A Guile of Dragons (5 page)

“So!” laughed Nimue, pointing at the points. “You'll poke me with those until I talk, eh?”

“Be quiet,” said one of the vocates, a furious white-faced, white-haired woman. “We don't need you to talk.”

“God Avenger, Noreê!” uttered another vocate, a dark-haired man who moved with catlike grace and wore a sword at his side. “Please ignore my colleague's ill-temper, Nimue. Talk as it suits you—though it's true that it doesn't matter what you say. The real questions, and answers, will not involve words.”

“They never do. Naevros,” she added impishly, reading his name floating on the surface of his mind. He had been thinking of introducing himself but then thought better of it.

His pleasant face didn't twitch, but inwardly he recoiled violently when he realized what she'd done.

The gray-caped thains weren't as self-controlled and moved farther away, as if that made their thoughts safer from intrusion. Since they were taking her to have
her
thoughts intruded on, Nimue found this amusing and laughed outright.

“Well, Guardians,” said a tall, bendable, fair-haired vocate, “she's either got nerves of stone or she has no idea what's ahead of her. Or she's crazy. Or maybe there's something I haven't thought of; it's just barely possible. Madam, I'm called Jordel. Naevros you know, and he has introduced Noreê to you. It remains to me to introduce the brooding silent craglike figure yonder, known with bitter irony as Illion the Wise.”

Illion's wry jester's face grinned a little wider and he said, “Ignore him, Nimue. We all do.”

“Except when you
need
me.”

“We never need him. Shall we introduce the thains, too, Jordel, or should we be off?”

“First,
you
should be off. Second, she already knows their names. Third, I can't remember their names. Fourth, I don't want to know their names, because I don't anticipate needing the services of these quivering custards in gray capes on any future occasion.”

Sullenly, the thains closed in again, their clenched determination to do their duty like heads of barley on the long wavering stalks of their fear.

Jordel and Illion led the way with two of the thains while the others followed. As he walked Jordel chatted with her, the thains, Illion, and stray passersby—either to set her at ease, or to pass the time, or because he couldn't bear to do otherwise. Underneath he was like steel—so guarded in his thoughts that she wondered if even he could hear them.

They came finally to the old wall of the city. It had long since fallen into ruin through disuse, but the Chamber of Stations was there, where the ruined wall met the river Ruleijn. There the Graith of Guardians had met since before there was history (so Earno said). The chamber was faced and domed in red marble, a beautiful if somewhat sinister shade, reminding her of dried blood. A single thain stood on the steps outside the chamber, spinning her heavy spear idly in her fingers as if it were a stylus. Her hair was mingled red and black; her eyes were amber; her skin was pale; her mouth was like a wound. She frightened Nimue more than anyone she had met in the Wardlands.

“Maijarra, my dear—” Jordel began.

“I'm not your dear.”

“Thain Maijarra, then. We want to return these thains for the money back, please. They were quite useless.”

Maijarra's yellow eyes scanned the abashed thains. “Oh?”

“Yes. Fortunately, Nimue came along quietly. Otherwise Illion and I would have had to subdue her with bare fisticuffs.”

“What's a fisticuff?”

“How should I know, and me being a man of peace?”

“I'll talk to them. The others are inside.”

The thains stayed behind and spoke with Maijarra in low voices while Nimue and the vocates mounted the gray steps to the door of the red dome.

The others, many others, were indeed there. The barrel of the dome was ringed with windows and there was plenty of light, but still Nimue felt a darkness and a chill in that chamber. There was a round table on a dais, and standing at the table were many red-cloaked figures: the vocates of the Graith of Guardians.

Earno was not standing with them. He stood at the foot of the dais along with Merlin, whose wrists were bound with golden cords. Earno was speaking passionately about something. The First Decree, or monarchy, or freedom, or something. But he was thinking about slaughtering season on his family's farm, how he used to run and hide, how they always dragged him there to watch the killing and, on one nightmarish occasion, to actually kill a beast: an old ram with scraggly wool. In Earno's mind, Merlin was that ram, which Nimue thought was quite amusing. She was less amused to realize that her face was on one of the dead beasts in Earno's submerged, distorted memory—one of the beasts whose death he had watched and had been unable to prevent.

He turned and looked at her. “Here is my witness,” he said, looking at her but still speaking to the Graith. “She will tell you of Merlin's deeds in this other world. Then you, my peers, will speak his fate.”

Earno stepped forward and took her by the hand. He walked her over to a gray marbled chunk of rock in an apse of the chamber. He said no word to her, nor needed to: she knew this was the Witness Stone, and what he would do. He put her hand on the stone and she was suddenly not herself.

Not only herself, anyway. She was still there, floating in the center of her own awareness, but now circling her in every dimension were these other minds, briefly hers and forever not-hers, joined for this moment in the rapport of the stone.

They remembered her memories and understood them in ways she never had. For instance: when she assisted Merlin in moving the Giants' Walk from Ireland to Britain. It was the feat of making she was most proud of. They had anchored the stones so securely in the green plain of Salisbury that they seemed to have grown there. As the vocates remembered her memories, she slowly realized it was even more marvelous than that. Merlin had used a power-focus that anchored the stones in time as well as space, rewriting the history of the world so that the stones had been there for ages, had never been in Ireland at all. This the vocates understood, and so she understood it. That was interesting to her.

