I had climbed back to Los Morryan, handed the key to the Lady, and re-crossed the square outside Ker Morrya’s gate, when I regained my will.
Waking up? No, for I had never slept. Escaping a glass cell? No, for glass you can smash for yourself. Growing up in a single breath? But a baby lacks a man’s coherent memory. I could remember everything. But now it all had meaning. And I was free to make a response.
The passersby must have thought me a lunatic, running full-pelt in the street. The Treasury scribes certainly did, for I barged straight back to the Vault-keeper’s room and on down the long flight of steps into those dim tunnels, past the torch we had left in a bracket, snatching it as I tore into the dank crypt where that other will had directed me, yelling, “What happened? For the love of anything you like, what happened up there?”
He stood as we had left him, back to the square rough wall blocks whose faces ran sopping red in the torch-glow, red as the pools on the uneven floor. I had done my duty well. A long fetter ran to each manacle, another to the leg-iron on each ankle. He could hardly have lain down, had there been inducement. But whatever we did, he had recovered his own guard. His eyes caught the light, narrow, sparkling green.
“To me?” he said. “Or to you?”
“To, to—” I found then what it means to grow incoherent with rage.
“You were given a Command. Not pure Chake, a blend of some sort. There’s something odd about all you Assharrans, it must come from—up there. You’re all permanently half under Letharthir—half mesmerized.”
“Mesmerized!”
“Bewitched, then.” His brows came down. “Did you never think, on the way here, to ask what you were doing? To say to yourself, Here’s a very strange fellow, peculiar powers, quite unknown quantity, could be highly dangerous—so I’ll just conduct him straight to my ruler’s doorstep and see what he’ll do?”
“I, I—”
I stopped as it hit me, winding as a door in the face. All that way, clean across Assharral. The Captain of the Lady’s Guard. With a wizard under my shield-arm, worrying about spies and the doings of the Sathellin.
“Then, when you do get a Command, you go clean under.” The eyes twinkled. “Like sleepwalkers, you were.”
“And you, you cackling idiot!” It is wonderful what liberties affection permits. “You let her get away with it!”
The laughter snuffed. “To stop her,” he said flatly, “I would have had to kill you all.”
I gasped. He nodded. “Or challenge her, and try to break the Command. There wasn’t time.”
Water plopped. I heard the scurry of a rat. Then my own voice, sounding shrunken, small.
“Could you have—done it?”
“You mean, was I able? Oh, yes. Was I willing? Never. No.”
I stared. He sounded quiet, stern, pure adamant.
“I will never,” he said, “save myself by killing innocent men.”
The torch guttered between us in the sodden air. He had had the power to win. He had chosen defeat, shameful bondage, rather than abuse that power. For the sake of his enemy’s tools. And whether she understood his power or not, whether or not she had gambled on his integrity, the Lady had been ready to see us slain. For malice, revenge. Victory.
I should have agreed. Every soldier knows his life may be the price of winning, and counts winning the end that justifies all means. And unquestioning obedience, unswerving fidelity, are the corners of a soldier’s earth. But mine was no longer firm.
“She,” I said, “just wanted to win.”
He nodded, silent. Even now, he would not stoop to calumny.
“However she did it. . . .” Slowly, a conviction formed and firmed to intent in my mind. “I’m going back to get that key.”
“Alkir!” His voice spun me round and his eyes were white-hot crystal. “You’ll do nothing of the sort!”
“But—but—you said yourself, it’s against Math! It must be stopped! You can’t sit here and refuse to—”
“I refuse,” he said between his teeth, “to get you killed.”
“Killed!”
“Wake up, man. Stop thinking you’re a big brave sword-swinging soldier and she’s just a slip of a girl. If she let you up there, you couldn’t do a thing. She could walk you straight over that parapet. And she would.
“Don’t drop the torch,” he went on after a moment, rather hastily, but I knew the smile had revived. “I’m not that fond of the dark.”
I groaned. He, I could hear, smiled. “When Fengthira taught me Lathare I spent two days tied on a rope-end. This is just damnably wet. And uncomfortable.”
“And,” I said bleakly, “there’s no way out.”
He was testing the manacles. “I don’t . . . think . . . Axynbrarve is up to these. If it were, I’d have to cut down a wall of sleepwalkers upstairs. And probably the whole guard outside.” He gave me a cryptic look. “Including you.
“And don’t get sacrificial,” he anticipated me. “I loathe sacrifice.”
“Then what in the name of your Math,” I bellowed, “is this?”
“Oh, this is tactics,” he answered cheerfully.
Looking round, I saw a fetter-ring, and stuck up the torch. “I don’t even know the ensigns, and I’m in the middle of a war. Do you think you could explain, at least? To begin with, what was that—thing?”
