The Carnelian Throne (29 page)

And so, when they had eaten their fill, they began to scale Imnetosh in earnest. When the day was nearly spent, the clouds had begun to roll down from the mountain’s peak. All until the attack on the ledge that night was a blur in his memory. There was climbing, and the cold like knives in his lungs, and Kirelli’s warm breast against his neck.

Until they had found the ledge, until the wehrs of Eviduey had attacked once more. Well into the dawn they had fought them. And now Quendros slept like a baby.

He peered into the darkening thunderheads, surveyed the carcass-strewn ledge, and shooed Kirelli from his shoulder. Then he busied himself rolling the dead from their refuge, in case the wehrs came again to besiege them.

The noise woke Quendros, who groaned and staggered erect and emptied his waterskin, casting it aside in disgust.

Deilcrit wished that he too had water, and then wished it no more as the icy rain began.

Hailstones pelted him as the sky came alight with jagged brightness; thunder clapped its palms over his ears so that they rang.

Kirelli squawked into the rising wind that drove the sleet and hail into their eyes, and scuttled into a cranny in the shallow cave’s rear.

Ouendros, with a bellow about folk that had not the sense to seek shelter in the rain, followed suit.

They sat long, shivering, in the dreary dark. Kirelli’s feathers were dotted with icy balls, and his own teeth were chattering, when the whelt screeched and humped its wings and took flight, bursting out of the cave.

He jerked to his feet, slid on the icy stone, and skidded nearly to ledge’s lip, over which peeked the red-in-red eyes of three ossasim.

One grabbed him by the ankle before he could stop himself. Together they tumbled into space.

He grabbed the wehr’s wings, hugging it to him, and when they landed on an outcropping of rock it was the ossasim who was underneath.

He disengaged himself from the corpse, staggering to his feet just in time to draw his blade as the two other ossasim plummeted down toward him through the fiercely gusting rain.

Lightning exploded in the sky. He raised the blade. The ossasim pair folded their wings and dived after him.

He swung the sword blindly above his head, catching one ossasim’s wing and slicing it through. There was a scream, a rush of air as the ossasim lost control and crashed into the mountainside. Then the other ossasim hit him, feet first, in the chest. As its talons raked him and he went down beneath its onslaught, the blade flew spinning from his grasp. Lightning blew the sky apart once more, caught the spinning sword in its blue-white fingers, caressed it. Its length enflamed, it tumbled groundward.

Then the ossasin’s fangs snapped near his throat and the rock came up under him with concussive force and he wrapped his legs around the ossasim’s trunk and shoved back on that mighty jaw with both hands. Grimly, red lights crowding his vision, he dug his fingers into the spittly chin, thrusting forward with his arms while pulling inward with his legs. There was a loud snap, and the ossasim lay quiet on him.

It was some time before he pushed it off. It was even longer before his lungs ceased gulping air. Then he sat, shakily, to consider his wounds. Through the coarsely woven jerkin his chest and belly were scored in twelve diagonal lines. But for his clothing’s protection, the thing would have laid open his belly.

Something within his right hip twinged. His left arm was badly scratched where it had only been half-healed, and the sleeve of the tunic was torn away. He ripped off the rest of the flap in disgust, and used it to bind up the arm.

Then he assayed the climb down to where the sword lay in a narrow crevice ringed with ice.

He squatted down there, studying the blade that lay in a pool of slush. The metal shone dull, grayish, but otherwise seemed intact. The gemstone hilt was not even scratched. Even as he watched, the slush that had been melted by the hot metal began to crust. Satisfied that any heat the blade retained must by now be dissipated, he picked it up, dried it as well as he could in the continuing sleet, and thrust it in the makeshift scabbard.

He was just rising, cautiously, intent upon the throbbing twinge in his hip, when Quendros joined him, blowing loudly.

“You are by far the most charmed man I have ever met. That lightning was meant for you. I yelled. Did you hear me? No. Well, I did. Lightning loves nothing like the taste of metal. You are bewitched. Anyone else would have been fried.”

“Is that why you climbed all the way down here, to tell me that?” He kneaded his hip tenderly with his fingers, but found no spot where external pressure caused pain.

“No,” said Quendros brusquely. “How’d the blade fare?”