But not as interesting as
their
memories. While they were riffling through her fragmented selfhood, she found herself free to explore theirs. This one, named Vineion, lived in a tower with a hundred dogs. He thought rather like a dog, mulling over feeding times and runs along the river and games and loyalty and fear. Jordel was remembering a time when Merlin had sewn up a wound in his side, but was regretfully deciding that the old man would have to be exiled. Callion the Proud, a tall marble-faced vocate, was detached from the inquiry, having already made up his mind. He was watching Noreê with cool patient longing.

Noreê herself was the strangest mind of all. Her self was like a crystal shell on which played simulacra of feelings or thoughts, but that wasn't what she was really thinking or feeling. Nimue had never sensed so harrowingly complete a personal defense. She wondered idly what was going on behind it.

Merlin was in the room, but apparently the rapport of the stone barred her from joining minds with him. He looked concerned. Really, she had never seen him so concerned.

Another presence she couldn't feel was the life in her own womb. It was odd to her, alien indeed since their passage through the Sea of Worlds, but she had grown used to feeling it and the not-feeling was unpleasant, like the numbness of a frozen limb. Why would they bar her from contact with her unborn child? It made no sense.

She explored the barrier with her awareness . . . and was trapped by it.

Her selfhood divided. Part of it was as unconcerned as ever, if diminished. Part of her was trapped in the barrier wrapped around her own womb.

Her child was dying. Anyway, it was fighting for its life, helplessly struggling against a more powerful, endlessly malefic entity: Noreê. That was the secret behind the vocate's shell: she had somehow used the Stone to create a separate rapport between herself and the fetus and she was launching attack after attack on it, trying to kill it with her mind. Nimue knew she should stand between her child and the murderous seer, but her heart quailed as she even thought of doing so: Noreê's hate was raw, desperate, dangerous. It would kill Nimue as readily as her child.

She wondered if she could disrupt the separate rapport through the Stone. . . . Noreê was fearfully powerful, but she was doing three things at once: sustaining the separate rapport, maintaining her facade for the Graith, and striving to kill the child. If Nimue could strike one of those things off balance . . .

The rapport that was killing her child was also a passageway. Things can move both ways through a passage. . . . She tried sending thoughts past the volcanic torrent of Noreê's hate. The seer was intent on her task, and hardly noticed their passage.

The thoughts percolated through Noreê's facade, appearing on the surface of her shell.
Help
, they said, in Latin and Wardic.
Noreê is killing us.

Callion was the first to notice. He broke rapport and spoke sharply to Noreê with his mouth. He called to the other Guardians. They shifted their attention to batter at Noreê's facade.

The barriers broke. The tide of hate receded and Nimue was alone in her own mind with her wounded weeping child.

She would have spoken then, said something to the frost-faced witch who hated her child so much with so little reason. But something was wrong. There was a pain in her, merely physical, but demanding all her attention. Noreê had succeeded in convincing her body to reject the child.

She slipped in a puddle of amniotic fluid and blood pouring from her own body and fell speechless from the stone.

Or was it the child rejecting her? She thought of that as she swam in and out of awareness over the next few hours. The child seemed fighting to be free of her, struggling to climb out of her. She wanted to let it. She had never felt pain like this before. This could not be normal. Or maybe it was. Old women talked of childbirth and looked wise and said poetic things . . . and all the time they knew it was like
this.
Lying whores. She'd do the same to them one day. Christ, oh sweet Christ, it
hurt.

And in the end, there it was, a boy, and the pain was receding like a fiery red tide, and Merlin was there holding the child, cutting the cord and wrapping the baby with a grayish cloth. He said a funny thing as he handed the child to her: “The blood may fume a bit, but the cloth won't burn, at least for a while.”

She took the child and tried to feel for it what you were supposed to feel. It looked funny. And it watched her, oddly intent, with slate gray eyes. It had long fingers and its head was hairy—she'd seen some newborns, but never with heads of hair like this.

“What do we call it?”

“In the Wardlands, the first name is the mother's privilege, the last name the father's. I'll call him Ambrosius, if you don't mind.”

“No, that's right.” Names. She should have been thinking of names. Only she'd had no one to talk to about it, really. “Aren't you mad at me?”

“Some,” Merlin admitted. She'd seen him lie like a fiend, but he never did to her; she wondered why. “But,” he continued, “the thing is done. This part of our lives is over. We have a chance to start again.”

“With our. With our son.” She wasn't sure how she felt about that.

“Not necessarily. The Graith have given me permission to leave him behind. He can be raised in the Wardlands.”

“Is it really so wonderful here?” She thought resentfully of Noreê but couldn't say anything, not yet.

“He'd be better off. But we can take him with, if you'd like.”

She didn't want to. She wanted someone to take the pain and the strangeness of him from her. It was a relief to think of someone else bearing that burden. “All right,” she said weakly.