“Not a thing.” For the first time he showed reverence. “That was Los Velandryxe Thira. The Well”—reverence deepened—“of Wisdom’s Light.”
“But what is it?”
A fetter cramped the familiar scrub at his hair. “Nobody really knows. Fengthira tells a very old story that it’s a drop of water from Los Therystar—do you know the Ystanyrx, the Great Tales? No. Anyway, there’s one about the Xaira, the separation of aedryx and men. The Mothers of men and aedryx were sitting by Los Therystar, the Well of the Purple Flowers, when Arva Aedryx saw in its water the first vision in Yxphare. Foresight, you’d say. The Mother of Men laughed and Arva Aedryx struck her blind. So ever since, aedryx and men have been”—an old wound spoke in his voice—“different.”
He looked at my face, and shrugged. “Math knows where Los Therystar was, if it was at all. The Tales are truth, not history. And nobody knows the origin of Los Velandryxe, because at some stage some enterprising soul put a Ruanbraxe, a mind-shield, on it. You can’t see it with the Sights, not with Pharaone or Phathire, and Fengthira says Yxphare’s the same. One reason why that Sight’s so dangerous.”
“Sights?”
“Pharaone is farsight. How I checked the mare this morning. Phathire is vision of the past. Yxphare, future-sight, is a gift, it can’t be taught. Because of the mind-shield, I didn’t know what Moriana had. I thought she was just Ammath. Evil. An aedr gone rotten. For her line, it would be in character.”
“Never mind her line. What about this—this—heirloom?”
“Um. . . . The lower arts, like the Sights, and the Commands, even A’sparre, deal with minds. The higher ones are different. Wreve-lan’x, Axynbrarve, then the harder ones, Wreviane, Wrevurx, that’s weather-work—”
“You can control the weather?”
“Oh, yes.” He was quite matter-of-fact. “I could have turned that storm in Thangar. But Wrevurx is the first art where Velandryxe really matters. Wisdom. Justice, judgment, and Math.”
My head swam. “I thought Math was respect for that-which-is?”
“Part of it, yes. The rule part. Just as a storm’s part of that-which-is. Before you meddle with it, you have to judge if your reason’s pressing enough. To push a storm about may drown someone here, or ruin someone there, who needed rain for his crops. It may spoil remoter things.” His look was unfathomable. “So you must use judgment as well as power. And guide the judgment by Math.”
“Respect for that-which-is.” I clung to that talisman. “But where does this Well come in?”
“At the very top. The supreme art is Wreve-lethar. The old aedryx never told prentices about that at all. You had to be a master to know and a Velandyr so much as to think of trying it. And of the handful who tried, only one, so far as I know, managed to succeed.”
“But what did he actually do?”
He grew very quiet. “Wreve-lethar means, to control the dream. And what aedryx call the Dream is—what you call the Universe.”
My head spun right round. I grabbed for solid stone. When the Lady said, “You could change the entire world,” I had thought she meant something ordinary like conquering it.
“You need wisdom,” he was saying, “and more skill than I’ll ever have, and the sort of strength I only dream about. Most aedryx said it was for the Pharaon, the creators, and forgot it. A few tried, and lost their minds. But one succeeded. And he changed the Dream. He brought Math into the world.”
“Who . . . was he?”
“Th’Iahn.” He spoke the name with care, respect, but not reverence. “The first Heagian. Founder of the Flametree, from which both my and Moriana’s lines were a branch. . . .” His eyes came to sudden life. “But I’ll show you. Look here.”
His eyes seemed to swallow me into gulfs of black. Then a tiny world rushed toward me, I was in it. Part of it.
He was on his feet looking straight at me across a work-table cluttered with mementoes, gems, bird-skulls, artifacts. His coppery hair flung back from his temples as with the wind of flight, his eyes bore down on me like runaway green fires, leaping from that volcanic face. “You’ll want and wish as you like,” he hissed, “but I say you will!”
I literally tumbled backward from that impact. Beryx looked down on me sprawling amid the puddles with a somewhat wry grin.
“One of his happier moments. Makes you wonder how he could sire Math?”
I reformed my wits. “So he used Wreve-lethar and—and changed the world by dreaming Math?” He nodded, I scrambled up. “At least my outposts are set. But how does this Well come in?”
“Wreve-lethar’s like any other art. There has to be a focus. A mind, a woodheap, a horse. When you try to change the Dream, Los Velandryxe is where you look.”
The torch popped, water dripped. He stared back at me, not trying to soften the significance.
“Yes” he said. “In the wrong hands—with the wrong intent—it could be the most terrible thing on earth.”
