Redoubt (31 page)

Mags thought about asking
why
the Sunlord had allowed this to happen but thought better of the idea. After all,
not that long ago, he hadn’t been
altogether
certain that gods existed at all, and now, well, maybe it would be a bad notion to
draw their attention too closely.

The cat was far from done with the subject, however.
:Once there were the black-robes, the red-robes, and the white-robes. The black-robes
were few, and their mandate was to control the demons in order to protect the people
of Karse from their depredations, not command them. The red-robes tended to the everyday
needs of the people, and the white-robes were made up of outsiders who had been called
to the Sunlord’s service or those who went to serve the Sunlord in foreign lands.
Go-betweens, if you will, charged with keeping the peace—bridges from the people of
the Sunlord to the outside and back again. But then the black-robes began commanding
demons; little things at first, hunting down a bandit tribe here, repelling an attempt
at an invasion there . . . it all must have seemed to be in the best of causes and
for the best of intentions. But they got used to being called on to use the power.
They got used to being deferred to because they had the power. And then one day, a
black-robe said to himself, “Why shouldn’t I be the Son of the Sun? I’m able, I am
powerful, I am intelligent.” And he commanded his demons to make it appear that Vkandis
had chosen him.:

Mags’ head hurt, so instead of thinking the question, he asked the next one out loud.
“Didn’t anybody say anything?”

:Of course they did. Especially the Gifted among the red-robes, who had the power
of Mindspeech, and the white-robes, who were pointing out that this was not the way
things were done. In fact, they conspired among themselves and very nearly overthrew
him. But his demons were too powerful, the Gifted red-robes were slain, the white-robes
fled, and that was when Gifts were declared anathema.:

Mags felt his jaw dropping open a little.

:And that was when the Suncats began coming only to Gifted red-robes, helping them
to hide themselves, seeking out and hiding those like Franse. I have been helping
the red-robes who live in this place for quite some time. Six red-robes have come
and gone, in fact, and Franse is the seventh.:

Mags got his mouth and his brain working again. “Does Franse know all this?”

Reaylis finished his washing and arranged himself in a dignified pose.
:Of course not. It will be a long time before the people realize that they are oppressed,
that their rulers are evil, and that they must rise up and overthrow them. We are
here merely to keep the spark alive. They must be the ones to blow it into a fire
to burn away the rot. Gods do not sweep in and fix things. You are not children to
be saved. You must save yourselves.:

“Then why are you tellin’ me? Unless you think Valdemar should—”

:No, and your King would be the first to tell you that Valdemar should keep itself
to itself unless the people of Karse ask for help.:

Well, that seemed definitive enough.

:You need to know, because your King needs to know that Karse must be left alone and
why this is so. The temptation to save these people will be great, but they must save
themselves. The key to their prison is within their grasp, but only they can use it.:
Reaylis shook himself all over again.
:You must tell them, Horse-Boy, you and your Horse. Oh, it will be perfectly all right
if you help a few here, some refugees there, if they come to you for help . . . but
to make a formal war of it? No. No, to make war for the sake of imposing what you
think is right upon someone else is never going to end in anything but agony. And
you must tell them that, make them understand, so they do not even think of making
the attempt.:

“I will,” he promised, though as soon as he did so, the temptation to go back on the
promise was incredible. After all, what had the people in that little village done
to deserve suffering?

They didn’t get up on their hind legs and drive the bastards out of their village,
that’s what,
came the reluctant answer.

It was a hard truth, but unless someone was so vastly outnumbered and overpowered—like,
say, the slaveys in Cole Pieters’ mine—they always had the power in their hands to
take back their freedom. That was the choice: to lie down and be abused, or stand
up and refuse to be abused and throw the abusers out. Lying down and taking it never
worked anyway; you might suffer and die if you fought, but you were going to suffer
and die regardless, and at least the suffering and dying part would be shorter if
you fought.