“Well enough,” he replied, looking curiously at Quendros’ drenched face, which bore an expression he could not name.

“Well, son. Let’s go get you installed in that carnelian throne of yours. Nothing is going to stop us now.”

“That is not wholly true. Kirelli says we must fear Wehrdom until we make that first ridge.” And he pointed upward, to where he thought that ridge might be, hiding behind the storm.

“Ignorant savage,” Quendros chided, offering Deilcrit a countenance pursed like a closed fist and kicking desultorily at the dead ossasim. “Se’keroth is like a weathervane. It does not create a climatic change, but it does indicate one.”

It took Deilcrit a moment to realize that Se’keroth was the name Quendros had given to the sword he bore. Then he gave Quendros a blank stare.

Quendros, upon receipt of this, grumbled that they had best be making for the ridge hidden behind the midday dark, if they would face the real dark safely.

Deilcrit craned his neck in vain for sight of Kirelli, then agreed that they had better start climbing. Hitching himself up between two rocks, he asked Quendros what he meant about the sword being a weathervane.

Quendros asked him if he could read. To which he answered no, and Quendros pronounced that in that case it was no use trying to explain.

But he knew that something in the morning’s occurrences had greatly heartened Quendros, and if it was the dunking of the sword in a slushy puddle that had caused the change in Quendros’ manner (and he strongly suspected that it was), the change was still to his benefit. And he respected Quendros’ knowledge. So he decided that if the sword would in some way aid him, he would let it though he did not believe in material things such as swords having desires or goals or significance of the like with which Quendros seemed to credit the strange blade.

When they had gained the ledge once more, Deilcrit asked Quendros if he did not believe in Mnemaat the Unseen. And Quendros replied quite solemnly: “Not only do I believe in him, I have
seen
him.”

At which Deilcrit made a sign to ward off blasphemy, and Quendros laughed and said, “It is true. Fifteen, no, sixteen years ago. I can’t tell you on what errand—gave my word, y’know—but he’s magnificent, a great golden thing with the face everyone’s father should have had.”

“In the flesh?” said Deilcrit as Kirelli’s wings beat around his head, and with a deep sigh he extended his arm to the whelt.

“In the flesh; clasped his hand.”

“But Mnemaat is the Unseen!”

“Now he is, and that’s a fact. Look, Deilcrit, when you’re in a position, you hire me and I’ll tutor you in history.”

“Do you know something about Imca-Sorr-Aat that I do not?” asked Deilcrit, bending his head away from Kirelli’s insistent attempts to give him a message.

“Nothing that will help you. If I were to think of something, you would be the very person I’d tell.” There was something icy and deliberating in his tone that Deilcrit had never before heard there.

His feelings hurt by he knew not what, he took the message from Kirelli, who urged all speed, and with a curt word to Quendros started up the boulder-strewn ridge.

The rock and dirt and weeds blurred by. He climbed mechanically, surely, though he had never before been on Mt. Imnetosh, did not know her. When he had climbed with great attention, in the beginning, he had been dizzied and fearful. So he rested his attention elsewhere, and Kirelli sometimes rode his shoulder and sometimes flew around his head, and he thought of Mahrlys-iis-Vahais and what had passed between them.

The swoop of her white throat, her soft curves along which the light rode as he stripped her of her veils, the surrender he had not expected, that which his lengthy exploration of her had precipitated, all proceeded before his inner sight as he climbed. The dreams of her that had tortured his youth had not prepared him for the reality. Nor for the questions she had asked, or the rare pleasures, of which he had been previously ignorant, she demanded from him. And she had bade him kneel down before her, saying “Do you not show respect before her to whom you are sworn?”

A cold had chilled him then, causing his passion to shrink and then blow away on the wind of her words. It was while she interrogated him that he determined that the day would come when their positions would reverse. She had cheated him of his dream, cheapened it. She had drained from him his strength. He grunted and pulled himself by the arms over a chasm between two boulders, and up onto the shelf above.