“But—why didn’t you take it when she—”
“No!” It was violent. “In Math you do only as you must. The temptation to alter things, to—” The sweat sprang on his forehead. “If you did master the Well, it could rot you as easily as power. Easier. Especially if you follow Math. The hardest lesson I ever had to learn is not to act. To let alone, if not well alone. To have the Well. . . .” He shuddered. “No, I can’t—I won’t think of it!”
“So,” I was still catching up his line of march, “she offered it to you for evil. Ammath. Is that it?”
“She doesn’t know what she’s doing, Alkir.” It was almost pleading now. “Four knows how she came by it, it was lost in one of the upsets three generations before Berrian, and he was my ninth forefather. Fengthira thought it was lost forever. She told me about Wreve-lethar, but just in explaining Math. Moriana doesn’t know. She’s aedric blood, but she’s blind ignorant. She’s learnt to tinker with a few things,” again that adept’s scorn, “like slowing time to keep herself young, and mastering Assharral—she picked the rest from my thought. She’s a child. A child playing with a wound-down catapult.”
I caught my breath. “With the world sitting in its target eye!”
Then Assharral’s bondage, ten guard captains, my ignoble subjection, his defeat by his own integrity, all burst in my head at once. “A child! No child would—no child could—have you mislaid your wits?”
“Now don’t start feeling your wounded vanity all over again.” The grin revived. “Mine’s a lot more wounded than yours.”
After a moment I said, “What do you mean to do?”
His face wore the strangest look. Airy, willful, save for the lack of malice it might have been the Lady’s own intransigence.
“Oh, I intend to . . . wait.”
“Wait! You—she—I—what will your Fengthira say to that?”
He chuckled. A resonant, acerbic feminine voice snapped, “ ‘I told thee naught but trouble would come of tha gallivanting. Tha wast ever one to stick tha hand in a hornets’ nest and wonder that t’was stung.’ No,” he resumed in his normal voice, “distance means nothing to Lathare.” Ruefully, “And she’s probably right. I couldn’t resist teasing Moriana at the end, and look where it’s landed me.”
I ignored this last frivolity. “She won’t help? What sort of a friend—”
“Alkir, Alkir. She follows Math. Do only what you must. If she came raving in here firing thunderbolts, who knows what she might spoil?” The chuckle answered my thoughts. “No, this isn’t bad enough for a Must. Not yet. What can you do? Um. You were allowed down here once, so . . . I could do with something to eat. And something to sit on. And—most definitely—something to throw at the rats.”
* * * * *
Part of me must have outmarched my chaotic thoughts, for as I blinked onto the street a black flash at one eye-corner spun me round with a fistful of surcoat and my sword at an unprotected throat.
“Eh, ow, Cap’n, whoa!” Sivar’s heavy face was twisting ludicrously above my grasp. “I ain’t done nothing, sir!”
“Oh.” I let go. It was all triggered and light, as in a battle’s heart. “Yes. I—what are you doing here?”
He squirmed. Then he addressed the pavement. “Sir . . . is it true? Our wizard—he's been chained up in there?”
Our wizard. I hardly noted it. Nor did I marvel anew at the wonders of barrack espionage. I was merely thankful for them.
“Walk away. Normally.” We paced downhill. “It’s true. The Lady—” I stopped. Our wizard. But how far did that go?
“He’s detained.” An eye-corner on his face told me all I needed. “You’re off duty? Buy some food, and something rat-proof to put it in. No, it’s not the lap of luxury down there. A stool. Candles. Water-bottle. If you can find it, some,” I all but said Everran, “Sathel wine. Keep things small. We’ll have to lug it past the whole Treasury. Meet at my house. You know it?”
He nodded, eyes glistening. Intrigue, illicit intrigue, and with an officer. He would glory in it till his dying day.
Callissa was posted in earshot of our door. At my footstep she flew out, face transparently thankful at seeing me alone. “Thank the Lady, he’s gone! It’s all over. Now we can—” She stopped.
Taking her elbow, I made for our living room. Unsurprised, I noted it was already evening. Soon the twins would be in from play.
“Do we have a couple of spare blankets? And where’s my campaign cloak?”
She did not move. “I thought it was finished,” she said.
“He’s in the Treasury vault. In chains. Can I just walk away?”
Her face was flint. I had never seen such a wall in it. “You should.”
I opened my mouth. She cried, “You’re Captain of the Guard, Alkir!”
“So?”
“So leave it alone! Let the Lady see to—”
“Callissa . . . listen! She told us to arrest him. He could have killed us all.” She went white. “He told me he would never save himself by killing innocent men. Can I walk away from that?”
“You should! You must! If she chained him he’s bad! I knew it, I knew he was, mad and bad and—”
“Callissa, she ordered us to arrest him! She wouldn’t have cared if we had been killed!”
“You’d be doing your duty, wouldn’t you? You always said that was what mattered. That it was all a soldier would ask!”
