Law of the Broken Earth (38 page)

“A very good question,” agreed the Casmantian mage amiably. He regarded Tan with great curiosity for a moment, then looked away, wincing slightly. He told the fire, “One certainly understands why mages have no difficulty tracking you. It’s quite a remarkable effect, when you try to examine it closely.”

“I wish I—” Lord Beguchren began, but cut that thought short.

“As do we all,” said Gereint Enseichen, in a tone both wry and deliberately brisk.

Mienthe gazed at him for a moment, then at the elegant Lord Beguchren. She started to speak, then visibly changed her mind about what she meant to say and said instead, “Whatever Tan is,
I
can’t be a mage. Isn’t that right? I don’t see anything strange when I look at him. And my cousin said I couldn’t be a mage because I didn’t hate his friend. Kairaithin, I mean. The griffin mage.”

Lord Beguchren regarded her thoughtfully. “If I remember your story correctly, after you were forced to flee Tiefenauer, you went directly to your father’s house at Kames, to which you had directed the honored Tan. Why did you go there, rather than north to find your lord cousin?”

“Well, I… I don’t…” Mienthe frowned. She opened her hands in a gesture of bafflement. “I don’t… I don’t really know why. Only…” She shook her head and looked back at Tan, her brows drawing together in puzzlement.

“You were drawn to find the honored Tan in Linularinum, after Istierinan Hamoddian had taken him; you found him without difficulty; and then again you were drawn after him to Kames. Gereint? You do not believe the lady is a mage?”

The tall man sat forward, turning so he could study Mienthe without looking also at Tan. He tilted his head in polite curiosity. “Perhaps you may have a very weak mage power, Lady Mienthe. That might explain why you have found yourself drawn toward the honored Tan without being exactly aware of what draws you, and also why you were able to endure the presence of a griffin mage without distress.”

Mienthe nodded uncertainly.

Tan said sharply, not uncertain at all on this point,
“Whatever gift or power the lady holds, I can assure you, it is hardly
weak
.”

“Thus the world insists on defying our expectations,” Lord Beguchren murmured. He steepled his hands, regarding both Mienthe and Tan over the tips of his fingers. “The lady holds a powerful gift, but nothing a mage can recognize. Though your presence, honored Tan, distorts the world, we are told that you are not yourself a mage.” He paused, his expression becoming even more bland and unreadable. “Mages do not ordinarily devote great attention to the work of ordinary gifts. Possibly this has constituted an oversight.”

“So, now?” Tan challenged him.

“I, too, have directed only scant attention to the gift of law,” the elegant lord said softly. “A regrettable neglect.” He paused, but then went on, speaking directly to Tan, “While the lady’s gift is interesting, it is yours that appears to require urgent attention. Your current condition has clearly come about not because of the working of any actual magecraft, but because of the great influence of the legistwork you have taken into yourself. The conclusion to which we are guided by events is that very influential factions within Linularinum are so distressed by the fact that they have lost this work that they are willing to provoke Iaor Safiad to war to regain it.” He paused.

Tan said quietly—he could manage a quiet, civil tone if he concentrated—“I suspect Istierinan—or, yes, I know, possibly some faceless, nameless Linularinan faction—knew that your Great Wall had cracked through. So they wagered that King Iaor would be compelled to commit his strength in the north, giving them a relatively free hand to act in the south.”

“And yet,” murmured Lord Beguchren, “if I were a clever Linularinan spymaster, I should have assumed that the goodwill established six years past between Feierabiand and the griffins might possibly hold. That Wall was not built because the griffins intended to strike against
Feierabiand
. Why would any Linularinan faction, no matter how prescient, have guessed that the breaking of the Wall would draw peril down across Feierabiand rather than Casmantium?”

Tan had no answer to this.

“I think,” Lord Beguchren said quietly, “that we have perhaps gone as far as ignorance can carry us. I think perhaps it is time to seek a clearer understanding of this book and the work it contained. I think it will after all be necessary to, as you so neatly put it, open your mind and heart and discover what is written there.”