:So you see.:
The cat nodded.
:It’s not punishment for allowing this to happen. It’s the consequence of allowing
this to happen. It’s the consequence of cowardice, of apathy, of giving up. The two
things are very different.:

Mags sighed. He still didn’t like it. He could see it, but he still didn’t like it.
He actually agreed with it. But he didn’t like it.

:So see to it that it doesn’t happen to your people, Horse-Boy. Now, let’s work on
getting those shields of yours working again.:

13

T
hree days later, and the ache in his head was still a dull throb, so Franse and Reaylis
were still forbidding another attempt to reach Dallen. So, early in the morning, even
before the sun had come up over the mountains and down into the valley, Mags was shivering
down by the pond, bow in hand, and severely puzzled.

There were no waterfowl at all, nor any sign of them.

Though the sky above was a cloudless blue and sun gilded the tops of the mountains
on all sides, here in the valley, it was deeply shaded and a thick dew lay over everything.
It was chilly, and a faint mist hung just above the surface of the water.

He had come up on the pond as silently as always, and there had been no sounds of
birds taking off as if he’d flushed them. But the pond was utterly still and empty;
not only were there no ducks or geese out in the open water, there were no little
coots, no waders, not even birds in the reeds, rushes, and cattails. It was as if
something had frightened
everything
off before he got there, which made no sense. A fox or a wolf might flush a few birds
at the verge, but they’d only go to the deeper water where they knew they were safe.
A goshawk might take down one, and perhaps even flush the whole flock, but there would
be signs of the successful hunt—like a goshawk with a fat crop and a half-eaten carcass—and
a goshawk wouldn’t have disturbed the smaller birds. In fact, the smaller birds would
be scolding it right now, noisily.

What could this mean—

“Not to be moving, Northerner,” said a harsh, heavily accented voice behind him. And
something sharp pricked through his shirt to his skin, before withdrawing.

He froze.

“Good. I am to be having a large sword, and there are twenty men with crossbows,”
said the voice, sounding extremely satisfied. “You will to be dropping your bow. And
you will to be turning.”

He did so. Slowly.

The voice belonged to a man who could have been Franse’s cousin: big, very blond,
very strong, and dressed in brown leather with riveted plate mail over it. He barked
an order, and half a dozen men pushed their way through the cattails and rushes at
the edge of the pond, heading for him. They were dressed in much the same way, except
without the plate mail.

Mags was surrounded. These men must have infiltrated the area in the early morning
or even before dawn; that was why there were no birds.

He thought about fighting them and trying to run, and thought better of it. Granted,
he knew the area much better than they did, but there were far too many for him to
fight off effectively.

The last thing he wanted to do right now was to fight, end up with another blow to
the head, and lose his Mindspeech again.

And they’d called him “Northerner,” which suggested that they knew he was from Valdemar,
or at least guessed it, but didn’t know he was a Herald. He could be anyone or anything.
So he submitted tamely while they bound his hands behind his back, roughed him up
a little, and then bound his arms to his body, leaving just a sort of leash of rope
by which they could pull him. He didn’t fight any of it, and he didn’t ask any questions
either.

For one thing, he was pretty sure that asking questions was going to get him hit some
more. For another, he was also pretty sure that they wouldn’t answer him.

He
did
let down his shields a very, very little bit, but he snapped them back up again as
something exceedingly cold and exceedingly
nasty
brushed against his mind. It had a very familiar feeling to it, and after a moment
he understood what it was.

It felt like that Karsite demon.

Now
he felt terror; he clamped down his shields so tight that not even the slightest
thought would escape; as he stumbled along in the wake of the Karsite who held his
leash, he felt cold sweat breaking out all over his body. He was just glad that he
wasn’t wearing
anything
that was identifiable as belonging to a Trainee. Somehow they already knew he was
a Northerner, but maybe he could get away with . . . well he would have to think of
a story, and fast.

His mind raced as he stumbled along; he was paying very little attention to where
he was going or even to his captors.