“Yes. But. . . . Obey orders, yes. But how if they’re not right?”
“Not right! They were the Lady’s, weren’t they?”
“Yes, but—suppose they were still wrong?”
“How could they be wrong? What are you talking about?”
“If they were . . . not good?” Ammath, he had said. How could I explain, with only the vaguest newborn notion of what its own disciple admitted to imperfectly understanding, this intangible, unintelligible Math?
Her face was brittle with scorn and strain and hostility. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Callissa. . . .” Never had I so desired the gift of words. “He’s an aedr. A wizard. He has powers. Magic, if you like. But he won’t use it, unless he thinks it’s right. He—”
“Right! Oh, you’re besotted! He’s sorcelled you! He can’t help you, you can’t help him, he’s just a mad magician and he’ll ruin you, you’ll lose the captaincy, the—”
“I don’t want the captaincy!”
“Oh, Alkir! No money, no house, no rank—the disgrace—the wives whispering—the whole school jeering Zem and Zam—”
“To the pits with the wives, and the brats as well! Do you tell me you’re afraid of that?”
“No! No!” Suddenly she screamed it, gabbling at me. “What about the Lady? She’ll never forget it, she’ll take you like the others, you’ll go up there and never come back—”
“Then I’ll have done my duty! My real duty, for once!”
“And what about me? What about the boys? A criminal’s widow—evicted—begging—stoned—the boys—” Her face crumpled. “Oh, I wish we’d never left Frimmor! I wish we were home and s-safe!”
With shame I admit she cried a good ten heartbeats before I could reach out for her.
“Be easy,” I told her hair. Bitterly I envied those who had no hostages, no bonds to shackle their honor at such a pass. “Don’t worry. I won’t . . . leave the Guard. Only—where’s my campaign cloak?”
She drew away. At the beaten apathy in her face I made to draw her back. But she said, “No. What does it matter? You won’t listen to me.”
* * * * *
Our passage drew scared glances but no opposition from the Treasury scribes. As we unloaded, the prisoner raised his brows at Sivar, grinned, “Don’t tell me you’ve never been in cells?” turned to me, thanks clearly on his lips. And stopped.
“We’ll be back tomorrow.” I ignored his expression. “The Treasury’s locked at night.” You were allowed down here once, he had said. It was pure but determined assumption that we would be allowed again. “We’ll bring more candles. I’m sorry about the bucket, and the straw. So late, we could get nothing else.”
He merely nodded. The pity had grown clearer. Then he said quietly, “We all have our own choices. Don’t blame her for putting your sons first.”
I opened and shut my mouth. Then I felt an easing, as when a bandage is slacked over a swollen wound. Tossing out the blankets, sure he would read the mock-taunt rightly, I said, “Sleep well.”
* * * * *
A Guard Captain has duties, whatever his allegiance. Parades, inspections, escorting the Lady abroad. The old world engulfed me, emphasizing the change at home, driving in the knowledge that I am not made to serve two masters, and that a choice would have to be made. I almost welcomed the furtive meetings to enlist more of the escort as provisioners.
“Cheerful, he is,” Sivar reported at the third noon-watch, face knotted in wonderment. “Been killing rats by the hundred. Reckons he’ll charge mouser’s fees to cover stabling the mare.”
“The mare!” I had quite forgotten her. “I’d best go down and pay something before they turn her out in the street.”
I entered through the long post-house yard with its ranks of seemingly disembodied horse-heads, meaning to inspect her first for myself. But the whole inn force was moiling about out there, ostlers, tapsters, scullions, cooks and hysterical chambermaids. I paused to retreat. Then I saw the red streams oozing amid their shoes and tore into the crowd as into a battle-front.
The mare lay flat on her side on the cobblestones, neck outstretched and belly mounded up in that pathetic posture of a horse’s death. The blood was on their shoes, in the cobble crannies, in her shimmering gray coat, on her unshod hooves. A slash behind the jaw had all but beheaded her. Cleaver at least, said my soldier’s past, before I saw the human body pinned under her, the mashed mess that had been a face, and the weapon beyond. A cleaver it had been.
I had no need to ask. They had already fastened on the black surcoat, the badge of succor, authority.
“Went mad she did—quiet as a cow ’n then kicked down the door—put us out o’ the yard! Clean up the waterpipe—Tem had at her with a pitchfork, savaged him—yah, over there, near to—not the street, the kitchen—maids screeching fit to bust—she went right in! Kicked over the spits ’n the cook had a giggling fit—two barons o’ beef, clean ruined! Roosting on the drainpipe—Tath there back from the butcher—‘Watch out,’ I said, I said, ‘she’ll butcher you!’—‘Butcher!’ he says, ’n off for the cleaver—join the army he was going to—at her full tilt—swipe—no, she knocked him flat—never, he got her first swing—’n then. . . .”