Mienthe said uncertainly, “If you’ll permit it, Tan?”

And if he would not, Tan had no doubt that Lord Beguchren would compel him. That would horrify Mienthe. And to what point, when the Casmantian lord was so clearly correct? But he still could not make himself speak.

Lord Beguchren, though undoubtedly aware of Tan’s sharp terror, said mildly to Mienthe, “He is aware there is no other reasonable course open to any of us. He was aware of it from the first.”

Mienthe was, Tan regretted to see, indeed beginning to look horrified. He reached out toward her and managed to say with a quite creditable imitation of calm, “That’s true. That’s true, Mie.”

Mienthe, unmollified, jumped to her feet and came over to stand behind him. Placing her hands on his shoulders,
she glared at the Casmantian lord, looking young, small, unkempt with hard travel and, Tan thought, also quite courageous and resolute. He was distantly amused at his own appreciation of the young woman, grown more and more acute through the recent days. How foolish to allow himself to feel any attraction whatsoever toward Lord Bertaud’s cousin under these circumstances! Or, to be sure, under any circumstances.

“Of course you must stay with him, Lady Mienthe,” conceded Lord Beguchren, so gracefully that one was hardly aware he was making a concession. He gave Gereint Enseichen a glance that combined inquiry and command.

The tall mage unfolded himself from his chair with a slightly apologetic air, as though he knew he tended to loom and wished not to alarm anyone. Nevertheless, he alarmed Tan, who gripped the arms of his chair.

“Only if you’re certain,” Mienthe declared, color high in her face, glaring both at the mage and at the inscrutable Lord Beguchren beyond him.

Tan would in fact have been glad to refuse if refusal had been possible. But he was well aware that the Casmantian lord would not in fact allow defiance, and even more clearly aware that the disorder resulting from any attempt to stop this could not serve anyone. Least of all Mienthe. He reached up to lay his own hand over one of hers and concentrated on producing an expression of mild acceptance.

The mage took the one step necessary, reached out with one big hand, and touched Tan’s cheek with the tips of two fingers.

Tan had thought he’d prepared himself for the mage’s
intrusion, but he found he had not begun to imagine what that intrusion would be like. No kind of preparation could have been sufficient. Gereint Enseichen sent his mind slicing through every mask Tan could put in his way, striking ruthlessly past every illusion of calm acceptance and through the shock and fury and terror beneath, laying open the privacy of mind that Tan cherished more than affection or honor or any other quality that he might have claimed to value more highly.

Tan would after all have fought this incursion, if he had been in any way able to fight it. He could not. Memories shifted rapidly before his mind’s eye, a confused blur of images and emotions, with anger and fear underlying them all, so that even memories of his childhood, of the house by the river, of his mother’s face became colored by dark flashes of rage. He cried out… would have cried out, but he had no voice. His first sight of Teramondian whirled by him, of the Fox’s court, of Istierinan… He had liked Istierinan on that first encounter, as nearly everyone liked him on first acquaintance, even those who did not approve of the dissolute face he showed the court; not many ever saw his other face…

He saw Istierinan’s study, all his traps and locks and codes defeated. The wild, reckless pleasure of that morning swept through him again… He had got past all the Linularinan spymaster’s defenses and now everything was open to him, defenseless, save for the trifling exercise of getting away again. The thought of Istierinan’s white-hot rage when he discovered Tan’s depredations made him laugh. He turned, took a small, thick book off a shelf.

He had not planned to take it. It had not caught his
eye. He did not know why he had reached for it. He only found it in his hand as though it had come there by some odd chance of the day. He hardly paid it any mind even as he flipped it open, glanced down at a random page—

He was standing somewhere warm and close and not in any way Istierinan’s study. His throat felt raw; his eyes burned as though he had been working all night by the poor light of inadequate candles, writing out some complicated, tight-binding contract with a thousand codicils and appendices; his leg ached ferociously from hip to foot. He was violently angry.

Mienthe was clinging to his arm with both hands. Tan nearly struck her—he might have hit her, except the Casmantian mage grabbed his arm.

