to fight. Thus he will be evolutionarily successful in that he will reproduce. More and more the pacifists enter that society, until they outnumber the warriors and begin to constrain the very making of war. But when this happens, the warriors resurge, because in any fight they will triumph over the pacifist, who is neither disposed to fight nor very good at it. When the warrior is threatened, he fights; in fighting, he culls the pacifists. Only the most atavistically oriented, war-capable pacifists remain. The warriors become dominant in the gene pool, and the cycle starts again. It is vastly more complicated, of course. One must take into account what predispositions each group has in breeding, and the individuals capable of deception to the extent that they can for a short time triumph and themselves become dominant, until they are found out, at which time they recede—”