They all went quiet at once. Battle, murder, sudden death. It was too alien to their little world. I looked with them at the dead. I should have grieved for the man, my own kind, my own breed, my own blood. But I could only see her on the road, gay and docile and beautiful, and I grieved for the mare.
A portly aproned person was forging up, outrage well in advance of sorrow in his eye. I heard myself promising reparation for damage done by the beast of an imperial prisoner, arranging a funeral, someone to tell the family, check their finances, provision for the savaged groom. And the mare. “Get the knacker’s mules,” I was saying harshly. “I’ll show him where to go.”
She left a long smear of blood down the hill among plunging horses and scandalized carriage folk, through the gate, along the harbor, into the forest quiet. I grieved for the damage that the dragging did. In a clearing amid the helliens I made the knacker’s man help with all the familiar details of a field-pyre. Then I poured on a whole jar of hethel oil and waited, as an honor guard should, till only embers remained.
* * * * *
At the Treasury I caught the last porter and bullied the keys out of him. Then I went, slower and slower, into the tunnels below.
The vault was in darkness, total, impenetrable. As I checked, aghast, a sharp green flare became a candle-flame. When he said, “Over here,” the tone told me he already knew.
He was hunched on his stool amid the straw, my old campaign cloak’s faded brown and field-green blotches bizarre over the blue robe. The candle displayed his face. Deep-lined, drawn to the bone. But quiet. Perhaps the touchstone of an aedr is such acceptance of hard reality, but I knew it had not been easily won.
I sat down in the straw. Water ticked. Presently, in a voice remote beyond sorrow, he said, “Thank you, Alkir.”
Words were still superfluous. Queries remained. At last, he answered them.
“She used the Well. Broke my Wreve-lan’x. I was a fool not to expect something like this.”
“You mean, you’re not vicious enough!” I could not help myself. “Do you still say she’s a child? That this isn’t a Must?”
He shook his head. Our common pain made me lash at him. “What will your Fengthira say to this?”
He looked up. His eyes told me he had broken his own news, with a hurt to which mine was trivial.
“She said, ‘Tha’lt have need to think on the words. Vengeance is sweet. But wisdom chooses salt.’ ”
“In the name of—” I found I had shot to my feet. “Are you both mad? An innocent beast! That never asked to be brought here! That trusted you! That—and you made a song and dance over Gevos!”
He did not protest or retaliate or excuse himself. He merely bent his head.
“All this talk of Math,” I raged, “and you can’t protect one poor poxy beast! If I—” And then the straw fell out from under my feet.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. . . .”
“No.” He did not look up. “That was all true, yes. It wasn’t unjust. It was what I’d already told myself, yes. It’s no harder because you say it again. Don’t blame yourself. No, don’t.” He raised his head. The candle defined that laughter’s resurrection, painful, unquenchable. “There’s been enough blaming around here.”
What could even begin to make amends for such crass, blundering imbecility? I had a vision of the night ahead, alone with nothing to do but think. I sat down again in the straw, hauling my own cloak closer round my ribs.
“No,” he said. “Go home. And don’t argue. Callissa will be expecting you.” It was an order. A general’s order, permitting no demur.
* * * * *
When I woke the mare was in my mind, like a bruise, more hurtful the morning after the blow. I went on duty because there was no alternative, and Sivar met me by the guardroom, saying for the benefit of a passing pentarch, “Sir, about my leave. . . .” The pentarch receded. Worry mushroomed in his face. “Sir—something wrong. He wants another blanket. Made it a joke, said no exercise. But I don’t like the look of ’im.”
My heart sank. Parade, guard-change, recruits, a mess dinner that night. “Buy the blanket.” I disgorged fendellin. “I’ll try to come down sometime.”
“Sometime,” was late afternoon. The tunnels were dank and chill as ever, I felt the cold invade my flesh as I went. He was hunched on his stool again, but now the candle was lit, he had all three blankets over my campaign cloak, and before I reached the light I knew he was shivering.
“Killing rats with Axynbrarve,” he said ruefully, “doesn’t keep you very warm.”
“The Morhyrne’s forge wouldn’t warm you down here.” His arms were huddled close, the classic pose of a man in cold too bitter to remedy. I could see the fine, continual tremble of his shoulders under the rough gray wool. I doffed my parade cloak, black velvet with the moontree stitched in silver. He shook his head. I said roughly, “Don’t be a fool,” and he forced a laugh.
“I doubt,” he said, “it will do much good.”
After a moment I said, “Look here.”
His face fairly jerked up. Then he gave a somewhat shaken laugh.
“Nothing. That’s just how Fengthira begins a Command.” His eyes were a little puzzled. “What is it, then?”