Turning in the mage’s grip, Tan hit him instead, hard, a twisting blow up under the ribs. It was the sort of blow a spy learned for those scuffles that might happen in the shadows, where no one involved had the least interest in the civilized rules of proper encounters.

Big the Casmantian mage might be, but he was not a brawler: He collapsed to one knee with a choking sound, his arms pressed against his stomach and side. Tan stared down at him. He felt strange: half satisfied and half appalled and entirely uncertain about what had just happened. The only thing he remembered with perfect clarity was hitting the mage. A powerful Casmantian court mage, it gradually occurred to him. In front of his friend, the even more powerful Lord Beguchren. And in front of Mienthe. Whom he’d possibly come near striking as well.

“Appalled” began to win out over “satisfied” as his anger ebbed at last. Tan looked up cautiously.

Mienthe was standing several paces away, her hands over her mouth, staring at him. Lord Beguchren had one hand on her arm, having drawn her back out of Tan’s way. His expression was unreadable.

At Tan’s feet, the Casmantian mage began, with a pained noise and some difficulty, to climb back to his feet. Tan cautiously offered him a hand, more than half expecting a stinging rebuff. He knew he should offer an apology as well—he searched for suitably abject phrases, but his normal gift for facile speech seemed to have deserted him.

But the mage accepted his hand, levered himself upright, touched his side tenderly where Tan had hit him, and cast a distinctly amused glance toward Lord Beguchren. He said to Tan, “How very gratifying that must have been. All men so provoked should have such recourse. Though I’m grateful you did not have a knife to hand.”

Tan did not know what to say.

Gereint glanced once again at Lord Beguchren, turned back to Tan, and added, in a far more formal tone that nevertheless still held that unexpected note of humor, “Though my actions were unpardonable, may I ask you nevertheless to pardon them?”

Tan managed a stiff, reluctant nod.

The tall mage inclined his head in formal gratitude. Then he sighed, limped back to the grouping of chairs, lowered himself into one with a grunt, and stared into the fire for a long moment without speaking, presumably ordering his thoughts. Or the images and impressions he’d taken from Tan’s heart and mind.

Tan closed his eyes for a moment against a powerful
urge to hit him again, possibly after finding a knife. It was the urge of a fool. A hot-hearted, intemperate fool. He tried to put it aside, dismiss the anger, assert a more reasoned calm. In the event, unable to force calmness on his heart or nerves, he settled for what he hoped was a composed expression. But he did manage to give Mienthe a brief smile that he hoped was reassuringly natural, and walk with an assumption of calm across to take his place in one of the other chairs. Mienthe followed, though hesitantly, and Lord Beguchren came to lean on the back of the fourth chair, regarding them all with bland patience.

Gereint Enseichen looked up at last. He turned first to Tan. “I give you my promise,” the mage said formally, “that I shall not speak to any man, nor for any urging, of anything I glimpsed in your heart. Can you trust me for that?”

As a rule, Tan did not trust anyone for anything. But if he’d had to wager on the big mage’s essential honesty, he would have felt reasonably confident of collecting his winnings. This helped a little. He produced a second nod, not with great goodwill, but a trifle less stiffly, and looked at the fire so that he would not have to look at anyone else.

“Possibly an overbroad promise, under the circumstances,” Lord Beguchren observed. His tone was unruffled, but with an almost imperceptible bite behind the calm.

“No. The little that I glimpsed of the book is not, ah, does not—” He lifted a hand in frustration at the limits of language.

“Lacks emotional context,” Tan said tonelessly. He did not look around, but kept his gaze fixed on the fire. There
was a pleasant smell in the room from the mountain cedar in the fire. He tried to fix his mind on that.

“Yes, well put. Exactly.” The mage paused.

“You only glimpsed a little?” That was Mienthe. She sounded disappointed and decidedly offended. “You did that, that—you did whatever that was to Tan, and you didn’t even see anything?”

“Even a fleeting glimpse may reveal a great truth,” Lord Beguchren said quietly.