Why would a Valdemaran be in Karse anyway?

He couldn’t feign being feebleminded, and he couldn’t feign being a deaf-mute. He’d
had a bow and clearly knew how to use it, and he’d responded to the orders of the
Karsite soldier.

Well, what if he wasn’t a Valdemaran, as such . . .

Who crossed borders all the time? Traders . . . entertainers . . . all right, he could
pass as either of those. Or rather, something like an apprentice trader. He could
grade gemstones in his sleep. Or if the Karsites didn’t, for some reason, forbid entertainers,
he could easily pass himself off as a rope dancer. In either case, he could say he
was with his family, and they’d all been attacked in the night—that would certainly
be plausible enough and account for his wounds. And the cat had said that the demons
pretty much roamed the night at will to keep people penned in their houses after dark.

But how had they found him in the first place?

The Mindspeech. It has to have been the Mindspeech.
Maybe it was that connection to Dallen that had somehow alerted the demons . . .

He was jerked out of his preoccupation by a sharp tug on the rope; he looked up and
realized that the group had reached Franse’s cave, and there was an even larger group
of men together with a trio of black-robe priests there. The armed men were evidently
ransacking the cave; they were hauling everything that had been inside out into the
light, and what was too heavy to take out in one piece, they were breaking up and
dragging out the bits.

He could hear the sound of axes on wood from inside, and even as the group he was
with halted, someone hauled out part of one of the dressers and dumped it on the pile
of discarded and wrecked furniture.

He tried not to wince.

Franse! The cat!

He felt sick.

He hung his head and looked around as covertly as he could for some sign of Franse
and Reaylis, full of dread, and sure after what the cat had told him that he would
see their bodies, or blood and evidence of a struggle. But as he peered around, allowing
himself to shiver in fear, he didn’t see anything at all that would have told him
that his friends were even in the cave when the soldiers arrived.

Did they have a back way out to escape? He found himself praying that they did.

The three black-robes certainly appeared extremely displeased, which would argue for
Franse and the cat having escaped their clutches. So if it was Mindspeech that had
somehow betrayed them . . . maybe Mags could convince them that it wasn’t
his
Mindspeech . . .

But he swiftly revised his idea of what to tell them after one look at them. They
didn’t look like the sort who would allow entertainers into their country, and he
very much doubted that they let anything other than select traders in, either.

However, he might be able to use his gem-sorting ability after all . . .

And even better, there would be enough of the truth in this story that if they had
some sort of variation on the Truth Spell, he might be able to pass it.

I worked at a mine in the North.
That was true enough.
I’m a damn good gem sorter.
That was true too.
I was kidnapped.
And that was true.

Now, if they asked
why
he was kidnapped . . .
I don’t know, I don’t know who it was that grabbed me or why, but maybe they were
gonna rob a mine and they wanted somebody to sort out the good stuff.
The first part was true, and the “but maybe” part might allow him to slip the rest
of that in without making it come up as a lie. And it would sound plausible. He hoped.

The Karsites were snarling among themselves, and they were talking too fast for him
to understand what they were saying. The black-robes were
definitely
angry, and eventually, when no one brought out any more signs of Franse and Reaylis
than another couple of sets of oversized and worn red robes, one of them left the
other two and stalked over to him and his captors.

The priest grabbed him by the collar and shook him. The man was bigger than Mags and
quite strong, and Mags didn’t have to feign cringing.

The Karsite priest shot out a rapid string of syllables and looked at the one in charge
of the group that had taken Mags.

“Where the Cursed One is?” the man demanded.

Mags shook his head violently and tried to look scared and stupid. The “scared” part
was easy enough to manage. “I don’t know!” he wailed. “He sent me out to hunt this
morning! I don’t know!”

The man babbled back at the black-robe . . . that was when Mags realized why he had
been able to understand the men who had stopped his kidnappers and why he couldn’t
understand
this
lot. These people were speaking about three times faster than the ones who had interrogated
the assassins, probably because the troop of soldiers, or at least their leader, had
recognized the assassins as foreigners.