There he rested, swinging his legs, while he awaited Quendros, looking into the receding storm clouds pushed eastward by the ocean winds. It was because of Mahrlys, more than any other thing, that he had accepted Kirelli’s proposal. All his life, those above him had asked him to do nothing, to be quiet, to be passive and follow orders and live the life he had stolen from Mnemaat’s henchman without letting on that he truly should have died in Nehedra’s dirt. Within him burned proscribed fires, needs which his station in life could not fill. Kirelli had held out to him a purpose, a striving, something more than the spitting of an occasional guerm. Kirelli had something to gain that was not yet revealed, he was sure; but the whelt had proposed that they
do
something, that thing for which, said Kirelli, only Deilcrit was fit. He mattered to the whelt. He had never mattered to anyone but Parpis, and to Parpis he had been a child to be protected, even when he stood twice the old man’s height.

He did not matter to Mahrlys yet.

Then he thought of Mahrlys’ tears, and Heicrey’s, and reflected that his touch always seemed to bring women tears. All but the spirit power Estri, who was not a woman.

And thinking of women brought him to Amnidia, and her pronouncement that he would feed Quendros to Wehrdom if she let him. The ancient crone’s face hovered before him. He shook it away and extended his hand to Quendros, just levering himself over the canted boulders.

He had thought Quendros might care for him. Now he was not so sure. But he resolved that the older man would not end in a wehr’s belly upon his account.

“Why so solemn, Deilcrit? Lose your whelt? Sun’s about due. We’ll both feel better with the ice melted off our bones.”

“Did you see Eviduey leading the wehrs who attacked us on the shale?”

“No,” grunted Quendros, shifting until his legs, too, dangled off the shelf’s overhung edge. “But I don’t doubt that he’s about.” Quendros peered upward, around his head. “Most wehr-masters who’ve become high as the Third Hand tend to stay pretty much in council. Eviduey has always been out in the field, himself. He likes it, I guess. The Byeks—the human ones, that is—all met in Bachryse the year before Nothrace was razed, and they put a price on his black head that would set a man and his children and their children free from drudgery.”

“Are the human rulers of the outer provinces those for whom you work?”

“On occasion. I try to stay self-employed, on the whole. There’s plenty for a man to do, if injustice concerns him.” Quendros gave Deilcrit a sidelong glance.

“It is revolution, then, that you are about.”

“Survival, more truly. There are not enough men left to launch a successful revolt.”

The way he said it made Deilcrit know that he had well studied the question, and also that he did not believe the answer.

He said slowly, “If I am successful ... I would do what I could for your folk.”

At that Quendros did not laugh, but only locked eyes with him and nodded gravely, telling Deilcrit more than he wanted to know about Quendros thereby.

Then the soft touch of Kirelli’s wehr-thought brushed him, and without another word he scrambled to his feet and began the difficult ascent to the ridge top.

The boulders were loose and the vegetation sparse and the rock iced slippery. When he could finally lie prone upon the ridge’s summit, he rested, eyes closed, until Quendros’ muttered exclamation made him lift his head and peer through his tangles at what lay enfolded in Imnetosh’s skirts.

Othdaliee gleamed sullenly in the thin air. She was hewn into the V where Imnetosh’s final sheer ascent met the ridge’s lee. Through her middle a river ran silver, and in the middle of the river was a gigantic amber bubble, dark-centered, like the eye of a dead fish. Around this bubble, on either side of the river, rose squat rectangular towers of shiny black, like the glassy stuff he had seen in Dey-Ceilneeth. Each of the twelve towers was connected by an elevated, enclosed span that arched over the river and the amber bubble set into it.

In the whole city of Othdaliee, nothing moved.

“By Laore’s eyeteeth,” said Quendros on an indrawn breath. “All men should see this before they die.” The reverence that choked his voice was incomprehensible to Deilcrit, for it was a reverence of man’s art.

They descended the ledge in a shower of tumbling rocks until they reached a staircase, invisible from above, cut into the stone. The stairs were very wide and fanned out from the mountain. The steps were worn round and slick with the years, and in their corners fat black spiders spun elegant webs.

The wind with its icy chill howled over the ridge, but its claws could not touch them in the sheltered ravine.

Where the green rock stopped and the black slick stuff began, Kirelli waited. He sat upon the head of a statue whose whelt’s visage rested upon a woman’s body. It was one of the first pair of many enshadowed by the overhanging staircase by way of which they had descended.