“Fever.” Though I am no physician, Phaxia had shown me that glassy, slightly unfocussed look too often to err. “Pains in your joints?” He nodded, taken aback. “Headache?” Another nod. “And cold. Or you feel cold.” To be sure, I touched his temple. “And you’re hot enough to shape horseshoes on. Swamp fever. From Lisdrinos, probably.” Silently, I groaned. A physician, sickroom gear, the care such fevers demand. . . . Scrambling arrangements in thought, I took some time to absorb his words.
“Probably not.” He sounded diffident, apologetic. And quite, quite sure.
“Eh?” I said.
He shifted his right arm. I did not have to be told that slow, forced movement had hurt.
“Hawge . . . the dragon . . . left a sting hole in my ribs. Sometimes it aches, swells up, that sort of thing. It’s aching now. But—I don’t think that’s all.”
A cold knot formed in my belly. “You mean. . . .”
“It would be logical.” He was carefully calm. “First the mare, then me. And with the Well, anything’s possible.”
I swallowed. Hard. Then, feeling hunted, I said, “We have to start somewhere, and it looks like fever to me.” I took up the water-bottle. “To begin with, you can drink this. All of it!”
We would need more water, I thought. Heat. A couple of braziers, coal, someone to stand watch, lay him down. . . . Looking at the chains I groaned again. They were fastened side-running, left wrist and ankle to the left, right side opposite. To lie straight at any angle was impossible. Smith’s tools, then. A physician. “I’ll see to the rest. Don’t worry—Well or no Well, we’ll get you through.”
“Sir,” he said dutifully, and produced the ghost of a grin.
* * * * *
It took a long time to organize help, heat, cudgel my brain for other sickroom needs, browbeat a night pass out of the Treasury. It took so long I was waiting by the mess when Evis returned, splendid in full-dress uniform, a frown joining his thick black brows.
“Sir.” His manner warned me what to expect. “There’s not a leech’ll touch it in Zyphryr Coryan. By the end they wouldn’t let me in their doors.”
You should have expected it, I told myself. “We’ll have to do without them.” He shot me a dubious glance. “I’ll have to do without them.” I gave the thronged mess a rather wild look. Candlelight, armor, decorations shimmered back. The moontree’s silver orb had developed a leer. “Did Amver find the smith?”
He said blankly, “Smith?”
“To knock those shackles off. I told you. Did he find one?”
Evis put a hand to his brow and looked decidedly odd. “Sir, I . . . remember you told me. Now. But I’d—forgotten it.”
With breath drawn to scour him I stopped. Evis was a second wasted on the Guard. In the six months of my command he had never forgotten anything, from horses’ tail-ribbons for a big parade to the details of a route-march’s provisioning. “No matter.” She, I thought viciously, saw to this as well. “We’d best get this over with.”
If a dinner took longer you would be eating in your grave. It was moonlight when I finally tore through silvered streets to the black hulk of the Treasury. The gate was just ajar. From inside, Amver’s voice demanded, “Who goes there?”
“Me.” I was flustered beyond recall of our password, but his reply held relief. “Oh, it’s you, sir. Sir, I beg pardon, I forgot them tools till too late. I can’t unnerstand it! I went soon as Sivar tole me, an’—an’—”
“Never mind. I know what happened.” I hurried past him to the silent scribe-shop within.
Two braziers at full heat barely tickled the vault, but within their range it was like noon in Phaxia. Sivar rose hastily from the straw, stripped to a drenched under-tunic, sweat shiny on his wide red face. But the prisoner, hunched on his stool, wrapped in cloak and blankets, was still shivering.
He raised a sort of smile. I could smell the fever stench, see the glaze in his eyes, already sunken into parched, waxy skin. The fever would burn him up, the shivering flog his muscles to exhaustion, as I had seen with men in Stirsselian.
I asked sternly, “Have you been drinking?” And he nodded.
“Three water-bottles.” His voice was slightly blurred. That was familiar too.
Sivar looked nervous, as well he might, no physician, lacking even my experience. I looked from the chains to the straw to the wall, steaming torridly. “We’ll get you loose tomorrow. If you could lie down—even against the wall—”
“I’d burn a hole in it.” However reduced, the grin was there. “Don’t worry, Alkir.”
“Worry!” I nearly had at him. “Wait—this happened before, you said. What did you do then?”
His brows knit. He had to struggle to marshal his mind, and that was familiar too.
“Poultices—wild honey. Thassal will know—oh. No. Thassal’s in Everran. But she’s dead.” He put a hand to his brow. “I keep forgetting . . . we live longer than you. . . .”
“Who was Thassal? What would she know?”
“Nursed me. After Coed Wrock—Hawge, I mean. But—there was no fever. At least . . . perhaps there was. I never knew. . . .”