Mags braced himself for further interrogation, but the black-robe just looked disgusted
and barked an order. Mags found himself shoved roughly aside with a handful of guards,
while the black-robes barked orders, and small groups of armed men peeled off to search
in every possible direction.

Mags kept his head down and shivered. He didn’t have to pretend fear; he could, very
dimly, sense the inimical cold of demons, and they were
inside
the mine. Somehow they had managed to break through whatever Franse had used to guard
the place.

Or else plain old humans got in, and then they could follow.

If such things could feel anything at all like comfort, they were feeling it now,
in the dark, away from the sunlight. There was no sense of restlessness. They liked
it in there, particularly now that everything Franse and Reaylis owned had been removed.

Mags broke out in a cold sweat all over again. Were the black-robes going to bother
to question him at all? Or were they just going to shove him into the cave and let
the demons handle him?

He was afraid to draw attention to himself but afraid to
not
draw attention to himself. He didn’t want to bring down their wrath on his head,
but he didn’t want them to consider him disposable, either.

He remained where he was, trussed up like a bird for the spit, while the men who had
been sent out to search returned in groups of two and four, empty-handed. By this
time, the sun was high overhead, and he was beginning to hope that Franse and the
cat had managed to escape. He was pretty sure that if they got far enough away, the
cat would be able to ensure their safety. Hadn’t Reaylis hinted that there were more
Suncats than just him? He could probably guide Franse to another Suncat, another Gifted
red-robe who could hide them.

Of course, that leaves me pretty much hung out to dry . . .

But he couldn’t blame Franse for that, any more than he could fault Franse for not
helping the village that had been destroyed. Franse couldn’t even see well enough
to shoot a rabbit—how was he going to defend himself? He couldn’t, of course. All
he could do was run.

He sat on the ground where they had left him, just inside the garden, which had been
thoroughly trampled. They’d stuck him in the cabbages; he managed to get himself marginally
comfortable, sagged forward, and plotted out a story for himself, using as much real
detail as he could. He didn’t know if there were mines on the southern Border that
Karse shared with Valdemar, but he’d bet the Karsites didn’t know, either. He closed
his eyes, strengthened his shields and added all the little details he could think
of—especially how he had gotten kidnapped. He built up the picture of his life in
his mind, and the picture of the person he should be. Stolid, unimaginative, someone
who just wanted to go home. Someone who was completely bewildered by everything that
had happened to him until now.

Now and again he looked up through his hair, and nothing much had changed. The black-robes
had taken the one bench that had survived from inside and the two outside; they were
directing the couple of soldiers that were left in sifting through Franse’s wrecked
belongings, and they were fuming. The sun coming straight down through the trees told
him that they had been there for several candlemarks. He forced his muscles to relax
as they tried to cramp up on him, and he wondered just what the Karsites were going
to do with him. What did they
think
he was? He was pretty certain that if they had any inkling that he was a Trainee,
the end would have been swift . . .

Unless, of course, they intended to take him to a city and make a spectacle of his
execution . . .

He broke out in a sweat all over again. He could picture that far, far too easily.
From what he understood, it would be the sort of thing they would do, too. Somehow
he had to convince them that he’d make a very poor show . . . though how he would
do that, he had no idea. Maybe instead he could convince them that his skill with
gems was too valuable to lose?

He should definitely try to convince them he was terrified. That wouldn’t be at all
difficult, since he actually was.

More and more of the men sent to search for Franse and Reaylis came back empty-handed.
The black-robes became angrier and angrier. This would be a very, very bad time to
draw attention to himself, so he did his best not to.

Then, just when he was certain things could not possibly be any worse—of course, they
became worse.

Much, much worse.

The sound of horses interrupted another snarling match between the officer in charge
of the armed men, and the chief black-robe. Both of them looked up; they clearly knew
who was coming, and neither of them looked happy about it.