Desperation winged my wits. “The past-sight. Could you see?”
He gathered himself together, or tried to gather himself. Already the fever had frayed not only wits but will. After a moment he let his hand fall, mastered a flinch, and said in that woolly voice, “I’m sorry. Can’t . . . focus properly. . . .”
“Never mind,” I said in a hurry. “Poultices. Wild honey.” We would have to break the irons and strip him first. “Sivar, I’ll relieve you.” He, too, would have duties elsewhere. “Tomorrow morning, get some honey. In the market. And smith’s tools. Can you find Amver a relief?” Never had the staples of command seemed so chaotic, so unmanageable. The coal was low. Callissa would be expecting me. There would have to be a nursing roster. Evis must take command. . . . I ripped my cloak off for the heat and the shine of armor made the prisoner cover his eyes. I knew that symptom too.
In a stronger voice he said, “Can’t play nurse and captain both, Alkir.”
“Amver’ll stand watch tonight,” Sivar butted in eagerly. “He’s off duty tomorrow. ’N I c’n muster some more.”
“Do it then,” I said with relief, looking back to my charge. He had raised his head, but I could tell focusing was an effort too.
“Go on,” he said. “They’ll look after me.”
* * * * *
At dawn I was making back for the Treasury. Cocks crew in distant rosy farmlands, late fishermen and early merchantmen moved on a harbor of pink and silver and wonderful azure blue, the city was full of fresh dawn air. But belowground was dark and dawnless, and the stink of fever and coal smoke had permeated the whole Treasury. The scribes will be pleased, I thought—then Sivar hurtled up the steps at me with blood on his face and water on his surcoat, white-eyed and blind as a bolting horse.
Clutching a fistful of cloth I swung him round, bawling, “Halt!” and he bleated like a girl. Then he caught my arm and hung onto it. “Sir—s-sir—sir, he’s gone mad! Crazy—like the mare!”
My heart turned a somersault. “What do you mean?” I snarled. “Talk sense!”
“Amver—c-come up at first watch—I been to the market—honey—took such a time, I—weren’t five minutes we left him, sir! I go d-down.” He shook all over, I shook him too. “H-he didn’t know me, sir. I’m just through the door. He starts—not yelling. Like a snake. ‘Get out,’ he says. ‘Go!’ I—I’m not all pudding, sir, whatever you think. It’s the fever, I reckon. ‘Easy,’ I say. ‘ ’S only me. Sivar.’ I start walking. He—” He quaked again. “J-just threw me, sir. Like a ball. Slam into the wall, I—winded me, sir, ’n there’s a lump big as eggs on my skull. ’N when I got up—he threw coal.” He felt gingerly at his bloodied face. “I ran, sir. ’N he chased me clean upstairs! Great lumps of coal, rattle, whack, bang—” He was on the verge of control again, teeth chattering, eyes rolling. “He’s crazy, sir! Right out of his head!”
“Shut up! Stand still!” I grappled for a point of contact. “Did he say anything else? Anything at all?”
“I—I c-can’t—” I shook him till his teeth clacked. “Something about, ‘I know what you are.’ Some word I dunno. Like ‘He’veh.’ But it was the way he said it. Not like a man at all!”
Terror clenched on me. Fever. Delirium. I had seen men go mad in Stirsselian, break bonds, fell orderlies, chase physicians with half a tent pole, or just run screaming out in the swamps where the demons in their minds drove them to die or drown. And this was a wizard. Burning up with the fever; we had to get to him. But if ordinary men in delirium were capable of such things, what could a wizard do?
Sivar was still goggling. Fit for nothing else, I thought. And was undeceived.
He said, albeit shakily, “I could get Amver—Karis—Wenver ’n Zyr—if we rushed him—”
“No.” Mere suggestion showed me the impossibility. “He’d kill us before we were in range.” My mouth was dry. The alternative loomed, inevitable, terrible. “I’ll have to—try it myself.”
Sivar fussed worse than Callissa would. We were still wrangling when the first scribes appeared. Furiously I said, “If you won’t go and you won’t let me go, you’ll have to come with me. If I—” I swallowed hard. “If that happens—oh, I don’t know! Come on.”
We wobbled down the stairs, me with helmet pulled down in case of missiles, Sivar quaking at my back. Nothing happened. There was no sound. But the very air was thick with menace, choking as the miasma of a Stirsselian swamp.
We turned the second-last corner. Faint red light dyed the walls. Then came a crash, a ricochet, a shower of pattering fragments, and as we flew back coal shards spun and tinkled about our feet.
“Stay here.” I dug Sivar’s fingers from my surcoat. “Here, you puddinghead! I’m armed. You’re not.”
I stepped from cover. Another shot whistled past my ear, a third thumped into my right shoulder and I stumbled back under its force. Recovering, I advanced. A rain of missiles pelted me, quite like catapult fire, except it was too fast. He has, I thought grimly, to run out of ammunition sometime.
The arch appeared. Flattening to the wall I got my head, eyelash by eyelash, round the jamb.
Light tore up in a huge ragged blaze, a hedge of fire across the wet stone floor. I shrank back, and in the movement understood. He had swept the straw into a ring and kindled it, walling himself behind the flame. I peeped again.
Red tendrils leapt and lashed toward the upper dark, smoke coiled everywhere, catching my lungs, blocking my sight. Then he spoke.
My spine turned to a rod of ice. Sivar had been right. He did not sound human. It was a snake’s voice, low, sibilant, inflectionless. But charged with more than serpent’s malignity.
“I see you,” it said. “I know what you are.” He hissed. Fire leapt almost to the roof. “Come, then. Come and . . . meet with me.”
When Sivar’s hand plucked my surcoat I was more than ready to heed. We shrank down the passage and the firelight pursued us, red, ravening tongues of flame. We were at the stairfoot before I reclaimed my wits.
“It’s only straw.” I held Sivar by the collar. “It has to burn out sometime, however it’s lit.”
Luckily Krem arrived just then. We bolstered ourselves with each other’s presence till the fire-glare began to wane, then I pulled off my surcoat and cloak. Sivar said desperately “Sir, he’ll be worse now—” But I had had time to think.
“If he’s out of his mind,” I said, “it’s not how you mean. He’s delirious. Seeing things. More frightened than we are. If I can just make him recognize me. . . .”
This time I did not slink, I marched straight down the tunnel into the waning fireglow, boots grating on the stone, and as I passed the arch I used the name he had given me.
“Beryx!” I said.
The blaze had died to embers, the coal heaps were beyond his chains’ radius, and he must have exhausted himself beyond reaching them by magic. He had been trying to hook a lump over with the stool. When I spoke he leapt in the air. Then he sprang backward. Then he seemed to freeze, limb by limb, staring at me.
“Beryx,” I repeated.
He started to back. I took a step. He came up against the wall, and rammed it as if to push himself clean through. A lesser man, I knew, would have been climbing it by now. I took another step.
“Fylghjos,” he said. He must have been almost paralyzed with terror, for his voice had lost power, evil, even its natural authority. It had a note I had heard in battles, when you have broken your opponent’s will. He was still fighting, it was his nature, but it was a mere gesture, drawn from the lees of spirit in some overwhelming defeat.
Not understanding, thinking only that he had recognized me, I said, “Yes,” and took another step.
He said, “It was before my time.” I took another step. He shook so the chains clinked like hobble rings. “You were never one for revenge.”
Quickly, I thought, get it over with. I came on, and he thrust out a hand. “Helve.” It was not a command. It was a last gesture of despair. “Imsar Math, Fylghjos.” His voice nearly got out of control. “It was not I who murdered you.”
Something clicked in my head. Fylghjos. But not me. A namesake. Someone else had borne that name. My voice came out in a drill-ground bellow and I roared at him, “Beryx, will you stop being a benighted fool!”
His head jerked back, I charged through the coals and grabbed him by the shoulders. “I’m not your poxy Fylghjos, I’m Alkir!”
At my touch he collapsed as if his bones were gone, eyes shut, probably still sure I was a ghost and beyond resisting it. We landed in a tangled heap. Something warned me to keep hold of him, so I shook his shoulders, mere bone and scorching heat, saying wrathfully, “I’m not a ghost, you can feel me, can’t you? Open your eyes. You’re delirious, that’s all!”
Either I pierced the delusion, or the very fear produced a spell of lucidity. He did not open his eyes. But he took hold of my arm, if take is the word when his fingers nearly bent the bones, and hung on, choking as if half-drowned.
It did not deceive me. Anyone else would have been in full hysteria. When his breathing eased I said severely, “Now remember who we are, for all love, and don’t do that again.” Then I yelled for the others with an impatience that was the backwash of my own fear.
“That’s Sivar,” I announced as they tiptoed up. “You nearly stove his skull in.” He winced. “And you’ve pelted me black and blue. Can’t you give yourself an order or something, so you’ll know us if this happens again?”
He shook his head. His face was ravaged now, wasted by the fever and his own power’s extravagance. My skin shrank from the heat of him. “Not strong enough,” he said in a husk of a voice. He rubbed his face, groping for coherence. “You’ll have to blindfold me.”
Instinctive repulsion made me hesitate. “You must,” he whispered. His eyes had glazed again. “Now. Before I . . . lose hold.” He reached out for my wrist, as if it were the one rock in a boundless, raging sea.